Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #423 Birth, Fatherhood, Wellness & Wisdom w/ Dr. Nathan Riley OBGYN

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

In this podcast episode, the host welcomes Dr. Nathan Riley, known as the 'holistic OB-GYN,' for his third or fourth appearance on the show. They discuss Dr. Riley's deep knowledge and unique approach to women's health, emphasizing holistic methods over conventional medical practices. Dr. Riley shares stories from his practice, including successful home birth experiences and innovative treatments for conditions like cervical cancer using alternative therapies such as curcumin and ivermectin. The discussion highlights the importance of fathers being present during childbirth and the benefits of a home birth environment. The episode addresses the rising trend of home births and free births, exploring the pros and cons of these practices. Additionally, Dr. Riley speaks about his Born Free Method and men's group, which prepare fathers for their roles and support them through challenges like miscarriage. The conversation also touches on the impact of fear-based medical advice and the significance of informed consent.   Connect with Nathan here: Instagram All Links   From Kyle: The Community is coming! Click here to learn more   Our Sponsors: Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. These are the b3 bands I was talking about. They are amazing, I highly recommend incorporating them into your movement practice. If there’s ONE MINERAL you should be worried about not getting enough of... it’s MAGNESIUM. Head to http://www.bioptimizers.com/kingsbu now and use code KINGSBU to claim your 15% discount.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Kyle-Kingsbury Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!

Welcome back to the podcast. We've got my homie. Dr. Nathan Riley, Uncle Doctor, the holistic OBGYN. I think this is his third or fourth appearance here on the podcast. It might have been the first we did face-to-face, oddly enough. Even though we've hung out plenty face-to-face, I think a lot of our podcasts have been online, if I'm not mistaken. And anyway, it was freaking awesome. I had him out at the house.

He stayed in Austin with us for five days, or Lockhart rather. Lockhart's better than Austin, in case you're wondering. but yeah we had a blast he got to attend the bears first football practices with me and him and just love every second i get with him i also got to jump on his podcast which was great he's just a phenomenal interviewer but also knows so much and truly is one of the most well-versed humans i've ever come across let alone had on the podcast so he may no longer be a bucketless guest because i have such access to him but he is one of my favorite people on the planet and he truly is a bucketless guest every time I get to have him on because he has such a wealth of knowledge and he's so heart-centered

and he's just a phenomenal human. A father of two beautiful and amazing girls, you know, he's a dude who's in a house full of ladies, so he's got to run that route. That's what he signed up for this incarnation and so I've got mad praise for him and love for him. And respect, no question. All right, share this with a friend. Leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the shows helped you out in life and support our sponsors. They make this show possible. I'm so grateful for each and every one of them. also listen through we've got a big talk here during one of the ad reads on my community that's starting this is very important to me it is everything i've been working on this year to be able to give back to people to be able to continue to teach in my own way and i'm super thrilled to be able to

launch that it's coming at you very quickly here so sign up that's in the show notes you'll get on the email list and you'll be the first to hear about it without further do my brother uncle doctor Nathan Riley Uncle Dr. Nathan Riley Welcome back to the podcast brother Thanks man I love your new place I'm enjoying the last couple days here I'm so stoked to have you here

Great land, great people Blue greens There's a That's the first thing people People notice It was funny because when I was I did my first private with Connor online Yeah uh huh

And he's on my iPad You know and I'm walking through the house trying to figure out which room to go to and they're like oh man I really like the kids room I was like oh there's no mats there and so I go to the living room and I'm trying to think of where I can set the damn thing

so you can watch me right so I set it on the fireplace and he sees like all the the ania his wife sees like all the blue cabinets and stuff she's like boy they really like blue and teal okay because our couches are blue everything was like I don't think we really thought

about how much blue that would be I was thinking like we've got a tan like this kind of rusty colored stained concrete we've got a lot of brown couches but yeah we got a lot of color in here i love it i do love yeah it's a it's a it's a huge upgrade in some ways this is a a relaxing calm but also like uh doesn't turn you off no i actually really like the colors i mean i got into i got a little bit of that the science on color i remember they started talking about that how they'd done that in prisons i found this out when i was at ASU playing football,

that some teams would paint the visiting locker room pink to make them docile. Oh, and some guys would be like, fuck pink, you know, and they'd just override it. You know, they'd override the calm.

But a lot of guys would naturally be like, oh, cool, you know, that's kind of weird, you know. It's going to be a good day of football. Yeah, I'm going to do my best,

you know. I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And doggone it. People like me. People like me. God, what was the name?

Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In Maricopa County, Phoenix, he had done Pink City, which are Tent City, which was all pink. All the inmates were dressed in pink at Tent City. Wow. If you got a DUI, you were going out there. You're doing hard labor outside in 118 degree heat wearing all pink. And they keep some docile. Uh-huh.

Interesting. They wouldn't want to wear that pink. Yeah. Think about your whole life, you're trying to be the most manliest man. You can be out on the jail, the jail yard. Two dudes dressed in pink. out in the yard just swinging. What'd you say?

What'd you say? Yeah. That's amazing. But the color stuff works. Yeah. We, I mean, we've had a lot, as with anybody, we've had life transpiring between podcasts. And I think that's a great thing. It's been a couple years.

I've had a lot of friends, get pregnant, a lot of babies either recently or on the way. A lot of things are happening in that space. And, of course, being somebody, you know, myself included as well as you. but somebody who, and I'd love to differentiate, you know, some of the language around this, right? Because we've talked before about some of the pitfalls of our alternative medicine, alternative health, what you might think of as like natural roots and things like that and where, you know, I'd love for you to break down because we've had many conversations where that can become quite like allopathic medicine in exchange for supplement programs and different things like that.

Just a prescriptive regimen of supplements as opposed to whatever, yeah. Yeah. So I want to break down that stuff. I want to break down, there's been a huge push in the free birth movement, which I think has pros and cons to it, you know, as we both know. So I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about, you know, what can be expected. What are some of the things that people should be looking out for?

You know, as we dive into this, you know, if you're going to get pregnant, like fucking, what do we do? Yeah. Where do we start? What are the best books to read? What are the things we should know for certain before the delivery date? Yeah. That kind of stuff. Where do we need to iron out those kinks and be in harmony and unity on as a husband and wife or a boyfriend

and girlfriend um and then you know but but before we dive into all that juicy stuff rewind us give me a brief bio if it's your first time listening to nathan on the podcast quick bio on who you are and the things that you've been into and you truly are one of a kind because a lot of people get to your position and there's a sense of i did it i'm finished and now i'm going to run with what i know yeah yeah yeah you see it in many fields right not just medicine or medical doctors, but like it is pretty fucking apparent, you know, there's a lot of medical doctors get there and like, I did it, best in my class, whatever. Yeah. I know it all. This was that the, I learned from the greatest people. Everything I know is fact, and there's nothing

else to know. Just keep doing that. If they didn't teach it to me, it doesn't exist. Right. Right. But then there are a few, like yourself, who stay hungry and they stay like curious and they're like, oh, fuck, what about this guy? And, you know, we got to meet each other at Paul Chek's 60th birthday. We had a monster journey together and immediately bonded. Along with Ben Stewart, a bunch of other, Jason Bacard, all the homies. Yeah. And, you know, we saw each other, you know, but I continue to see, like, you're a guy who who has studied Czech's work, your guy who studied Steiner's work and the anthroposophic

medicine and so much more. I tell you about guys like Dr. Thomas Cowan or Jack Cruz, and you dive into their shape balls deep and soak up that and all that. So I've always really appreciated that about you, brother. Yeah. Very unique when it comes to that. Oh, thanks. But I love it.

