Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #459 Under the skin with Dr Cameron Chestnut

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Learn more about Dr. Chesnut and his approach: https://clinic5c.com/providers/cameron-chesnut-md Submit a free photo screening to see if you may be a candidate for a procedure: https://clinic5c.com/contact/start-journey-form?utm_campaign=6579824-Chesnut%20Welcome%20Series&utm… Follow Dr. Chesnut on Instagram for daily education and patient journeys: https://www.instagram.com/chesnut.md/ Listen to Dr. Chesnut’s personal podcast for deeper conversations on health, aesthetics, longevity, and performance: https://www.5codespodcast.com/ Get the best microdosing products on the planet from www.BrainSupreme.co/kkp and remember to use code "KKP" for 15% off everything in the store! Up your brain's hardware and software now! Join my new community The Kingdom Within on Skool right here for a free 1 week trial!  https://www.skool.com/the-kingdom-within-5541/about

Dr. Chestnut, Cameron, it's so fucking awesome to have you on the podcast, brother. I'm so excited to be here, Kyle. Thanks for having me. Thanks for this incredible experience overall. Yeah, this is awesome. How do we meet online? I think you through Instagram or something like that. I mean, we have degrees of connection through a person in my inner circle who we were talking

about earlier. I'm still sweaty from our workout. I love it. Grayling Love, you played football with at ASU, who is like in my true inner circle. He's one of my people and speaks so highly of you and always has. my wife played basketball Arizona State, so there's that connection as well. But kind of honestly, when Grayling talks about you, somebody who I trust so implicitly and who you were a teammate with, you know, he's not BS in me.

You know, he's like, yeah, Kyle's the real deal. I love that guy. Says to say hi, all these things. And so, yeah, it's kind of fun to connect after that. But then I think, yeah, via the world of biohacking and wellness and Ben Greenfield and performance, and as things have evolved, I think you and I are very similar ages and kind of evolving very much similar in our paths and career. So it's kind of cool to connect finally.

It's super cool. And Grayling is fucking awesome, man. He was somebody I always really enjoyed as a person. And I remember talking to him. We were just talking about how intelligent Grayling is. And for those that don't know, he's fucking brilliant. Yeah. And like when I first really understood that, I remember asking him,

I was like, did you get like a ride anywhere else other than ASU? Yeah. He's like, yeah, I turned down Stanford. I was like, what? Yeah. That's crazy to me, you know? But, I mean, I can't even remember what his reasoning was, but... Too close to home.

Yeah. Yeah, he was ready to get out of the environment that he grew up in. That makes sense. He persevered despite kind of thing. And it's a, I mean, he's an inspiring human, you know, who nobody has ever heard of or knows. So it's just kind of fun to have that. The guys that know him from the team, no, I mean, anybody who's coming to contact with him, you know, knows him, right? I think he's a, he's a genuine fucking person.

He's got a huge heart, but also, he's gifted, you know, in many ways. Yeah. But he was one of the few guys. I can't say that all the offensive line liked me. Yeah. Drew Hodgden went to Palo Alto. So he was kind of like a high school rival of mine, you know,

and he had a full ride to go to ASU right from the jump. I had to walk on years after having shitty grades and everything and doing the Juko route. But I don't think Drew ever appreciated, you know, because I was a scrub. I'm on the scrub squad that practices are my game day. Yeah, yeah. And I fucking, I laid it in there. You know, like, this is all the playing time again. I'm going to fucking hurt.

I'm going to smash somebody. I'm not going to hurt anybody, but I want to put it to him. And Grayling handled it like a chain. You know, he realized like, yeah, iron sharpens iron, right? And I don't think Drew thought of it that way. I can like hear those words coming out of his mouth. Exactly. Yep.

Absolutely. Well, dude, tell me, I mean, I don't know if your, my arc of the podcast is I want to know, like, what made people who they are today. Yeah. And then we can dive into who you are today. We'll dive into all the practice that you're into. super curious for that part of the conversation just from, you know, have a holistic background. And, you know, they're also an optimization background. And you could call that biohacking. I definitely don't like that term, but that's okay. They cross in certain areas.

And there are certain technologies. I wouldn't necessarily call them biohacks, but there's certain technologies that are really fucking rad. You know, like I saw you using the bio, what is it, the biocharger? That's the real deal. You know, I'm saying in front of those things. Like, there's a palpable difference in how I feel. And it's not just, you know, mental. Like it definitely has, and the different settings will take you to different areas. So, like, we can dive into that fun stuff too. But you're in an interesting field, right, to be doing all this.

So that's going to be super exciting. And I'm just curious, you know, like, tell me about life growing up. Yeah. You know, you grew up in Idaho. Like, what led you to the path of medicine? And then in medicine, what led you to the choice? Yeah. Where are your final resting places?

I mean, sort of getting to the punchline there where you're like my, the field I'm in is I'm very much like a counterculture to it a little bit. You know, my facial cosmetics essentially is my world, which sounds very superficial and, you know, vanity and idolatry and all these types of things. And so I am always on a checkpoint of that. And what ultimately led me there is all the things we'll talk about. But it's just fun to, you know, be in that world with this different background. this different mindset of, you know, optimization, performance, and then helping people find their performance and their identity and who they are, really. That's kind of what I'm doing when I unlock it that way.

But also with a lot of points that have been create a lot of friction in our field, funny enough that aren't, don't create that much friction anymore, but 10 years ago they did type of thing. So it's one of those funny. Leading the charge. Yeah. Check says the trailblazers take a lot of arrows in the back. Oh, my gosh.

Yes, exactly. But, you know, I grew up in Cordelia, Idaho, beautiful mountains, small town area, same place my wife grew up. My mom was a nutritionist, a dietitian. Oh, cool. And as we were talking about earlier, in your beautiful, home full of love that you have here, it just, like, resonates with me with pets because we owned pet stores. That was a small business and this world of nutrition.

And my mom was a nutritionist through, and she graduated college in like the 70s, went to the same school. I was a nutrition undergrad at the same school my mom went to. Cool. At Washington State. And so kind of a fun little background, but my mom was the weird mom a little bit growing up. And I was born in the 80s. And she, you know, was 10 years into practice at that point or whatever it was.

And she worked in like for the gut for the state and was a registered dietitian, but much more of a like a nutritionist mindset. So she was like, you know, eating once a day before that was a thing. There was no time restricted eating or intermittent. That's just sort of, she found out that worked for her. And she, you know, I think one of the really. funny ones at the time. This gets very into the structure of the American Dietetic Association, her organization, like the one that dictated all the things, you know, the food pyramid. And she was sort of like, you know, timeliness wise, this just changed, right?

Six to eight servings of grain. Right. And she was sort of like, we are not doing that. Like this is, this was, this was tampered with, I think is the word she told me when I was a kid. Like, this is not real, which I had no concept on a kid, right? But so we have that, you know, like kind of not believing in the food pyramid from the very beginning, which was very counterculture for her in hindsight, which I didn't even, you know, put a finger on. But then like margarine, when margarine became like the thing, you know, well, that's healthier than butter, you have to eat margarine.

And she was sort of like totally calling bullshit to that one, you know, just like we are not. She didn't fall for Fabio for people that aren't old enough. You know, like you didn't grow up with like dare. You didn't grow up with, this is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any question. Marigold margarine.

You didn't grow up with, with Fabio's glory. his fucking hair. This guy was like a juiced up supermodel on the cover of every smut book ever. Like he was the cover guy in every smut book. And, you know, he's there and he's just, he's like the margarine

guy out of nowhere. He's the guy pumping this stuff, you know? And he's like, I can't believe it's not but a spray. Yeah. In the spray bottle, that's like forever stuck in my head. That is so funny that that's what stuck with you. Yeah, that type of celebrity. So she, yeah, was like, we're not eating margarine. You know, we were sort of

anti-seed. I remember her telling me when I was a kid, well, this was an engine lubricant. She literally told me that when I was a kid. This was an engine lubricant and they use it in foods. And basically, we're not eating that. She was mixing olive oil with butter before that was a thing. You know, so it's kind of funny because at the time that she was the weird mom, I didn't appreciate it. But she definitely created this like curiosity or challenging mindset of even her organization, which things that were like, you know, seeing Fabio on TV and then seeing my mom be like, no, we're not doing that. You know, so I'm like, okay. So it's interesting.

I did not realize how that shaped me until I got significantly older. This is like, shout out to mom, let's go, you know. And then having just kind of the grind of a small business and pets and curiosity. So I think a lot of it's just rooted in that like very curious, which is what I try to do with my kids, however I can, create some curiosity and some work ethic and let them see what things look like and let them find their path. But, you know, as a boy turning into a man, it took me a lot longer to find my path in curiosity

and be appreciative of what she had created in me. But I took that nutrition thing and I think much similar path to you, like, I didn't really appreciate it or apply it to the degree that I wish I would have earlier until I was really interested in performing well at something I cared about, which was sports. And then when I saw these palpable differences in what I was doing, I'm like, oh, this is what she was talking about the whole time. These are the principles she was teaching me in sports nutrition. And so I was gung-ho entering undergraduate. I was going to be a sports nutritionist. Like, this moves the needle. This does stuff, you know.

And that wasn't really even a field at the time, you know. when I entered school. And so I went through and medicine was always in the back of my head. And as I kind of progressed in, I was like, I actually think medicine is going to be the way that I want to go. And, you know, I went into it just thinking like, well, I know that I like doing things. And medicine, we talk about doers and thinkers, which there's always overlap. But I love problem solving and those types of things. But I really love doing things with my hands. And so I'm like, okay, I'll be an orthopedist. I was a cookie cutter orthopedist, a jock, you know, college athlete, all those things. And so I thought, oh, this is what I'll do. And then as I got into it, it just wasn't creative enough for me.

And that's not like an offense to the orthopedists. They're very creative and they're very good. But it was very algorithmic. Like, if this, do that. And I realized, I really like things that are a little bit more, 3D spatial. Every problem is different. It's never the same. There is no algorithm.

You've got to figure it out. You have a more intuitive. Yeah, yeah. Like, here's a hole or a defect or an injury or, and how do we kind of like put things back together a little bit? And so I really gravitated towards like the soft tissue specialties, plastic surgery, your nose and throat ophthalmology, dermatology. And ultimately, that was sort of the route, my route that I went through medical school. I went into dermatology, knowing that I was going to do surgery, kind of got through, you know,

you kind of like get through phases, just like, this is the hoop I need to jump through. And then I finally got into my fellowship training and being like, okay, I love, you know, these 3D spatial things, but always in my head were these things that I had used as an athlete. You know, I progressed through sports. and that rise was way before, and I was kind of peaking in sports while I was in medical school and like Iron Man triathlons

and things like that. So I was applying a lot of those, let's just call them biohacks, but they're more like actually like recovery and performance tactics to my athletic career. And then I'm like, this will help this other aspect

that I'm doing too in medicine, but it wasn't really accepted or proven or, you know, show me the double-blind study. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's examples of that all over from hyperbaric o'clock. oxygen, which we were talking about during our workout, which is a staple of mine to red light,

which is also a staple. That one's probably had the biggest evolution in evidence. But, you know, we've known since we were training, you know, in college or whatever that it worked, you know, or, you know, do you remember getting in the cold therapy pool after footballers? It was, it was miserable. It's like the cold world. It wasn't cool. It wasn't cold plunging. It was just like the therapy pool. Well, this, the one we had at ASU, I think it was like 44 degrees. Yeah. And it was a hot tub, you know, like, built in the ground. I remember when I went in there, they're like, oh, we just redid it. It's a million dollar facility, right? At that time, it was state of the art. I know that now that all

the money is going to players and shit like there. It's, it's a pissing contest to see how awesome they can make state of the art lockers and that kind of shit. But I love that thing. Yeah. And not because of when it was ages before I even heard of Wimhoff. Yes. You know, but I knew if I got in that, I felt better for the next time. And, you know, we were talking about Coach House being fucking one of the greatest mentors of mine. strength coach, strength coach of the, only got to win strength coach of the year

in NCAA and the NFL, you know, he made it mandatory. He's like, you got to get it. And for two of days, he's like, getting the fucking ice bath

in between practices or else. You know, it's like, we just lived in that thing. And I noticed how much it helped me at Camp Tanazona for two of days. And I was like,

why wouldn't I just fucking do this after training, you know? And it totally works, you know, but that's the thing. Like before there's a mountain of evidence, you know, people on the front lines

are the ones figuring out, does this shit work? Does it not? Yeah, and that was before there was protocols. You just go between. Well, is it going to stunt your hypertrophy of your, like, that's not what I care about. I care about being able to do my second day of double days. Or if you're an endurance athlete, get my run in tomorrow without being sore or whatever it is.

Yeah. So that's another, it's just interesting how all those things that I really love. I treat my practice as an athlete still. I still carry that mindset of preparation, execution, and recovery for myself and for my patients even. And like, I prepare them before they come see me. You know, their execution is happening while they're basically asleep, but there's even aspects of that that are very like tuned into how their brain's functioning. And then the recovery is where things really shine for them.

You know, same thing. It's a big metabolic stress, physiologic stress that I'm putting them through. I'm in this cool situation in Cordellane, Idaho where everybody travels to see me. 100% of my patients are traveling in. Nobody lives there. And so it's a retreat style setup. They're coming in. They're with us for a weekish.

and we put them in homes that are on the water, views of the mountains, like treat, it's like this beautiful environment. Five-star resort style. Kind of, yeah, and everything is in-house. You know, they're hyperbarics, their IV nutrition that they're doing afterwards, their red light therapy, all these wonderful, really cool adjuncts, you know, important aspects of it. But it's all like in this unique setting.

And so it's kind of like, well, you don't have a choice. You know, you're coming and we're going to recover hard after we do this thing. So it's really neat. But it's all driven by that, like, really that sporting background, you know. and, you know, where I'm at now is, you know, my practice is so lovely that I get to choose who I want to work with. It's very, it's, you know, very, it's like a quiet luxury type of setup, you know, like if you haven't heard of it, you haven't heard of it. And when you find me, it's like, oh, this is the right person. And if we click, it's like, all right, let's work together,

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We'll also have them linked in the show notes. And now back to the show. I want to talk to you about a little, just a, just a, to framework too, you're like, there's a larger discussion that I don't expect you to have an answer because there is no one single answer to this, but, you know, a conversation that I've had in coaching people in fit for service and to frame it, you know, most listeners right now are dudes, like 80% of them. Fit for service, I'd have like 50, 50 men and women. And there were younger couples that wanted to get pregnant and there were women just starting,

you know, perimenopause and there were women that were on the backside of menopause. you know, that it had it refining their way out. And so a large discussion came up around, you know, treating menopause with hormone replacement, things like that. Like, do you, you know, now that we have the tools, do we work our way out of that? And like, I've been taking TRT for years because I juiced myself to the gills and college trying to play in the NFL.