I just want to add that to whatever bio you've got coming. Sure, sure. That's great. Thanks, Kyle. I mean, I consider you a dear friend and I learned as much from you. I mean, there's a reason that we text so much. It's because it's like there's things in my, that aren't just aren't in my wheelhouse. They're not things that I'm used to doing on a regular basis. So let's find somebody who's had more practice instead of me reinventing the wheel. That's like, that's kind of like the hallmark of the scientific process. If you're curious and you're open-minded, there's a great deal of expansion that can happen even when you finish all of those years of training. So for as a means of introduction, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, a guy born in Pittsburgh, I married my high school sweetheart, went to medical school at Temple in Philadelphia, went to Kaiser Permanente for residency training, great training in OBGYN, did a fellowship year at UC San Diego in hospice and palliative medicine, and then got recruited out to Kentucky of all places. And if you don't know where Kentucky is, I didn't either before I moved there. But it's a super lush, hot, humid, very low cost of living place that allowed me to start to spread

my wings. I left the first hospital position. I was recruited out there for during paternity leave. COVID happened, if anybody remembers that. And I got fired shortly thereafter for taking my mask off, caring for an old guy, undignified death, in my opinion. So I wanted to give him some love, and I got fired on the spot. And that was kind of like the launch point. And so from there, I've got two board specialties. I've got sort of boundless curiosity. And I had people who were still coming to me like, hey, you're an OBJAN, can you help me with this or that? And it's like, well, I don't do surgery anymore. I don't really like pharmaceuticals. I did all the Institute for Functional Medicine training. Like, I've gone the distance. But let me see if, like,

I really think I'm good at what I do. Let me see if I can start to do this in a different way. And, you know, lo and behold, it actually works. So from the standpoint of pregnancy support, like, you're not a real doctor if you don't see these C sections. It's like, yeah, I don't really like being in the operating room. You know, I was really good at it. Czech will tell you that. I actually was there for their birth. That's how he and I got connected. I was really good at that stuff, but it was like, what if instead of just accepting a 40% C-section rate, what if we could help prevent some of the complications that arise that could impact your desire to free birth or to have a midwife at your birth or even, you know, complications that arise in the hospital?

And it turns out that most of the stuff that is happening in the alternative medicine space is highly effective before and during pregnancy so that you have the most options available. And even if you decide to go with a free birth, which we'll talk about, which means you have no medical personnel there, things are even more likely to go well. So my general counseling for people is I can't eliminate your risk of bad things happening to zero. No way. Even with the cervical cancer stuff we're going to talk about. But what if, with my help, we could lower your risk below the average of a bad thing happening and get you above the average of good things happening. And that's, I think, why I've been so successful, which I'm happy to say.

Like, you know, we go through this kind of imposter syndrome states. Like, I turned 40 this year, and I'm like, I'm not an imposter. Like, I'm the very best at what I do. And I feel very proud and sort of confident in saying that now. Now, does that mean I'm the best at doing gynecologic surgery? No, I don't do that anymore. I don't do gynecologic surgery because I wanted to focus on some other things. And if you're stuck in a medical job, doing the things that you described, this wrote over and over, the wash, rinse, repeat sort of thing, you end up with, you know, a situation in which you're only doing those same things. And you don't even have the time really to investigate other, you know, potentially novel therapies. You're not incentivized

to do that, nor are you incentivized really to even get to know people because you're on the clock and you've got 10 patients waiting in the clinic. I mean, it's a nightmare for the OBGYN's out there. But I chose to step away and now I have the sort of breath of freedom to really, like, let's get down to some brass hacks here. What do women really want? What do, what do the male partners really want? They want time with people. They want to like really develop this sort of trust and rapport. And I have now the space to do that. And I have time to come out and visit my friends in Austin and, you know, shoot the shit. Yeah, that was the thing. I mean, a relationship is fundamental in all aspects of life. But I remember thinking that when we, when we had Baron,

you know, these birth stories, but when we had Barry, it was at Stanford Hospital, Children's Hospital. really bonded with our doctor he was an awesome guy young guy handsome super funny um and i felt like that was our squad you know and the birth went great and then he left and went home and the nursing staff came in and we had no bond they're loading up syringes yeah who is this person like uh we're not doing that yeah no no we're not doing that yeah it's okay it's okay no no no it's not okay we're not okay we're not doing that there's no needle that's going to my son right now yeah just just chill yeah you know um and obviously that that's where you know with the walls of jericho separating us from a preemie baby which is sad but also like that's what you get when you go to a

certain place like we didn't weren't told we weren't going to have our own room it's the most split in the room yeah it's a medicalized institution at stanford like if you if you want that experience Stanford can probably do it better than the rest yeah but when people decide they don't want that experience and then you start asking why it's because people don't necessarily feel safe despite the you know that i give this analogy you know, you have the tools to keep a person safe, but actually feeling safe is way different. It's like having sex. Like, you want to actually feel like I can totally surrender and let my guard down and I can

just blend into this divine union with this person. That's how babies are made for those who don't know. But you're not going to do that at gunpoint. Like, that doesn't feel like fun. And so the analogy I give people is the pizza shop down the street gets, you know, there's a, there's a shooting across the street, right? And so the pizza shop is like, oh, people aren't going to come and buy our pizza. So why don't we put armed gunmen at the door?

and you go and get your pie, and there's a guy standing there looking for bad guys while you're eating your pizza. Like, that doesn't sound like a great date night with my wife, you know? Super safe. So, yeah. So the fact that you're keeping me safe is different from being, like, kind of feeling like, I can really let my guard down. You know, I can just enjoy my pizza or whatever. We don't eat a lot of pizza, but I hope the analogy works. So this idea that you're going to go in for your routine pap smear, you're going to get this biopsy, you're going to get this and that.

if it's with a total stranger, especially in childbirth, you know, especially the woman who's going to go into the astral, like one foot in the grave, like you're dissolving and then reconstituting through this archetypal transformation into a mother. Every single time you give birth, and the father's going through this as well to some degree, that process is not, it doesn't happen very well if a person doesn't feel safe.

And this is what the hospital system is missing. The reason people are having more homebursts, so I also attend homeburst. That's like a pretty unique thing. That's like heresy is an OBGYN, actually, working with midwives, working with doulas, and getting myself in the background, letting women care for women, and letting this process evolve through trust and rapport and surrender, that is not the experience you can have in the hospital. And so when women are describing this homebirth and free birth, these movements we're going to talk about,

you have to ask as a doctor, like as a curious person, you have to ask, why is that? We have a blood bank on site. We have a pharmacy on site. We have operating room. we've got a surgeon here my fastest C-section was 27 seconds that baby had to get out so I'm going to go through all of this anatomy that's used to be one of the highest mortality surgeries and you know of all we couldn't do we didn't know how to do it because there's all it's the anatomy is all you know reconfigured women and babies used to die but now 40% of the time babies are coming out by C-section we're good at this you know and if if you're trained to use a hammer everything looks like a nail so instead of saying you know why are you know instead of presuming you know, that women are having births outside of this hospital institution that advertises this sort of illusion of safety and saying that these women, you know, they must just be uneducated or misinformed or irresponsible, you know, how could you do that? How irresponsible.

What if something happens? Instead of asking why, they presume that this growing trend of having babies outside of the hospital is just a misinformation or whatever. Yeah. The truth is when you really ask people is, I don't, they say, even though you have all those implements, I don't feel safe there. And this is where the childbirth education thing has a lot of power and the time I can spend with people. And, you know, Born Free Method is my online community. We start with, actually, let's write a mission statement, you and your partner. Like, we want you guys to really appreciate who you are. Why do you even want to do this thing together? And if you don't understand what's going to happen after that, if you just focus on the day of the birth, you're going to miss out

on the opportunity for a man to flex your masculinity and really step into the shoes of somebody who's got to be grounded and present and like aware of what's going on. You can't just be like, okay, I'm going to go and do this thing. You got the kids? Like that isn't real parenting. That's like a naivete that kind of folds into their, in the language of Robert Bly, the poet, you know, Iron John. So there's a lot of work to be done there, but we can't do it in the way that we're doing it in the hospital system, which is why I'm happy to park myself out here and be considered to quack and all this other stuff, but our clients don't have, you know, it isn't often that they have really bad things happening. So we're, we're, our collectively, we're trying to

help people fall below the average. And we can do that through functional medicine, preparation before childbirth, helping the relationship kind of, you know, center itself around a mission and how you guys are going to behave whenever they start coming at you with needles and all this other stuff. And by the way, if you want all that stuff, that's great. But if you don't, there needs to be an alternative and that's that's a mischaracterization of those of the population of people in our community especially that are starting to want to do this in a slightly different less medicalized way and so that's what we're that's what i'm here to do and my team is to do i love it well we've seen a big rise you know like uh i was i think i was talking yesterday jol salatin when he came on

the podcast had mentioned i think since in the year 20 2021 from 2020 to 2021 there'd been a new a 1.5 million people shift into becoming homesteaders yeah right and of that a large percentage are doing homebursts and things of that nature um and he said by 2025 an even larger number right so like maybe three million and then who knows by 2030 if the trend continues yeah if the government continues being the government and governing us the way that they've had and uh you know we see like this big one with um the u.n pushing for basically total medical control in an emergency situation 173 countries saying yes I saw Bobby Kennedy saying we're not going to say no and Trump didn't sign it but it's like

the whole rest of the world just bowed Yeah right so like there's There's more fuckery on the horizon is what it appears to be Sure But there is a growing number of people That see the writing on the wall and say I don't need to live in a city Yeah you know and it's it's not for everybody

And it's not like I love some of the pages that I follow That are like this isn't you can't glorify the whole thing I'm cleaning a fucking chicken pen for three hours Yeah And I'm doing other things and it's work It's a different life. Right. I'm sweating my ass off in 110 degree heat in Texas.

And there's poop particles in the air that I'm breathing in. And I'm not worried about it. I'm fucking doing it. I'm letting that integrate and work with my microbiome. But it's not, there's no, there's no glamour to it, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's dope. We have the best chicken eggs on earth.

When nobody else said chicken eggs, we had the best eggs on earth, you know, orange yolks. That's one, like, example of several. But I think there is a draw to that. And you don't have to have the draw to that. Just the awareness, right? When we lived in Austin, we would go out for harvests at Rome Ranch, you know, and I'd sit bare on my lap and we'd harvest a bison, you know, and go and pray for the animal. And he'd watch me feel, dress it and help a bit.

And, like, that in end of itself is a different relationship to food. I think as consciousness is shifting, we're beginning to see there's a different relationship to what birth is. Yeah. Right? People talk about ceremony from plant medicine journeys and things like that. And then, you know, they either themselves have it or go. goes through it, a friend or family member that gets pregnant.

And it's a procedure, right? It's a medical treatment, right? It's not a ceremony. It's not held in that way. And even as good as we had it with our guy at Stanford, every 45 minutes, the lights would turn on overhead. You know, these fluorescent lights, bright artificial lights. Bright as hell.

And they'd come in like, well, we only come in every 90 minutes. It's like, but you're exactly halfway in between for that other side. And it's the same lights that go on. Right. every time to see check on us for the premium so it's like it's every 45 minutes yeah a million things I could get into there but I think that as consciousness is shifting there's a burning desire to want to take power back that's it as females right exactly like hey let's let's let's I can do this this is I'm I'm fucking made to do this if I say yes to that and if I prepare for it appropriately

if I am healthy if I am do some some strengthening of the kegel exercises and squats and I'm walking each day and I'm doing things to stimulate oxytocin and I'm loving on my dog and loving on my partner and doing all these things. Getting sunshine. So much of that bodes well for the experience itself. And as the pendulum swings, we've kind of seen this pendulum swing so far off with freebirth, which is cool in a way, right? But that comes with some complications.

So let's talk a bit about that because I see a lot of people are doing it. I've had friends do it. And, man, we had a neighbor actually, dude. That was the first time we had heard of it. We were in Austin. And I was like, whoa, everything cool. And he's like, yeah, man. And he was, you know, total faith.

And it went perfectly. Yeah. You're batting a thousand, right? Like, if you fully believe and it happens with no complications, you can't argue with it. You feel like a big winner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about what I've been up to. This year has been a year of transition for me with a fit for service making huge changes. I've been working to create my own community. I still don't have a name for it yet. That is in the works. I'm brewing on it. But one of the things that I have come to understand is what this community is about.

And so I want to give you a little hint here and let you guys drop in. I'd love to get your feedback. And there's a link at the top of the page here if you guys are interested at all. All right. So join in a transformative journey with our exclusive community where like-minded individuals come together to explore the realms of body, mind, and connection. For $150 a month, you'll gain access to a treasure trove of wisdom from hundreds of podcast guests, a lifetime of learning and human optimization, and the teachings

of legends like Paul Check, James Clear, and so many others. Reconnect with your inner compass and discover the freedom, health, and sovereignty that await. Embrace the journey to excellence because we are what we repeatedly do. If that interests you, peep the link in the show notes for the community, and we will get you guys locked in. All right, back to the podcast. Let's first talk about, like, the out-of-hospital experience, you know, having a home birth is, is like an act of civil disobedience nowadays, and now it's gone further to the free birth. So let's first talk about the contrast between the hospital and the home environment, because you've had both, right? In the hospital, the bright lights, constant interruptions, continuous monitoring,

almost invariably across every hospital that has a maternity in in the country. There's a lot of sharp things. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen, so to speak, to the baby afterwards, from the vitamin K shot to the eye goop, to the cleaning, and all that. Clean them up in seconds. Yeah, it just doesn't feel, it doesn't feel very carnal, and perhaps that's not what everybody wants.

That's fine. But when you attend a home birth, you notice the dim lights, maybe some amber lights, you may have some nice soft music playing. You could like candles. You can have candles in hospitals. You know, you can set the scene.

You know, when I walk into a homebirth, I'm taking my shoes off because I'm respecting your space in the hospital. You barge in and you shove your hands in places. They don't belong. And I know it sounds kind of crude. But that was actually, like, gross to me. It was like, she said no.

What am I supposed to do? Well, you have to check her. Talk to the husband. Have him hold her our legs. Like, it just feels like this is not the way it has to be. And for those who have had a hospital birth, like my wife's first birth was in the hospital, like, it's fine. A lot of people have a great experience.

So it's not necessarily that, like, you can only have a good experience if you're in the home. But when you feel what it's like to just be in their own space and they're laying in bed afterwards, man, there's a midwife just gently checking in on things. Or I'm, you know, one of the couples I had attended to recently. I actually just got off the phone with them. They hired me because their midwife abandoned them in the first birth. It was a surprise breach. And she was like, oh, I need to go get my textbooks.

I host these twins in breach conferences periodically to make sure everybody who wants to get, you know, short up and the fully skilled complement of things that we're supposed to do in birthwork know what to do. But this midwife didn't. So they found me and the husband had found me on, I think, on Checks podcast, actually. And he was like, you know, he said to his, his partner, hey, maybe we should talk to this guy. And she's like, you found me an internet doctor.

And then she and I got on the phone and she was like, he's hired. Like, let's go. So we attended. And I was, you know, 20 minutes away, staying in a friend's house up in, sort of upstate, this, wherever, you know, where they live. And the husband calls and my buddy. And he's like, hey, I think it's time. And by the time I got there, the baby was out and on her chest and, like, rooting and doing all this stuff without me.

So she had a free birth. I show up, and what's my job? Well, I'm going to get some hydrogen peroxide. I'm going to clean the carpets. Like, want them to just leave everything alone. And you know what? We had already prepared some marrow bones in the freezer or some knuckles and whatnot. I'm going to make you some bone broth.