And I just don't make it on my own. Even with things like in Clomaphene and HCG, I cannot produce enough testosterone without TRT. So I've been on low dose of TRT. I love it. I'd rather not have to fucking be dependent on something until the end of time. But, you know, no regrets about the choices that I've made. But for women, you know, and I brought in Dr. Nathan Riley, the holistic O'BGWAN,

he's one of my best buddies. So I'm like, look, I got to bring in this guy because he's, you know, worked on all levels. He's a lot like Zach Bush. He's delivered a baby and helped someone pass in the same day working in hospice care. Wow. So, like, he's done some really cool things and has a brilliant perspective. done a ton of, you know, I told him about Jack Cruz and he started training with Dr. Jasmine, Alexis Cowan.

He told him about Thomas Cowan. He started training with Thomas Cowan. Like he wants to know shit and he'll dive in head first and, you know, went through anthroposophical medicine school under a Steiner guy. Wow. It's like he's a awesome background. It's a curious. Curious.

Curious. Yeah. Super curious. Things outside the box. And one of the things we talked about, because I know, you know, you've got kids, right? So there's been a large conversation around rights of passage for young men and how that's missing. And perhaps maybe we'll circle back to that. But for women, there seems to be these stages laid out for them, you know, by nature, right?

If they choose to accept it, right? And so that first bleed, they have their red tent, you know, if it's celebrated as it should be. And that marks that first change, you know, and then if they enter motherhood, that marks the next big change. and then if they go through menopause, that's what brings them to the crone or the wise woman archetype. But it's going through those things that brings you there. Like, not everyone's going to have kids. I get that.

Not everyone should have kids. But the motherhood archetype is only going to be activated through being a mom. Right. You know, there's no other way around that. And so, you know, I've had this conversation with Nathan where it's like if we, and again, we don't know the answer, but like if we change that, you know, chemically so that you don't go through menopause, Does that shift that last trial that puts you into the wise woman?

How does that affect that? And so it's a very interesting thought process. But I'm curious on your thought, I'm willing to bet you get a lot of females probably coming through your practice, right? Exactly. I have a significant number of males just a selection bias of people who are interested in what I have to offer for sure. But in general, I could just speak to our field as a whole, too. That would say that question is very much in line as our.

Our faces are aging, but face especially, our faces are interface with the world for sure is a reflection of what's happening with us internally through the archetypes, through the hormones, there's biological, there's social aspects, there's spiritual aspects to all how those things come together. And with the face kind of being rubber meeting the road, really, all of those play into it. So the hormone conversation is something that I am peripherally involved with, but I'm not directly dealing with, right?

I'm not suggesting or not suggesting I'm letting that happen for whatever is right for that person. And then I'm managing how that plays out for them a little bit. But there's significant changes that happen there, which drives them towards me around those times often. And so the question becomes then, okay, what are we after? Why are we doing this? Are we trying to stop something? Are we trying to stop this transition? Are we trying to move through it in a way that sort of is in line with sort of how you see yourself through the process?

That's what I'm preferring to do, you know, kind of like, being a good steward of your body basically with it, but maybe not stopping the inevitable from happening, you know, into even like grandparenthood, that definitely falls in as one of those aspects of it. And so that's how I sort of frame and work through this. And if I feel like this person's trying to stop a moving train, they're trying to stop this transition, they're trying to stop aging, they're seeking vanity or an almost like this, this idol of an appearance, that's not going to be a good fit for where I'm at. If they have a photo of a celebrity and they say, give me this face.

Yeah. Well, and that's like if we go very much, that's kind of a very first order thinking question is people, and that's a great point, actually, Kyle, is people think of plastic surgery. Like, I only do stuff on the face. I'm in a very narrow deep hole, right? But if you get into plastic surgeries, well, everybody views it as exactly you described, like breast augmentation. And those are what I would call transformative things.

You're taking something and you're completely changing the form of it to something that never existed. On the face, that would be like, I want to look like this person. And so, okay, well, it's changing it. Let's change your, like, let's make you look different than you ever were. My practice is so the opposite of that. My practice is taking things that have changed with time, age, you know, metabolism, whatever it may be. And they're just shifting them back in that direction, a little bit more rejuvenative, a little bit more corrective types of things than it is something it never was before.

Restoring it back to where they were, maybe. 10, 20 years before. Totally. And as an athlete, I think that resonates with me too because, you know, let's say you're a pitcher in baseball and you're nearing the end of your career, but you're still good. You still got a lot of good throws in you and your rotator cuff starts wearing out, which it will do. And that's sort of your interface with your craft, your passion, your impact on the world.

You know, there's this idea of just age gracefully, don't touch it. Let it like, well. Fuck that. Take BBC 175. Right. Take PB 500. Right. You're going to do the things to change how you leverage the world, right?

Like if you're Tom Brady and you've got it, you know you got another Super Bowl and you, but you need a shoulder. Like, you're going to get it. You're going to do that thing. And for a lot of my patients who tend to be like people who are doing all the things, they're taking care of their health, their family, their businesses, their crafts, their passions. This is just one of those aspects of that.

It's like, you know, I like how I interface with the world and I want to have this little rotator cuff surgery. I want to improve my performance and what I love. And, you know, a lot of times that's sort of what I'm adhering to. So it's so far away from making them something they never were. It's just like, I want to, the most common thing that I hear is I look in the mirror and like what I see doesn't reflect how I feel. It's not me anymore. It's like it's me, but it's not.

There's just, it's like a cognitive. Aging is a sneaky fucker. It is. Oh, yeah. And you can't beat it and you don't, you can't control it. You don't want to control it, right? You just want to sort of manage how it impacts. And I think that this is just one of those levers that falls within that.

So, and I try to be very reductionist about it with like. I don't want a world of like perpetual maintenance. I want like hit it, quit it, get it done, do your thing, move on, don't think about it anymore, which really is a guy thing. Like that resonates with guys for sure. Well, that's it. From a medicine standpoint, even chiropractors, there are people out there that are like, hey, see me three times a week for the rest of your life.

Or let's get you fixed. And if there's a problem, hit me up. Right? And there's fewer of the latter, right? There's a lot of people that are like, all right, now I got your ass. You know? And so they want you coming back year after. year for this and that. I'm happy you clarified all that. I do want to have like another talk about,

you know, maybe these two different polarities. Yeah, let's do that right now. So, so without naming names, I go back, you know, I'm living here. I go back to Arizona for one of my old teammates' weddings. And great guy, great friends, awesome people. But I notice, you know, the Scottsdale crowd. Oh, yeah. Right? There's a Scottsdale crowd. and for those that don't know what that what I mean by that you know like fake tits fake lips fake hair fake everything and some of the times it's like wow that's hot but most of the time it's also like eh that's just it doesn't look right right something's off um but i've always wondered you know like when i'm in college post college when i was fighting there what does that where does that

end up you know and you know joan rivers is obviously like the worst fucking example of somebody but that also is a possibility. Now, it just so happened that at this wedding, there was a table of all aunts and uncles. And all of them had been through that shit in their 20s and 30s, and it kept up with it. Okay. And I mean, it fucked.