We'll put some onions and get all this fresh, you know, organic produce that they had ready. And we just made them bone broth and kept checking in on things, hour and a half later. Hey, are you feeling any, like, vaginal pressure? Yeah, a little bit. Just give a little push. And Jeff, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Hey, guy, why don't you go over and just, just be ready? Because he wanted to catch the placenta and, you know, the, she, she gave a little push

and placenta pops out. This is an hour and a half later. And he's like, oh, my guy, he's like, you can see he's, he's in ecstasy. I mean, this is just the ultimate experience as a dad. The baby did fine. He's walking around, toddling around, you know, pulling things off the counter now. and and I share that experience because it's like I didn't have to do anything but if I did I would do it so there was another client same state who had a had a really gnarly OB history and all this

relationship stuff happened got pregnant again and came over to my house for a console and she had all these past history medical problems and I was like hang on are you guys hungry and she and her husband are there and yeah I brought some sioux chips out and some cans of oysters I was like we're going to have lunch together. Let's go. And they're like, what? I was like, these are the best. I want you to start eating them. They're eating them with the lime ciette chips at the time. The lime, I'm telling you, lime had such a perfect flavor with the oysters. Like they were made for each other. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's like if you get the chili oil, the crown prince oysters with the lime siette, it's like, like, that is the best lunch ever. So they're eating and they're like, what are we doing here? And I'm like, we got to get your nutrients balanced here. I don't need lab work to tell me that you're going to need some nourishment here because of your history and where you want to. to go. So anyways, the problem was history of preeclampsia and all these blood pressure issues. Her blood pressure was better than mine in childbirth. She was so healthy and dialed in that I didn't

even go into the room. I stayed out of the room because I'm bringing my like yang, that masculine energy into the space, which the whole medical system is very, very masculine. We're going to get to free birth. This is tying into free birth. I stay out of the room. I'm working on my laptop, just, you know, answering emails or whatever. There's a duel in there. She's like, you know, Nathan, I think we, you know, she might, something might be transitioning and I go in and she's sure enough like giving little pushes in the tub. She gets out in the bed and I'm like, let me do an exam. I feel a scrotum. So we've got a surprise breach here. No problem. Let's have a baby. But that baby didn't, that baby was blue, was lifeless moments after. I had oxygen there and I told

the duel, I was like, go get ready. Like, we're going to have to do something here because I could see the baby's butts out. The baby's legs are out. The baby's arms are out. And there's a blue baby. So I gave like a little shoulder nudge to flex the chin. Baby's head comes out. this is what you do you're a professional do your thing that baby came out and needed full resuscitation so what probably happened was there was some amniotic uh there was some mconium staining it's like a little bit of early stool and that baby aspirated it meaning got into the lungs it causes like an inflammation the lungs can't expand so this baby needed support so we get in the ambulance isn't is too far away let's get in the SUV and go i'm doing the resuscitation the grandfather's doing bagging like we're doing

the whole thing baby gets to the hospital's pinked up the pediatrician that receives us is like oh so who's this little guy you know and i like i like fall onto the gurney and just start sobbing because it's like that trauma like you know like when a gazelle gets away from the lion you just got to shake it out i just was trembling and it was all good but had i not been there we very likely would have had a dead baby now free birth here's the beauty of free birth and i just shared one really beautiful story and one story that was very scary that ended up being a good outcome.

That baby is doing fine too. The free birthing is interesting because what people in the free birth community at large which is sort of nowadays sort of inseparable from the free birth society which I don't want to say too many things but there's a lot of harm being done I think in the conversation that isn't happening around free birth

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It's a muse that draws the brain into coherence so you can be the very your best version of yourself. And it also feels good. That's probably why it's addictive. It feels good. Let's be honest. It feels good to rock nicotine. I love the mint. I rock the 12 mc pouches, but start slow. Work your way up. There's no reason to jump up. If you jump up to the big boys too quick and get nauseated, just go low. Go light. Take more as needed. And it's about a 45 minute window of awesomeness. And there you go. Lucy.com slash KKAP for 20% off. The freebirth thing is interesting because, I'll just start here, the free birth thing is

interesting because everything that we advertise in the hospital system, everything until you had kids and started on your own journey as a father, sounds really great. You know, we've got a surge in there. We've got all these monitoring things. What could go wrong? And yet most of the babies in the NICU are babies that were born probably kind of pushed a little too hard in the hospital. That's like one little thing to keep in mind.

And so the idea that we're not going to do this in the hospital is one thing. But now we're going to actually strip ourselves of any medical support. So my wife and I did have a homebirth. That's another heretical thing that, you know, forget the tattoos and all this. He also had a home birth with his own daughter. Like, is he insane? We were also doing a Semitic breathwork effigy, a serratramoli. And I was like off and outer space and stuff's like the baby's coming.

I was like, uh, like with my claw hands trying to catch her. It didn't go well. And, you know, I just kind of laid there and I, like, you know, clawed her face. Like, look, she's here. Yeah, yeah. So effectively, my wife sort of free birth as well, except that there were some midwives that were there in the corner, just like hanging out. I'm sorry, I'm getting off track.

When I think about that birth, it's like, I actually was in it myself. It's like, do I really believe in this stuff? Like, let's walk the walk now. So it's easy to talk about it. But, like, we're here and our babies, of course, now fine. Everly is this brilliant little, you know, two and a half year or three-year-old now. So there's this notion in the free birth conversation that if you're really, really know who you are and you're really autonomous, you do this alone. You just go off into the woods and have a baby and come back after your sort of vision quest or whatever, which sounds amazing, especially in contrast with all the stuff you described at Stanford in that experience.

The problem is that at no point in history would it make sense for a person to go through, even a deep ayahuasca journey, without some. there, not a guide, but just an angel, kind of circulating and bearing witness. And if you need like a little support, there's somebody there who just gently reminds you and helps you ground, you know, a little hands on the feet, hands on the face, hand on the chest, hey, breathe, brother, breathe, wiggle your toes. It kind of gets you back there. And you and I have been some deep journeys. That is how it's always been. And even going back to like ancient Sumer, women cared for women. It wasn't until probably 18th, 19th century where they, realized there's actually some profit to be made here.

And by the time that Rockefeller Medicine rolled around, the final bastion where women were caring for women exclusively, men kind of stayed out of it for the most part, there was an opportunity to get the masses into hospitals. And this is before we knew to wash hands before you, or wash your surgical steel before cutting things, you know. And people can argue germ theory, train theory. I'm not going to get into that right now.

There was a good reason to have sterile steel. Handling dead babies and then going up upstairs. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So at that time when that happened, it did seem like hospitals were safe. Like, hey, if you have money, if you're, unless you're a peasant, you're going to give birth in the hospital. And that campaign worked with, of course, the publication of the Flexter report. We then had a massive shift in our education. And lo and behold, midwives were almost completely snuffed out, but not completely. And there's this little ember there that just remained hot. And now we're fanning it. We're trying to get that fire back to its, it's, it's. It's, you know, it's sort of prowess. But the free birth, this notion that having a baby without any help is somehow better, or it's like that's the ultimate ascended, you know, mother experience. Yeah, you're now a black belt. Sure.

Sometimes it goes well. And what's most compelling to me, and for the record, if I was going to have a baby, I'd have a free birth. Like, more heresy. This is why nobody in the community, in the OBJUAN community, can take me seriously. But the reason is because there's something so compelling, like going into, the jungle and going deep and surrendering to a full dose of mother ayah or grandma ayah you have to you know you have to imagine that i'm going to go and have this baby and no matter what happens we're going to sit with the outcome meaning if it's god's plan or the universe is plan or

spirit source whatever that this baby doesn't make it then so be it there that is the original attitude and there's certain people that still speak to that philosophy that you are so willing to look, your fear of mortality in the eye, in a world where we've outsourced everything to everybody as long as we don't have to take responsibility. That to me is a very compelling, very deeply moving sentiment. However, you were asking about the preparation. So we have people in Born Free Method who do have free births, but they are creating binders, they are creating lists, they are learning every possible thing that they can, so that if in that moment they see a blue baby, gray baby, who's not breathing, that they have something that they can start doing

instead of just freezing in headlights and wondering like how their blessings, you know, like, we were hoping for this outcome. Why didn't that thing happen? Well, you can't guarantee a good outcome, which is why the free birth thing is compelling on a philosophical level. I think the problem is, from an educational standpoint, is a lot of people go into it thinking you just have to trust it enough. And if it was me and my wife, and there was a, my little girl was there not breathing or whatever, and I didn't have any skills of the, you know, that I've spoken about, that would be catastrophic.

It would be something that I don't know if I would be able to let go of, you know. You could fucking ruin your marriage. You could ruin your marriage, ruin your whole life. And that's okay. It's okay that there's a bad outcome once in a while. That's what I want people to understand. What's not okay is that when somebody says, hey, I've attended some bursts and you don't have any problems when you free birth.

You're now making a decision that is autonomous and it's in power and you know your truth and all of that, but it's based on false premises around what can or cannot happen when you have a free birth. Now, fortunately, bad things are pretty rare in childbirth. I think you probably know that. But when bad things happen, it's great that we have hospitals. It's great that we have surgeons. It's great that we have nICUs. A premature baby at 34 weeks might need some extra support.

Thank God we have a hospital. But for that to be the default is problematic. on the other hand to throw caution completely to the wind sometimes as a consequence of being given information that is through the lens of a sort of self-proclaimed authority not having gone to a lot of bursts

I'm not certain that that's the most that that's an integrity so so where do we go from there you know I mean we have people out there that want to have free bursts well what do you do I think you prepare as much as you can.

You hope for the best and prepare for the rest. But if you go into free birth and you're like, whatever happens happens, we have to acknowledge that because we either believe in autonomy or not. But if a person's making a decision through the lens of autonomy and they're being fed statistics or whatever, they're just nonsense, then that's actually not on them.

That's on the person that was proclaiming themselves to have some answers because they went to a couple bursts and saying they've attended hundreds of births, There's some lawsuits in the, you know, whisperings now for some of these educators. If you're telling somebody, you know, hemorrhage doesn't happen in freebirth, you're going to hurt somebody. That person might say, oh, well, there's an experienced teacher or whatever. My mentor has told me that this isn't something to worry about, so you just don't even think about it.

And then you have a bleed. And that's where I think we're kind of letting people down. So I want to be super clear. I'm not an advocate for free birth, but I think that there's a, there is a big gray area in which, you know, a person may step into this conversation and say, I want to try that, but where do they go for that support? And I think that's really where the evolution of this free birth conversation needs to go in the future. I don't have the answers to it.

Now, we do have quite a bit of emergency skilled preparedness stuff in Born Free Method for those couples that, you know, have a baby that just comes out before their, you know, early contractions and before the midwife even gets there, there's a baby out, right? or 34 or 35 weeks, water's open and babies out, like maybe we should, you know, have some basic skills. But even for the 40-week babies,

things can happen. You know, they can aspirate some of that junk into their lungs and knowing when to reach out for help if your goal is not to just let whatever happens, let the cards fall as they may. And it can change in a moment, you know, like, we're okay with whatever.

And then you see it and you're like, no, do everything. Right. You know, it would be nice if we had a more fluid conversation and we were willing to actually support one another as opposed to treating this as like a badge of honor that you just did nothing. You know, you just let the cards fall.

So it's a complicated, it's a complicated conversation, but I hope that it will continue to evolve. I know people are starting to talk about it more. I think it will. You have like the pendulum swings both ways and it always comes back to center, that kind of deal. Sure. I'd still feel like that as we come back into harmony with ourselves

and the best of the old world will recognize that that is it is far better if you have the ability to at least start at home and don't throw the baby out with the bathwater having a fucking pro there that's been through hundreds of these things makes sense you would have done that in a tribe right right you would have had some fucking abuela there

who had delivered hundreds of babies and had popped out five or six kids herself that that's going to be your person that's right at your side that knows shit and there might even be another little helper right there. Let's talk about the importance of dad's stuff. You know, you work with a dad's group, and in some ways it's like men's work,

but it's not at all because it's deeper in many ways because it's about fatherhood, right? And I'd love for you to talk about that, and then I want to bring a couple questions into ponder in the context of, you know, all the stuff that you're doing because you work with dads that have come through miscarriage, right? I had that happen in between,

a barren wolf and it was absolutely debilitating like it fucking broke me down into pieces um and thankfully i had some skills and tools to grieve through that and to work with medicines and actually fully let go that's right fully trust then the process is okay she wasn't ready yet now she will be i mean we were we went to sultara for four days the week we had it planned and it was the week after she miscarried and i was like you can't fuck that timing up yeah right so it was the perfect perfect place to go um but all that said i mean let's talk about the role of debt and this is this is important i think because a lot of people listen to this maybe won't have kids right now but they're thinking about this stuff yeah right yeah thinking about this they're starting to see

maybe i have some trust issues with medicine after the covid debacle right and um how does that pertain i'm hearing shit about measles but then i'm also you know there's this other group that's talking and susan humphreys went on jo rogans and i read that book yeah yeah yeah so just um I'd love for you to frame a bit on the father stuff. And the importance of fathers being president at birth is such a big one to me. Because I remember in, and Tosh, you know, has, we got plenty of examples of this. Having fought in the UFC isn't like, like my badge of honor. I'm a man.

Look what I did. But it is, you know, and I, there's plenty of men that are in the UFC where you're just like, you're still a little boy trying to be a man. Yeah. There's still plenty of that. Yeah. But what amazed me was how many fathers. fighters weren't in there for the delivery.

And I was like, you're missing out on the greatest show on fucking earth, dude. Like, you're not going to be in the room. Like, if you don't want to see your catch, be at your wife's shoulders. Yeah. Be in her ear. Be your fucking corner man.

You know, like she's going in. Feel that vibration. Yeah. She's in the championship rounds right now. You're telling me you're going to fucking not watch. Yeah, take a potty break during the final minute of round three. Yeah.

Crazy, right? So that surprised me But knowing that about even guys in the UFC And in other professional fighters You know That that's actually common And then it's also somewhat common For women to not want their men there

Which is also a total fucking head scratcher Like what's going on in the relationship Where you don't want dad To be in the room with you Yeah Right so let's unpack the power of dad She's give me all things dad here B3 Sciences is a phenomenal company.

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this goes back to robert bly again this is iron john it's kind of a classic men's group sort of book um i actually happen to be going through that like studying chapter to chapter and we're going through this book together and there's a lot of topics that come up uh but one of his one of his concepts is that we once we get this little little little a little um whiff of grandiosity as little boys like you know you start getting some hormones circulating and girls are looking different or whatever you're getting some muscle like suddenly you feel like the world you can conquer the world right there's this grandiosity that leads us like we're flying high i'm invincible yeah i'm invincible

we all know that feeling that's when we we make stupid decisions when we're 18 you know have a couple drinks or whatever you know at that you know your your friend's brother got you beer and like you're you're having to make hard decisions and you're not even fully there like you don't even even fully developed or executive decision making capacity um on the other hand some some young men especially in the past they were sort of grounded a little bit too soon having to take on commitments that were far, far more solidifying. They're not flying. They're down here. And what's interesting is in childbirth is, and you can probably remember this with Tosh, she's not there when she's giving birth. She is in the astral. She is flying.

And women oftentimes are very grounding for us, for people like me and you. So she's off there flying. If you're also off there flying, who's going to balance that out? We have to talk about the sacred polarities of this. So the mountain has to be there for this feminine energy. to roar. And if you're not in there, you don't get it. So when you're there and you get to witness birth, even like you said, even if you're at the shoulders, you're going to feel something different. And your grounding presence is actually that immovable anchoring point is actually very, very helpful for her. She's given the opportunity to surrender completely to obliteration. Childbirth for a woman must just be a spectacular, hard, painful, ecstatic, everything all at once.

I mean, I just can't imagine what that must be like. So let me share a quick story. There's a guy in our actually in my born-free dad's group. And one thing that's missing in childbirth education is nobody's really talking about the dads. The dads are like looking over the shoulder once in a while looking at videos or maybe flips through a book or reads, he looks at Instagram, it listens to a podcast. That's like the like, let's just get you excited part. The real work is also realizing that you in this relationship, that you're actually a team here. and it's not just hey let me know when the baby gets here that's not how this works especially when

you get to be a father you need to actually be willing and able to ground which is why there might be a lot of relationship work that has to happen beforehand mom's going to be tired mom's going to be need some break like you're going to have to be with this kid and you should want to be with this kid it's going to be hard it's going to be uncomfortable but that's the journey nothing worth doing including the ayahuasca ceremony it's not easy you don't take a you know seven eight grams of mushrooms with paul check and expect that it's going to be easy that's not the point man that's not what you signed up for so short story there's a guy in the born free dad's group we meet monthly it's a it's it's a men's group but it's really focused in fatherhood as you mentioned um they were pregnant when we started the program and then they

had a baby uh around october of two years ago and the baby died in the birth and i was like oh my gosh And then, of course, I'm thinking, what did I miss and this and that? But this guy tells me this story, and I'm like, I'm on my knees just bawling in the yard. And, I mean, I just can't. It's sympathy. It's empathy. It's like, you know, ancestral stuff. Like, all of it comes up.