I was on a microdosa acid, so I was more sensitive to. Okay. There was a period where any time you saw my wife and I at a wedding, we were on acid. Okay. Because we didn't want to drink, but we still wanted to party and have fun and dance and, you know, have all the feels.

And I just remember, I mean, I couldn't look at the table. It fucked me up. And I was like, damn, that's what that looks like at 40, 50, 60, you know, down the road. And I know it's a polar opposite. There's that table and that image sticks in my mind of like, where does that road lead when you're not okay with what's inevitable? You know, where there isn't enough, there isn't enough appreciation for yourself to be cool with it. And then I'll give you another example of where, of all. also seen aging in a different light twice now.

I think once on ayahuasca and once on psilocybin with my wife, I've seen her at every age at the same time. Oh. And it's, you know, the second time it happened, we were just doing mushrooms together and I was like, holy shit,

it's happening again. She's like, what? I'm like, I can see you at every age. And immediately she's like, because she, you know,

sees it. I can see her at old, right? But it's simultaneously a young child, you know, all the way up through teens to right now, all the way up to when she's old. and just beauty at every fucking stage.

Like just enamored. Like, oh, man, like, weld me up getting to see that. And, you know,

she even at 41 now is, is not happy with, you know, the lack of sleep, the things that it transpire that she knows from a holistic or lifestyle choice are making her not look as good,

as vibrant as she should be, you know? But, like, I've seen her as an old person and she's fucking glorious, you know? And so,

I guess I frame the the Scottsdale crowd with, you know, this, what I see is beauty, right, in aging. And kind of a lack of, there's a desire culturally to avoid that, right? We had one couple in Fit for Service that were a little bit older. And this woman had gray hair everywhere. She was just, I don't know if it was the diet thing or what, but she was like in her 40. She wasn't very old. she had a facial, an organic, like facial cleanser type thing that she was doing. So her face looked immaculate.

But her gray hair was fucking hot, dude, because she owned it. And she wasn't dying her way out of it. I was like, damn. Like that's, fuck yeah. Like that is just saying, fuck yeah, dude. I'm aging and it's hot. And here I am. And because of her aura and how she owned it, she was fucking hot.

Like I was like, damn, dude. I didn't never think I'd look at, you know, like a woman with gray hair and be like turned on. But like she carried it. flawlessly. Love that. And so, you know, I want to get your take on this because, you know, you've got people coming to you and obviously there's a vetting process or you want to see who clicks and who doesn't and, you know, you've laid out fairly well, like what you are and what you are not. Yeah. How do you work with people, especially with women, on accepting the fact that these changes are going to happen. They're inevitable in how to work through that.

Man, Kyle, you just laid out basically three distinct scenarios. If I really, like, unpack what you're talking about. If we start with the ladder, the last thing you talked about, somebody who's aging and owns it and is beautiful and just going with it, right, no matter what. And gray hair or fill in the blank any aging change there just owning it. That same person with a different brain in that body, like somebody else may not own that same physical manifestation as much. And they may have done something about it, right? But you have that person who's just like owning it.

In my world, I may see somebody who's 70 years old and they're for the first time ever in their life being like, well, I've noticed a little age. aging changes or anything you can do about it. And I'm like, in reality, you've been aging for 30 years, right? But this is the first time across whatever arbitrary threshold it was for them to like, well, maybe I should look if there's any options, right? So that person was, if I took that same human and put, you know, somebody else's life experience inside of them, they might have been seen me at 41.

You know, like, I've got this thing and it's only this much change, five, 10 percent aging, but it's crossed that or whatever arbitrary threshold. So in my opinion, you've got that. Someone who owns it, just sort of like they're probably will never do anything. anything at all. Totally fine. You've got on the other extreme, I'll give the first example, you have the Scottsdale crowd, right? And there's some cultural influence in that, for sure. I trained in Los Angeles at UCLA. That's where I did my residency and my fellowship. It's a bit of a different world, right? You see extremes there. But with that crowd, there's a, there's a few things

I think go back and unpacking that, but that is the perpetual maintenance group. They're always kind of doing something. And there are these little minor changes sometimes that cook through these things called fillers that kind of like put volume in your face or Botox or things that fall into that. Yeah, my lips are a little thinned out. They're not holding the same volume as before. Add, add, add, add. Every six months you add, add, add, add, and over time, there's this psychological phenomenon

that happens is called perception drift. Your true north of who you are starts to slowly change. If it all happens at once, you look in the mirror, you're like, oh, my gosh, I don't recognize myself anymore. Or an old photo, right? Right. And that's what usually happens with perception drift. If somebody they haven't seen for a while says, what's going on if they have the wavos to say it,

or you see an old photo, you're like, I don't even look like that anymore. So that's exactly it. But it happens slowly over time. And for everybody else seeing you, it pushes you into this. We have this, well, I love neuroanatomy. I really get into the neuroanatomy of how we perceive faces because that makes me better at my job. But it's also just a curiosity of mine. And what I mean by that is when we see each other's faces as humans, a very specific region of our brain lights up that is.

is dedicated just to faces. It's called the FFA, which is a facial area that is in our temporal lobe that really just, it gives a little gravitas to how important faces are with how we perform, because there's real estate in our brain that's dedicated to that only one thing, facial recognition. Once that happens, like, I'm looking at a face. That area lights up. It starts communicating how old are you?

Are you attractive? Do I want to mate with you? Are you being aggressive towards me right now? Are you going to hurt me? what's your emotional state. Do I trust like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all these areas light up, our emotional areas and our amygdala,

our memory areas, our reward centers. It goes crazy. So there's a lot of impact of what faces do to our brains. When that face doesn't fit in a norm, basically, something that's like what we would expect in our FFA. Like what's human?

Yes. Well, so that's exactly it. You start to get out of it, and people call it the uncanny valley. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but it's this like almost, and you see it in like anime or robots or humanoid type of things that aren't quite human. And when you look at them, you almost get this kind of like feeling of disgust.

People describe it. And that's just our amygdala, saying like this is an aversive, you know, emotion to this thing that's not quite human. Something's off here. But you can start to get that. And it's not just filler and buttock surgery can do that too. But if it just doesn't quite look right, something goes off. And it's not an analytical frontal cortex like higher order thinking. it's at our very core.

Like, I don't like this. Something looks wrong. It's one of those things. It's hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. And so that's the Scottsdale crowd a little bit. They kind of start getting into that. And that's not a good thing. And there's biology behind that with like what all those things do to your soft tissue and how you age.

I definitely want to talk about that as well. But do you keep going? And then you got the middle ground, what you described, what you saw with your wife. That is the normal spectrum of aging. The thing that happens, everybody's on it. And this would be the most common part of my world. is, okay, I'm on this and I'm not mad about it at all. Like, my shoulder's going to degenerate from striking and stuff like that.

I'm not mad about that, but I kind of want to maintain where I'm at, right? And I'm not trying to, like, build me a new shoulder, but make this one, like, last a little longer. And so that's what, that's where I'm working with people. Like, well, let's take you on your aging curve the same, like, my best goal is a picture of you from X number of years ago. That's what I'm really shooting for. Like, let's make you who you are. And it's never the exact same. right, because there's tissue changes and stuff.

But that's what, let's get there. And then as you cook forward from there, you will still age. We're never going to freeze you in time. We don't want to do that because then that looks funny. But let's kind of make things stronger along the way. Like you take your BPC and your shoulder doesn't deteriorate as fast. Okay, great. Let's do that.

Let's get you to a new starting point where things are stronger than let's tick forward from there. That's the most common because then you're never, ever off of your aging curve. You're still on it. It's still you. And you sort of like have a little bit more, you know, like alignment or coherence with what you're feeling and what you're wanting to do and perform with. And the picture you have inside yourself. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. That makes sense. Talk to me about, I love the sports references too. It helps me as a dude. And trust me, I want to get into, I'm going to get into more of like your optimization and stuff like that as we go. So for the guys that are just like, why are we only talking about this shit? Exactly.

We'll get to some fun stuff that you can take home. But, you know, all guys listening, you know, unless you're gay and I certainly have some gay listeners, like you've got, and even gay guys, you know women, right? And so like, a lot of gay guys have a lot of female friends, this is all a part of, like, our experience. You know, it's a big part of the conversation in my mind, how we age. How do we age gracefully? What are the things that we can do for ourselves that, you know, help us feel better,

but don't come at a cost, right? And then what are the decisions we can potentially make that will fuck you up even for short-term gain, right? Yeah. So I'd love to dive into, you know, all the things. You had a great post on like what works, what doesn't work. and what's actually bad for you. Yeah.

You know, that's in the field of facial stuff. And so for everybody, you know, for all the dudes that are listening, you know, keep this in mind for a girlfriend, your wife, your mom, your sister, that kind of thing. But break this down. I think it's a big deal. Yeah. The basics of this aren't sexy or exciting, unfortunately, but it's the truth. It's like, what are you sleeping?

How are you sleeping? What are you eating? It's your metabolic health. Our face is our reflection of that to a very significant percentage, right? even hormonal things that we talked about, like some of those levers you can pull some you can't, right? But those are the basic ones that you should be doing anyway because if you're losing elasticity in your face,

it's happening in your arteries as well. You know, like that oxidative change, that inflammatory change, whatever it may be it's just, you can see it here. You can't see what's happening in your coronary arteries, right? So that's like big thing, number one. Not sexy, but easy levers to pull and widely applicable.

So that's great things. If you get into, I'll go, I'm going to do this like spectrum again to the other end. of things that to avoid, those are generally the like short-term thinking quick fixes. And there's behavior, there's cognitive biases and behavioral patterns that dictate that we want to do those things. We want to like avoid challenging decisions. And like these things are, you know, status quo, simple to do. There's loss aversion. There's presence bias. There's

all kinds of things that are like, well, let's just do this simple thing, which is like if you go to the place on the corner of wherever you live and what do they do there? Well, they probably do X, XYZ, Botox filler devices. Like, let's say you're a female who's 50 or something. Like, well, I'm getting laxity or guy, laxity in my neck. And they have this device there that's going to like magically lift my neck up. Careful, honestly, because it's not going to work and you're going to get yourself in trouble. And anything that has those short-term fixes, I just don't, I don't love those.

I like the definitive answer that gets things done, moves the needle, then you can just be done and move on with it. That's my personal bias towards this versus I got to see all the time. These fillers, and I think this is worth like a minute or two conversation, have been around. They're very prevalent. They're usually somebody's first step, so they're worth talking about. They're not bad to do. They're volume in your face from a gel.

Almost 90% of the people that I work with have had them at some point. And over the last decade plus, 10 to 15 years, the thought paradigm around them has or should have changed. It hasn't for everybody yet because they were thought to be. be like you put them in. They last six months. It's a gel. Your body metabolize it. They go away. You do it again. Then you do it again. Then you do it again. Then you do it again. And the big sort of like spoiler alert with those is that they last decades. And so this like six month paradigm is not good. If you keep adding gel, gel, gel to your face in this revenue model essentially

of like come back, come back, come back, come back. You end up with a face full of gel. And that's not a good thing. And is this like, is this gel Botox? So yeah, no question. It's a little bit different. Botox is another injectable. Botox goes into muscles to make the the muscles not flex. And I have feelings about that. Like, I want that. Yes. Okay, okay, guys, we'll talk Botox, but explain the joke because that's a big one, too,

on how we smile and what we see in another person's face. Jennifer Aniston, people have talked about this. Totally. Publicly, how they lacked empathy when they could no longer smile and mirror someone's facial expressions. They just, it felt like they were dead inside because all of that shit was turned off. Their ability to actually raise their eyebrows and, wow. Yeah.

Or, oh, my God, how did that feel? Like they couldn't relay any of that. And without that mirroring process within themselves, they lacked the ability to connect. Exactly. Well, we have mirror neurons for that purpose, right? And then, I mean, we'll just sit on this because you brought it up in a very, you know, eloquent way, which is, you know, we are hyper in tune to how people's faces move. I could show you 500 pictures of slightly different facial muscle expressions, barely different. And you might not be able to name all of them, but you internally would know kind of what each one of them mean.

Like what's happening inside that person based off of this little flexion of this muscle. So using something like Botox, which is just to make our muscles that of our face not flex as well, almost by definition, blunts some of your ability to communicate directly, what you're putting out into the world. So kind of the opposite of what I want. I actually want my procedures to make your facial muscles work better, put them back in their working ranges, move our fat pads the way they're supposed to. And so I'm not like super anti-Botox. it's just it's a tool that I don't think should be as blanket applied.

And again, that's counterculture. And I'm not like, if you get Botox or like, that's not bad. But I want you to think about what it's doing, right? And so that's, Botox makes muscles not move. And the goal of that is when your muscles move, it wrinkles your skin. And so your skin doesn't break down as much. And so I kind of talk about that as like a tug-of-war. You've got a tug-of-war that when you're 20, your skin is doing just fine.

no big deal. When you're 50, your skin starts to break down because the muscles are pulling on it, and it's not as inherently strong anymore. So if we go to first order thinking, well, let's just paralyze the strong part. And so that the tug of war is more even. But what about strengthening the weak part? You know, that's where I kind of like to approach it more. It's like, let's let the muscles do what they're supposed to do.

And if we don't like the wrinkles, let's go to the skin. Yeah, solving the problem instead of patchwork in it, right? A little bit. I mean, both of those philosophies work if your ultimate goal is to just make the tug of war more even. But if we want the one end of the tug of war to stay strong and do its job and we just don't want the second order effect. Let's do that. I'll go back to the athlete, though. If I keep pulling my hamstrings because my quad's super strong, the athlete will strengthen the hamstrings. He's not going to put shit into his quad to make his quad not as strong. Exactly.

That's exactly right. It's exactly right. Yeah. It would work, but would you be as functional, maybe. And again, okay, so that's like, I'm not saying the people that get about talk about. So sorry, we're done. So that's Botox, right? And that's an injectable, temporary thing. You put it in. It is a neurotoxin. It makes it so the nerve doesn't communicate with the muscle and the muscle doesn't fire.