And I'm just weeping for this man. And he actually is weeping as well. But then he says, you know what, though? That little man just wasn't ready for this world. Like it was just, he brought this tremendous energy in. And going back to something you and I were just talking about, he was like, there's a lot of medicine here for me. Because then later, we kept talking and he said, you know, I'm realizing that that happened, that had to happen, in order for me to step into the shoes of a man. He's like, I wasn't ready.

And I think my son knew that. And so he felt like he was a little bit overbearing and like, ah, that's nonsense. And brushing recommendations aside, getting his ego in the way. when he wasn't actually prepared to do the thing of like where are you what is your what is your gut feeling i want to go to the hospital okay let's go instead it was kind of just a bypassing of the real work of being in relationship not realizing that that work in relationship happens way before the birth that's not something that happens in the moment so this idea that i don't want him in the room our women know i don't say are not possessive like the women that we love our people

Tosh and Stephanie, they know what they want. They know what they need. They're great women. They're not moldable like these, you know, like the young maidens. They are powerful, powerful women. And if they didn't feel like this is a safe person, this is an immovable force that I don't actually have to do the masculine for him. I don't have to take care of his feelings. He is an immovable force that will keep me here.

Without knowing that, you might actually say, you know what, you're not actually somebody I want in the space. Right. So all of the work preparing for this is fatherhood, even though you're not a father yet. You don't have a baby in your hands. And that's what I really, really want people to take away from just this part of the conversation. There is so much that we can do in relationship that will also contribute to a really beautiful birth experience. If your lady is worried about how you're going to handle her, you already miss the boat. And that's really, I think, where this work of like, let's prepare for fatherhood. We need a real. right of sort of an initiation. We need an elder. In some ways, I'm kind of an elder for young guys that are having babies. I'm not. I don't consider myself an elder. But in this case, I've been through this twice. I've seen dads in birth. I've talked to so many fathers. Sometimes I've only talked to them because I want to, like, distract away from what's happening here. Let her go inward. Let her do her thing so she doesn't have to take care of your feelings. Let's talk in the maternity unit, even in residency. I was kind of, you know, scolded for that

because it's like, you're supposed to be doing your job. And it's like, well, this is my job. Like this actually, this relationship building is important because I want to know how to support him when when shit gets real. But nobody's doing that work. It's just like, hey, do you want to be in the room, dad? Do you want to cut the cord? Like, that's okay. But like when I think about how you probably show up in birth, that's a very, very different story from what a lot of these young guys who have no clue. And it's not their fault.

Nobody really has ever helped them get to that point where they're like, okay, I'm ready. I'm like grounded. I'm here for you, baby. And I have no problem here to solve. I'm here to show you that I can stand and be immovable. Yeah. And that is fatherhood. Yeah.

And I know our birth sheet, it's printed out and laminated. And I'm going to, while you're incapacitated, I'm going to be on that shit like a hawk to make sure this goes down the exact way you wanted it to. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And there also doesn't need to be like you go in with your dukes up.

Like, I'm going to fight anybody in here. If you're that opposed to being in the hospital and you were planning to be in the hospital, maybe next time you just don't go in the hospital. Because you don't want to also want to be in a fight and argument the whole time. Not at all. You don't need to prove people wrong or anything like that. I mean, we worded things. It's funny because our dear brother Paul, you know,

how to learn the hard way the first time about the medical mafia and child protective services and all that stuff in arguing over vaccines. And I just took the easy way out and said that's something we're going to do on our own pace a little bit later. We're going to follow a spaced guideline. That's right. And the spacing was never. They didn't have to know about that, right?

At one month, we're not doing it. And then six months, we're definitely not doing it. every other moon we're not doing it yeah yeah um talk about fear-based birth plans because i feel like there's a lot of there's a lot of and this had we not known better right like when we came to texas and having already had one yeah we got a lot of shit not shit but just kind of fear-based things like oh you got a test for x y and z if you don't run this test your kid could come out uh messed up in some way and you wouldn't know but if you knew early you could abort and then you know we could find the kid that's right for you

kind of thing that way you don't end up sure you know that kind of thing and um that was like one of several things when we went to a normal OGYN before we found you and before we found amy offutt who was a brilliant functional medicine doctor out in marble falls so we get like real answers about stuff you know um but that was kind of there and then we've had so many friends go through this some which are older right if you're 40 you're geriatric on paper right 40 year old fucking geriatric yeah right you can't give birth anymore you're uh you're you're you're a High risk patient, right? Yeah. So so much of this language gets tossed around.

And, you know, I mean, there's plenty of, of, Deepak Chopra talked about that. The guy who gets cancer, you know, they give him the, they give him the placebo water and tell him they got the cure for it. Fucking cancer goes away completely. It's like a nocebo effect. Yeah, three weeks later, they tell him that it was an ocebo and, and fucking cancer comes back full on and kills him. Right? Wow. Guys lived with tumor, like a tumor, another one they used.

The guy lived with a tumor for a better part of 20 years. Never knew about it. Goes in, doctors like, holy shit, you've had this tumor. It dies in a week, right? So like, there's something there. There's something that the association of it, the fear that comes in, like, oh, man, this thing's happening. I'm doomed, especially when we've, through our education system, you know, we haven't just offered a way. We've absolutely been trained into giving over our power to the guy in the way.

lab coat right like and it's it's in it's entrained in us that's why so many people think it's quackery to do a homeworth or think it's quackery to have you know uh to to not see a doctor unless you need it or less it's for like functional stuff or improvement so um anyway i forgot where i was going with that well you you had said fear based fear based brain let's talk about that yeah let's talk about that because it's it's ever present i think for a lot of people who don't have somebody like you on deck and um you know shut up in here a second but even like what we did right before we were certain we were going to do a home birth before we had found our midwife before we had you know learned more about things and had felt comfortable okay we're going to st david's hospital if shit

hits the fan that's the closest one here's our plan this is what we're going to do um before figuring that stuff out you're still going to go you're just going to call the local OBGYN right right you're going to go to a normal place and the normal place is going to tell you normal standards, right? And some of these standards are fear-based. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, the classic line that kind of sums all that up is if you don't do this, your baby's going to die, which if I told you that, it's going to be pretty compelling if you don't have, you know, somebody to help guide you through, what are they actually saying here? Like, what is the actual risk? And unfortunately, you know, there's a good argument to be made that the gold standard

in clinical research or randomized controlled trial is not really applicable to maternity care. There's some smart people that are making that claim. And the reason is that there's so many immeasurable variables that make it very hard to say what is a good birth to begin with right we say healthy mom healthy baby yes but that's the minimum you know if that's our only goal like gosh i mean there's a lot of ways to injure a person apart from killing them you know so um the the classic line is you know if you don't do this your baby's going to die and that can be very compelling for people to do things that they otherwise maybe weren't planning to do is it sometimes you know a useful intervention yeah, but that language is coercive to begin with.

If I say, instead, you know, hey, there's some things here I'm concerned about. Can we talk about this? As long as it's not an emergency, why don't we have a real conversation around what you are concerned about, doctor, and what the risks, benefits, and alternatives of that intervention are? In order for you to consent, which we call it informed consent, you have to actually know all those things, and then you and your partner get together and you talk about it.

Maybe you pray over it. It doesn't really matter. But once you have all the information, and it's honestly given without coercive use of coercive language or any coercion for that matter, like mistreating you, like ignoring you, giving you the uncomfortable room. Like, I've heard that stuff.