There's a temporary period of time. The protein gets broken down and then eventually the muscle fires again. Great. On the other end, you have these gel injectable fillers. And they're trying to fill lines and wrinkles and little focal areas, which is fine. But when it starts getting applied to global facial aging and it keeps getting done and done and done, they sort of accumulate and they move around and you get into trouble with them. And so you don't want a face full of gel.

Doesn't move normally, doesn't age normally. That breaks down, attracts water. It just kind of makes people look puffy. It's like this pillow face thing that thankfully, hopefully we're getting out of a little bit as opinions have changed, but I took a lot of arrows in the back and still do on that one a little bit because there's a whole pharmaceutical industry behind it as well. And again, I don't, I'm done being the anti-filler guy, which I've been for all. a long time or at least interpreted as that. I just really want to be critical thinking. Let's

understand both sides of this, which at first sounded very, you know, like the anti-filler situation. I'm like, let's just think of what it does before we use it. It's a semi-permanent implant at that point. You don't keep adding to it. You do it and you view it as a semi-permanent thing and then it's, you know, it's going to be there for decades. I had a 42-year-old patient last week who had filler one time 20 years prior. So it should be, you know, gone 40 times over and I'm still removing it during our surgery. Wow. 27 years later. So, you know, that's anecdotal, obviously, but this is my every day when I'm working.

Yeah. So that's the Botox filler. These are these temporary fixes. And again, I said we were going to talk about it for a minute. It went longer. Those are just things to be to raise an eyebrow about, to be discerning about, especially if you're going, again, to the place on the corner, whatever that means for you. How are they viewing that?

Is this the revenue model? Just be careful. Yeah. And they're super common. That's why I think they're worth bringing up. They're super common. I talk about the Scottsdale crab. When I got to Austin, there was a shit ton of that here.

Mm-hmm. You know, just going out, you know, downtown, that kind of thing. It was like, oh, yep. This reminds me of Scottsdale. Right. You know, in many ways. Yeah. And the best of, like, even what I do, you would, if you see my patients on about,

you would never know that they did anything. You'd think they look great, but you wouldn't be able to put your finger on it. Even with a, and this is another neuroanatomy thing, right? If I show you before and after picture next to each other, we go into our frontal cortex analysis. Like, oh, this is different. this is different. But even if that's done really well, you kind of look and you're like, well, I don't exactly know what was done, but that looks a lot better. Like that's my goal, right? So then you take that face and put them out in the real world, like, you know, in real life.

And there's no before picture walking around with them. You have no idea. They just look great, right? This is the fun and interesting, like, little poppy thing with celebrities in my world is like, they get a bad rap because for many people, we have their before picture etched in our brain forever. Right. You know what so-and-so looked like five years ago. And now when they walk around, you just happen to be able to be able to compare them analytically, where if you didn't know that person, you would have no idea. They actually probably look okay. But you can compare and contrast.

We love to be critical, right? So it's a bit of an unfair shape. You're Mariah Carey? Yeah, it's a bit of an unfair shakedown for them, for sure. Didn't you used to be Mariah Carey? Yes. Yeah. Oh, man.

Yeah. Not to pick on Mariah Carey. I mean, who didn't have a crush on Ryan Carey, right? Talk about some of the stuff that you do that does work. Like you talk about taking someone's own fat, refining that, looking for high quality density stem cells. Talk a bit about that. That's what fascinates me because now we're taking something that's organic.

It's from the person's own body. Yes, it's being repositioned. You know, yes, they could be thinner or have made better lifestyle choices, whatever. But like, you know, can this, can this, you know, work in a way to bring back facial beauty alongside, you know, doing the right lifestyle choices, eating organic food, getting enough sunlight, you know, getting enough movement and all that. Yeah. So I love the U.S.

that because this is regenerative medicine, maybe at its core a little bit. This is not the IV stem cells from somewhere else and going to Mexico and getting high. This is like, I'm taking your stem cells from your body immediately and using them, like right away. And I'm doing that. And I love regenerative medicine as an adjunct. It's a really important way to improve quality. It, in my world, is not a be-all end-all. I can't just, like, shoot you full of stem cells and everything does what we want it to do.

But when I'm creating a controlled injury with surgery or with a laser or something like that, or when I'm taking a fat pad that is aging, our fat pads in our face are really interesting because they're functional. They're also very cosmetic. Our brains tuned into them, but they're functional. They're just glide planes for muscles. They're meant to make muscles function in a convex surface or to be a place where they can glide through two areas without any friction, you know? And so they're very functional, but they have structure to them because of that. They're almost like, I would describe as like a honeycomb type of structure in our fat pads of our face, which is very unique.

Other fat pads in our body don't have that in the same way. And so there's a volumetric component and a structural component. And that's where regenerative medicine from your fat-based stem cells, which I'll take from your belly button or your flanks or your thighs or wherever you have a little bit, I can take it. I can isolate the stem cell dense portion because our fat and our bone marrow are probably our two best areas to get our, we call the mesanimal stem cells. I didn't realize that fat was such a good source of that. That seems like a way less invasive. I mean, I remember when Daniel Cormier, you know, got stem cells from his hip taken out and he said it was unbelievable pain like he's never felt before. Yeah.

You know? Shouldn't be that way, but it can be definitely. Yeah. As you get, I mean, you're punching into your pelvis basically. A giant freaking horse needle, you know. Yep. Exactly. I was like, I don't know about that.

Yeah. Well, you can get in from your fat too, which is awesome. And it's, it is more accessible. It takes a little bit more, I want to say skill, but it's, it's. It takes a unique approach to get them, basically, what you could do with local anesthesia. You don't even need to go to sleep to do this. So that's great. But when I harvest it, then I have your stem cells.

I also have your fat for volume. And it's a bit different than what people might think when they think of like liposuction or where you just take out a bunch of fat, like hundreds or thousands of cc's of fat and then just like pump it back in. I'm taking like tens of cc. So then I might only use one quarter of what I take out because I'm looking for the quality aspect. of it. And then I'll put that back into your facial fat pads. And now we have, it's, it's kind of like redoing the foundation on your house. It's not that sexy. It's not like, wow, that's all different, but it's stronger structurally. It maybe looks a little bit better if areas were collapsing.

And now you're good to go. Like you have this nice foundation moving forward. So again, maybe less sexy, but a lot more of like a long-term mindset to it. And when you're paying that with things like laser resurfacing, which is just a qualitative improvement of your skin surface. I'm say quality, I'm talking like alastin and collagen. People talk about collagen a lot. It's important, but elastin is more important. This is the recoil of it and how it kind of bounces back after there's a stress put on it, even if that stress is gravity. So what Rick Flair and Holkogen lost. Yes. In the last like 20 years that are alive. Yes. You know, when you see like the tan titty's bouncing, you're like, these guys don't have elastin. Right. That's what they're missing out on.

And it's interesting because alastin is very delicate, very delicate to UV exposure, very delicate to oxidative damage and that includes in our arteries like our arteries have a lot of elastin in their walls too so they can lose it with oxidative damage just like our skin can so that's another like little window to the inside UV doesn't change obviously the elastin in our arteries but it can in our skin it's very delicate to that a little bit so some cool studies with stem cells these fat like your fat-based stem cells put right into your skin show what we call regeneration of elastin like kind of breaking down old byproducts and upregulating new elastin creation. So pretty cool.