Like, give a room six. Oh, the crunchy one. Oh, the anti-vaxter, give a room six. Like knowing that it's really cold. I mean, it's just stupid. It's just childish, adolescent stuff. If we really care about people, let's have an honest conversation

and let them make a decision. And this is across the board, informed consent and autonomy. If we believe in autonomy in one thing, we have to believe in it across the board, including if they want to have a home birth or a free birth. and not saying like, oh, you're going to do that, like, how you're responsible. Anyways, like, that's coercion.

You're now making me feel afraid of my decision without even giving me explanation. So most of the birth planning experience is a person saying, here's what I recommend, or probably more accurately, here's what we are doing without there being really any conversation. And one of those, you know, the aspects that, involved here is that they're not given a lot of time. And then there's a lot of doctors who don't take care of themselves. So how would they know, you know, what could be done to prevent this thing? Instead, just take the aspirin to prevent preeclampsia. Well, what about preventing preeclampsia

to begin with or preventing gestational diabetes? I told you I was in a social media shitstorm at one point. A part of that was I was getting probed and prodded by people who were angry that I had said you can prevent gestational diabetes. Insulin resistance is one of the most readily reversible, let's say. It's not easy. It can, can be hard, but we know we can reverse it. Not everybody should have diabetes. And we in the United States have one of the highest rates of gestational diabetes in the developed world, if not the highest. So for me to say, hey, listen, my clients don't get gestational diabetes. I think we can prevent this. And then to be told, that's bullshit. You know, you're a quack. You shouldn't

be taken care of women. Your mom should have aborted you, like horrible things. When all I'm saying is, guys, my clients don't get gestational diabetes. I told you about the oysters thing. Like, I get them all eating bone broth, eggs, fermented cod liver oil. I get them eating. beef liver, bivalves, like smoked oysters, and they actually do much better. And they're conceiving naturally instead of going the $20,000 route down IVF, right? Well, briefly, I mean, I had Dan from Nutrisense has been on this podcast twice, and I have no affiliation with them, but they are a CGM company. When CGMs became widely available, they have pools of thousands of N-equals-1 data reports

on how people have improved their blood sugar management and improved their metabolic flexibility, and they say, you could be 100 pounds overweight. and still have weight to lose, but become metabolically flexible in a matter of weeks. In less than one month, you could have metabolic flexibility where now your insulin sensitivities return to normal, you're burning fat regularly, you're processing carbohydrates appropriately. You're not seeing these giant spikes, multi-spike things from one meal, right? And that is fucking lifestyle. But to your point, you have genetics, right?

A lot of that allopathic is this is what you were born with. This is the hand you were dealt and you're fucked. Yep. The only way out of this is this pill. I got or this knife that I've got. That's right. And then the other side of that is if I'm willing to take responsibility for this, I can fix it. Right. Right. If I own it, then make it mine, then I can, then I am the guy. And if I, and if I mess up, that's on me. Right. It's not on the doctor. It's on me if I mess up. That's right. Right. I think that that's very empowering. Yeah.

But it's also to your point on informed consent. That's not a part of the informed consent. It's just if you don't do this, this bad thing will happen. Well, I better go on insulin. And that will happen for a lot of people. I'm not saying that that is a failure or that you should feel guilty or shameful, but when we have an entire medical construct that's harassing me because I'm saying, hey, maybe we can do a better job of preventing these complications, which are leading to bad outcomes. Like, why isn't that important? And a part of that also is the socioeconomics, which you probably notice, I didn't mention a single supplement there. You could consider cod liver oil a supplement, but these are all whole foods. And there's a huge difference between doing that and saying,

hey, you need to take $600 worth of supplements each month. Not saying that the people doing, prescribing in that way are bad. But, but, you know, how much is like a pound of the liver worst that we eat? It's like, it's pretty expensive. Oh, let's say that's $17 a pound, but it goes a long way and the amount of micronutrients

that are in that pound of real food. Yeah, I don't think that's expensive. That's not desiccated. Like you get it, you're, trust me, pound for pound, it is worth more than any other type of meat you'd buy, right? And then when you get into oysters, now you're talking about really low price, probably the best... $3 a can, one of those big cans, something like that.

Yeah, best pricing on things like that. Right. And the nutrient content, and that beats liver and kidney. Yeah, right. So my point is that you could go and spend $100 a month on supplements. You're not going to get a great bioavailability. We use supplements. I mean, I use some still.

But, you know, getting a, you know, maybe like a couple slices, a little medallions of that liver worst in your diet, maybe every couple days. Now it's, what, 30 bucks a month for liverwurst? And then we have a couple cans of oysters, you know, a week. We've added just, you know, $10, $12 more maybe, you know, every week. That, in contrast to even your co-pays and all that stuff for all the medications and whatnot, we have a wash, if not an advantage for the food-based way of doing it.

And again, even if you didn't buy any of those things, just cutting out some carbohydrates or switching your Coke to Coke Zero. Like, I don't know. there's all these different things. My point is not to say, here's how you do it. My point is to say, it can be done. And so when I say, hey, you know, your glucose screening, we won't talk about all the individual things because that's another 16 hours of conversation. But your glucose screening was elevated. What do we want to do? Let's get a CGM. Okay, your insurance is going to cover it. Great. Let's get a CGM. Let's just see what you're eating. Doctors don't really have that knowledge either.

And in some ways, the people that hear what I'm saying is, I'm saying you have way more power and control over certain factors than even your doctors and midwives are telling you. And that's partly because of the system. And it's partly because they don't take care of themselves. And that is not me knocking you doctors. Thank God you're doing the doctor thing. But when we don't look, lean, and we don't get adequate sleep, and we have dark circles under our eyes and our hair is falling out, and our skin's all blemishy.

and we've got all these snacks in the lounges and whatnot. And the hospitals using canola oil and whatever to cook all their food, it's no wonder that the medical system itself doesn't reflect health. So how could they, you know, it's like the two fish swimming by one another in a bowl of water. How's the water? What's water? Like they don't even know. They don't have any concept because they don't have the time and the education really to understand this.

So the practical experience I have is anything that comes up that could be, quote, you know, lead to a, quote, bad outcome, let's have a conversation around what can be done, what does this mean? And instead of jumping in and saying, your baby's going to die if you don't do this, why don't we actually kind of elicit, like, hey, how does this sound? You know, like, you know me. We've gotten to know each other for eight months now, and we're approaching the birth and I see this thing on ultrasound. Instead of it's, you know, us saying, you have to do it this way, why don't we just have a, like, a conversation, like two friends would talk about something. And I can say, you know what, Kyle?

I know that this wasn't in the cards for you, but I'm a little bit concerned about this thing. I think we should do this. Let's keep a little bit closer check on these things. Hey, and if we end up at the end of the road still having to do a C-section, fine. But let's also try to work on some of these things to mitigate that risk. Again, to fall below the average. Instead of putting you into this giant bell curve and saying, hey, the average risk is 15%. I want to get your risk down to 5%.

Not zero. I can't promise that. But if we can get it below that, there's a good chance that you don't have to go into this experience being afraid of those things happening and you know that you've taken all of your focus resources and energy on doing your very best to get as healthy as you can not just in the pregnancy ideally before the pregnancy so that those things don't even have to be on your radar at all but man I love that you said that it's actually an empowering message and that is actually not on me for me to say hey there's something that could be done to prevent these things from

happening is not be saying it's your fault dummy for not doing it it's me saying if you want to do this we can do this yeah it's not going to be for everybody but to say that it's just like this sort of fatalistic inevitability is also not fair to people yeah just because you don't know yeah it's just not true yeah well we're running we're running out of time here we've got about eight minutes before before noon let's talk about the vaginal thing the cervical cancer yeah this is a follow-up to the interview we did on clear and free mimi linquist and i hey mimi if you're listening. So we had this lifestyle program for people that had abnormal pap smears, abnormal biopsies.

The basic process that women go through is every three to five years or so. You go in, you get in stirrups, they swab your cervix. They stick a little thing in the opening. And then whatever those results are, you might end up resulting in what's called a coposcopic biopsy where we go and take a big chunk out, no anesthesia, pretty gnarly. Sexual organ. Be like me taking bites out of the tip of your penis. Probably doesn't feel very good.