Kind of like a way to, when you look at the skin under a microscope, you can tell kind of how far the UVA penetrates because that's kind of where the elastin is damaged to. Then it kind of goes away. It's actually pretty remarkable. That's cool. And so you can put the stem cells in there and see like under a microscope, see, oh, that's regenerating that to kind of not be as damaged anymore. That's super cool.

Yeah. Kind of interesting. It sounds like you've got a very holistic approach to what you're taking people through from a mental, emotional standpoint, but also what you're offering and how you lay that out. You know, you're a father. You're, I know your wife from college. Talk of it about, you know, how you balance or not balance your life, right? You had a great, great post on balance on Instagram, and I was like, yes, this is exactly

how I feel at times. And, you know, you've got a wide variety of things that you do that are, some are just, you know, like being outside nature and some are, you know, the, biocharger and different things like that. But talk about that. You had a great point on a lot of the times when you train, you're max in at Zone 2 because you have a thing to go into from a work standpoint or you're going to come home and be with the kids.

And I've tried to frame that mentally for people. You know, I love the book Easy Strength by Pavel Totzulin, where the short end synopsis is these Russian scientists figured out that if you train at 50% of your one rep max and you do that more often, often you can still move your one rep max up higher, you know. And so does it affect the one rep max? Yes. And it doesn't hurt the nervous system as bad. So you can keep going to it. You know, so a lot of my stuff has shifted. Even training with Connor Milstein is a David Wet guy, live with Jordan Burroughs for the last two years before the Olympics, you know, and trained him

all the time. Like he's been a fantastic trainer. Same thought process. Like if I'm in a deadlift or something like that, it's going to be fairly light compared to where I was. I love picking up something heavy. But I also want to be able to touch my toes the next day. I want to be able to get on the mats and rolling jiu-jitsu. I want to be able to, you know, if my kids barrel into me, then I'm going to be responsive and not be like, no, you can't do that to daddy because I'm stiff as a freaking board. Yeah. Right. But talk about that balance point and, you know, how you frame how you live. I'm still finding it too, right? Like I work around this, you know, I've been heavily like integrating my practice with my life with my family, you know, this idea of

balancing them. I think that was the point this Instagram post is they're always kind of playing off of one another. My emotional and cognitive output with my family affects how I am in the operating room effects and how I'm in the operating. It affects how I am with my family. And so I try to leverage my training to support all of those other things. I love it for myself like that, you know, I want to lift heavy things too, but it's not always the right time for that. And so it honestly kind of falls into a nice balance that way where I don't know that I would zone two train as much other than I have a desire to get sweaty. And I know I have a really big day tomorrow or today or whatever it may be.

And I can't tax my, I can't go max deadlift because that'll tax my central nervous system too much. And I, not a lot of surgeons, I don't think think this way. But if I'm having a surgery, I want my surgeon to be like dialed in for that procedure, in their flow state, preparing for me for days, knows exactly what's going to happen, knows my name, went through my photos or my images or like they're ready. Like I'm their, I'm their Super Bowl. That's what I want it to be, right?

And that's how I approach every single surgery. And so that means that I am like, you know, we're sitting here and I have a procedure tomorrow. And so like I've been thinking about it. I know what I'm doing. Our workout was timed perfectly for that for me. And so everything revolves around that to some point, but it balances really well with how my family life works too.

And so I leverage my workouts to be for me, like after my case tomorrow, I will go, then I'll do my central nervous. I'll break it down because then I want to. rebuild stronger for next time. So it's a cycle. It's the athletes mindset, basically into that, right? But building and all the other things that happen in life, too, and being very respectful of how I show up as a father and a husband, too, and a business owner and a leader and all these other parts of it. So it's a messy, but also beautiful integration of how all those things come together for me. It's sort of like planning, but also flying by

the seat of my pants at the same time, right? Being optimized, but also being a real person at the same time. Like how does that being a, you know, a badass surgeon and the, like, the best dad I can be? Like, all of these sort of kind of seem like opposites, but I think if you approach whatever your craft is and whatever your passions are in your family life, I think if you just approach them with this sort of like, you know, kind of steady down the middle and like, what do I have to do today? What do I need for me? What does my wife need for me? What do my kids need for me? And what do my patients need for me? You can kind of find what's at least like the path of least resistance through their. Yeah, and you can, you can at least get the minimum effective dose.

Right. You know, like, easy strength by Pavel and Dan John was that from a reframe for me around strength training. Chi running was a reframe around running. You know, my wife got me in a distance running when I was retiring from fighting. And at first, I took it as like the next, next pissing contest of the way I'll show that I'm a man, you know, so this is before Goggins came around. But, I mean, I did a 55K ultra and I was like, okay, that was good one time. Yeah. That doesn't seem like your body type. Right? Yeah.

But when I think about the training, that was the first time in our life where I distance ran, you know, outside of nature in the hills in Northern California three days a week. It's cool. And it was awesome. And Kelly Storette was a buddy. Actually, he was the guy that introduced me to Gabby and Lared. I don't want to talk about next. You know, he wrote ready to run becoming a supple leopard. He's six three, two hundred and 30 pounds.

I'm like, hey, you did an ultra. Tell me, you know. And he's like, look, the volume doesn't have to be there. Yeah. And but it was the consistency, right? And so, like, getting into that just kind of reframed, what does it actually take to build cardio, to build speed, to build resilience so that I don't get hurt when I challenge myself to 31.7 miles, you know, all those things. And that training was awesome. It was a lot like a fight camp where I just felt like it balanced and dialed.

And so even though the race kicked my ass and I wouldn't do it again, I look back on that, like training was like, oh, there was the medicine. you know so now i kind of have two gears it's like i all we do it's a 1.6 mile lap around the farm here and so you know i'll hit a lap sometimes i'll do two which is a 5k but for the most part that's it and i'm oftentimes doing nasal breathing only you know that we learn from dr any gallpin and gabby and laird and um you know it's a rate limiting factor sometimes i'm running a 12 jogging a 12 mile nasal only right i'm not able to push that hard but i find for distance if i use that as a cap, I can do it the next day. And I can do it the next day and I can do it the next day. And if I'm running sprints, you know, the teeter-totter of volume and intensity. If the intensity

goes max, I go really low on volume. If the volume goes up, I go really low on intensity. And that seems to be a really good thing to do. A lot of times, I might only have 20 minutes to move. And I know a lot of people that are still in that in that camp. If they only have 20 minutes, that's not long enough. And it's like, no, no, no. If I can do fucking 20 minutes, that's going to help my brain think better, my body, just break a little sweat. Nobody's going to move better. It's not going to break me down and beat me up for the next day or for whatever I have next. I can go right from that 20-minute workout into a podcast or into whatever.

We just did one. We're in the gym. I got blood flow restriction on. It was like 30 minutes and change. You know, and it was great. It wasn't too taxing. Right. You know, so I think about like those are, those are key fixes for a lot of people who say no to it

because they have this idea that if it's not an hour or it's not hard that it's not worth their time. And it's like, no, fucking limp in. Get the minimum effective dose and see how you feel the rest of the day just from doing pushups and kettleball swings for five sets. You know, whatever it is. You know, like you just get that little bit and everything else becomes better. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about my brand new community, the kingdom within 15 months in the making. I've really been dialing this in. We're on school. If you want to learn about the body, the mind, connection, family, psychedelics, all the things. This is your place to do that. This is about bringing people together who want to grow, who want to learn and are willing to make changes, but don't know how or maybe don't think they have enough time.