And women have told me that. So they want to avoid that to begin with. But if you get the biops, and it shows that there's some real abnormality here, you might be faced with a procedure where we just lop off the top of your cervix, called an excisional, a loop electrode excisional procedure, or a cold knife cone, where we're actually lopping off this bundle of nerves and this cervical opening. Hey, you're not having kids anymore.

It's just lop it off. And a lot of women don't want to go through that. You know, it's pretty horrific. You become an ascent there, so it can. mess with your sexual gratification and all of that. So we were working on the lifestyle stuff and using Immune Intel HCC, which is a compound that's derived from the mycelia of Shataki mushrooms, getting great results.

But then we were having women who were coming with Sin 3, which is the worst. It's like pre-cancer. It's like really the next step is this might become cancer and we might be talking about bigger things, hysterectomies or whatever else. And they would get this and it's like, gosh, you know, we could probably reverse this, but they're so afraid because of actually it's similar in the birth planning, process. They've been so they've been sort of instilled with fear that if I don't do this, I'm going to die of cancer, that they want to do something now. So I found I started doing some

digging, which I have the luxury of doing that. And I'm super curious, super into all the functional medicine stuff, super into Ivermectin and all this. I was following what was happening during COVID. And I, um, I heard this oncology case conference. If somebody on Instagram who sent this case conference to me, if you're listening, thank you. Because I was a gynecologist. There was a GYN oncologist with a cancer, the women's health cancer doctors. And there was, you know, some other people in there. And they had tried this regimen vaginally of curcumin, high-dose curcumin, high-d-d, and high-dose EG-C-G, which is a green tea, an extract from green tea. And within like 12, 16 weeks or something, this lady went from Sin 3, you know, being faced with this

potential cancer diagnosis in the future to a clean bill of health. And I was like, well, that's interesting, and they were all blown away on the call. Never really thought about it again. I'd watched this, and I was like, well, that's cool. But then a lady, like, you know, reaches out, and she's like, here's, I've got this problem. And she was referred by an OBGYN. And I had prescribed the regimen. I tried to get it to certain people, so I had some time to formulate this. How are we going to, what are we going to put in the vagina? What are we going to do orally? How do we deliver it? All that stuff. But I hadn't had anybody with such a success story as this woman. So she had reached out, this is probably,

six months of tinkering with that regimen. And she reached out and she was like, I got Sin 3. I went to a specialist in L.A., gynaecologist, and he's like, you've got like stage zero. Like if we, you know, Steve's zero cancer, if we don't do an excision right now, this is going to be really bad for you. And of course, now here's the fear, like, what do I do? Like, I don't want to die. She was a cigarette smoker.

So when she got the initial diagnosis, she stopped cold. She reached out to me. I was like, I'm going to reach out to the compounding pharmacist. I think you're a great candidate for this regimen. We sent her out some cervical cups, like menstrual cups, that would be a delivery model. You put a bunch of gel in there that has ivermectin and curcumin, which everybody knows has all these anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties.

We're going to put that in the vagina, dose in the morning, dose in the evening, and we're going to do oral EGCG and oral active hexos-correlated compound, the HCC through immune intel, and we're going to see. But we also did all the other lifestyle stuff. I was like talking to them about masculine and feminine dynamics and relationships. We went through like kind of the stuff you do. It's like coaching counseling kind of thing. Absolutely.

And got her, you know, the water. We got the food. We got all this stuff. She's not smoking anymore. Okay. Talk to your OBJuan and ask them when they'd be willing to repeat the biopsy. Like how late can we push this out before they're going to do the leap? And the OBJuan said probably something like, let's do it in four weeks.

And if it still hasn't changed, I really want to do the leap because I'm worried. And again, a leap is lopping off. a part of your sexual reproductive system, the top of the cervix, can lead to preterm birth, could, you know, lead to some scarring there, maybe some fertility issues. But most importantly, like, she was born with those parts. She wants to keep those parts. So we did it. He got them out to her the next day.

I sent some discs to her I just bought them for it. I was like, let's go. Let's get started. She got the HCC. I ordered her EGCG. All good. Four weeks later, I didn't think about it. I was like, she's going to go for this and we'll see how it goes.

Four weeks later, she sends me a text with her. pathology report. Sin 3, four weeks prior, about five weeks prior, now a completely negative biopsy. So this OB-G-W-N and I got on a call with this woman and I was like, Doc, what do you think? And he's like, I was as sort of stunned as you are. He said, we don't have anything like this. We haven't ever seen. I haven't ever seen something like this. And I said, well, maybe they mixed up the slides. I'm trying to be skeptical, you know, because that's what a true scientist does. maybe they mixed up the slides and they were looking at the wrong person. He was like, no, I even had a second pathologist look at it, and they all agree.

Somehow we went from pre-cancer, like almost cancer, to nothing in four weeks. So for those listening, what I'm trying to do here is to provide a novel therapy that's an alternative to an excision. And there's other therapies that are called escharotic therapies, which is like multiple regimens, supplements, supplement, vaginal, supplement. I mean, there's so much to it. It's super expensive. It's very complicated. is super straightforward, and of all things, it's using ivermectin and curcumin, you know. So, you know, you brought McCulligan.

Curcumin's a part of everybody's sort of antiviral, you know, protocol and all of that. Ivermectin's a big one now. I wouldn't have, I wouldn't even have thought about doing this had we not gone through the COVID thing. So there's another silver lining opportunity here, but this is something that doesn't exist in the space. We don't have an alternative, and this is a vaginal. regimen in a gel that's compounded. And in as little as four weeks, it seems that we can go from

like 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock with regards to, you know, where you're at with this. So I wanted to provide that update because we had done the podcast before. And anybody listening, you know, even guys that are listening, you have women that are going to be potentially scared into doing certain things. Just have them reach out to me and let's have a conversation. I don't even charge for the regimen because I'm collecting this data now. And I want to really see, like, in my full myself or is this real because it's easy to take like a couple success stories like that and to say we got the next big thing let's start a website and sell it like I don't want that I want this to be available to everybody we're going to make this open access therapeutics because this is something

that is sorely lacking in women's health and no women woman listening or anybody listening if you talk to your partner about the pleasant nature of a pap smear in that whole process like it's it's not great so I'm glad that we now have potentially and all alternative and we do a live HPV class where we talk about the regimen and we talk about all the lifestyle factors and whatnot we're doing that now on a quarterly basis so people can go to clearhpV.com if they want to learn more more about that or or just have questions that's awesome and then we'll wrap up here but for for people that want to learn more from you in terms of birthing and how to be the best dad possible how to show up for your partner and things like that website there

yeah born free method.com is the website well i'm going to make a code for you guys. We'll put it in the description. We'll give like, you know, 150 bucks off or something. We have a 12-month access that's only 750 bucks. The lifetime access is just under 4,000. We'll give you a separate code for that. But then you get direct access to me. You get my cell phone number and you call or text me anytime. You've seen me take a couple calls here, training UTIs, some kidney and kidney stuff. You get, I get to be your sort of back pocket OBGYN and you call at any point throughout your entire reproductive life from start to finish. many pregnancies you have, I become your guy alongside my best friend and midwife, Sarah Rosser.

So, bornfree method.com. We also have a fertility deep dive there, which is just under 500 bucks for people that just want to focus on fertility. Lots of options there, including a free pregnancy loss program, which again is like, this is so important that I just stillbirth miscarriage, the recurrent miscarriage, what is wrong, why aren't we getting this to work? There's also a free program on there at bornfreemethod.com. So, yeah. That's it. That's it. Where it could be We'll link to your stuff, your Instagram handle and all the on the show notes, your podcast as well, which you're still doing. Yeah, born free method, the podcast. Awesome, brother.

Yeah, I love you, buddy. I love you too, man. I'm so grateful we were able to fit this in. Hell yeah. Let's go lift some weights. Let's do it. How's your life been lately? It feels like mine is a never-ending hustle.

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