We're going to reframe that. We're going to reframe that through the wealth of knowledge that I've had 30 years as an athlete and training under the best coaches in the world, the best mentors in the world and putting that all together. The last seven years I've been coaching people in fit for service. And now I get to be directly the coach with you guys. And I'm inviting in people that really want to work and people that are willing to make changes. and we're going to get that done. There's no two ways about it. You will make changes.

It will change your life for the better. I can assure you that all you got to do is show up. We meet twice a month once for a lecture where I have a deep dive on a particular topic with some Q&A. And then again, two weeks later, just for a pure Q&A to make sure everyone's integrating and practicing and getting this stuff down. And then it asks me anything. You know, that's all going to be in there too. But we're also posting in between you guys are privy to special emails and things that I'm not sending out to my regular group. So detox pathways, all the different things that you'd want to know.

You know, the questions I get on Instagram, I'm writing detailed reports for the people in this community to be able to get a hold of. And it's only $150 a month. It is the cheapest way to work with me possible. I hope to see you there. Click the link in the show notes for the kingdom within. And now back to the podcast. Yeah. Laird was the king of those five-minute workouts.

He had like this really cool series for men's health maybe back in the day. I mean, I'm talking like 20 years ago or something on like five-minute workouts you can do. and they're murderous. And you just brought up so many, like as you're talking about this, thinking about my real life, but also thinking about, like, through my very unique lens as a surgeon and how I prepare my patients for surgery, you actually just brought up a lot of key points

that are really foundational for me there, that are very unique. And anybody could apply this. If you're having a procedure for anything, you're having your shoulder fixed, back to that. Like, do these things, nasal breathing that you talked about, improving your hypercapnic tolerance, your ability to tolerate and build up CO2,

that will help you through your, surgery and your anesthesia recovery, make you more metabolically flexible. Getting your BDNF up. That's what you described. Brain-derived neurotropic factor from that little short workout that you did, right? Boom. Now you're more neuroplastic, and that's going to help you through your procedure and recovery. So there's all these, it's funny to hear those little things in your life that are just like preparing you for resilience, basically, which is what I'm trying to get my patients to do. I want them to do that before they come. I love to work out in a pool, much like Laird, which is like the ultimate of hypercapnic tolerance.

Like you're lifting weights underwater. Like you get to breathe when you get to breathe. There's no cheating with that. Because it's hard to nasal breathe and work out. It really is. It'll be really limiting for a lot of people and they'll quit. But we're meant to breathe through our nose. It's important to do that.

So yeah, the water kind of brings that out of you for sure. The water, it's kind of like Henry Rollins when he says like the weights never lie. Yes. You know, they're your most trusted friend. They always tell you the truth. Right. I remember going down. I did the XPT thing with them when they were filming it.

But like it took, I was freaking, you know, power lifting. I was like 238 pounds. Gabby gently was like, I like you when you're smaller, you know, when you're thinner. Like, I pick up what you're putting down, Gabby. And anyhow, you know, now I walk around like 220, 222. And I find that balance point, you know, what did it for me was being 238 pounds and rolling with Robert Drysdale and just getting fucking mollywopped by a guy that was 50 pounds less muscle than me. And I was like, oh, I'm way past the point of diminishing return.

turns. Yes. Way past that point. Wow. And strength is not making a damn bit of difference with how technical Robert is, you know. And that was also my first real understanding of like, we're both black belts, but we're really not. He's something else, you know, where I'm not even close to where this guy is. Yeah.

You know, but like that I think you can only get those things from actually testing as an athlete. And shout out to Kelly Sturrette. He just had a post on Instagram, which is, I think he's the ready state now. But he shows like the Thai guys that, do that. Yes. Volleyball kickball game, right? And so it's going around with this guy's unlimited mobility with his leg,

like making his shit move in ways that you'd never even thought were possible and still landing on his feet like backflip, kick, land on his feet perfectly, walk off because he knows he hit it perfectly. There's some of the greatest athletes on earth doing this shit. And, you know, Kelly just brings up the point, like, why, what if our fitness routine isn't making us a better athlete or better at moving, like, what are we doing that for? And there's so many, so many of the general population, you know, I call them muggles, if I'm angry. So many muggles out there that, you know, are living in the pattern of 24-hour fitness, you know,

whatever the thing is. And they're going there. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to train for aesthetics. But there's still, we got locked in from bodybuilding to train in a certain way, you know, and then this singular pattern, stuff like this. And this is why you and I've gravitated towards people like David Weck and Paul Check. And what is functional? and what actually works and translates to real athleticism.

But I like reframing that. What Kelly was bringing up was like, look at these guys. This is how they train. This is how they move. You think of the Ito-Portals of the world and people like that. And it's like, oh, we ought, we ought to be shifting us as a culture in how we train to develop better athleticism than just pure strength or pure muscle. Right. And that happened for me at 40.

I'm 44 now. And I was just like, oh, my goal is to, you know, my goal has been to. remain strong and mobile. Why? You know, my goal now is to be the best athlete I can possibly be at each age. I'll never be what I was when I was fighting or, you know, prior to that. But that's fine, though, right? Because I'm going to be, I'm going to excel. I'm better in certain areas now than I was when I was in my prime in many ways. And so I feel like that reframe is a necessary piece, you know, in the overall equation of like, what is health? What is optimal? Yeah. Yeah. And you want the byproduct. I mean, I, when I hear you talk about that, I just hear

you don't have to be fun and something you enjoy, which is for you being a good athlete, which is probably a core of yours to some degree, right? You're an athlete. You always have been. So, of course you want to be great at that. Then you get the benefit of the cardiometabolic healthy, increase F.O.2, the muscle mass that helps you keep your bone density up,

your metabolic currency. It all just comes as a byproduct of being a great athlete doing the thing you love, striking, rolling, you know, playing with your kids. I mean, I can imagine you throwing them in the air. like that was like those are my favorite workouts let's let's throw you in there a hundred times um the most bonding things ever and so yeah that that that's again that's like a very much rubber meeting the road non-optimized you're not you know in the don't die mindset as much as you are you know in the like i want to like really really live yeah yeah absolutely and i you know

gabby and laird are great people that i've learned a lot from they're also you know like Call and Peyton just a smidge older than I am, right? But I look at people like that. Paul Check's going to turn 65 this year. Mark Sissons in his mid to late 60s. Rob Wolfson's in his upper 50s, working on his black belt. And I look to people like that because these are people who move well. They eat, you know, I've learned all of my nutrition stuff from these guys.

And they've changed so much in, you know, my life personally that I want to see like, how does this pan out? Show me the guys that are panning out. Show me the guys that are actually doing this in their 60s and 70s. and everybody you described right there is a little outside the box in their own worlds and Laird has turned into like a mentor of mine and Gabby again like they're you and I are very similar

just like a frame shift ahead of us just barely their kids are just sort of getting out of the house and we're just not quite there yet but you know it's on the horizon and I love their wisdom but one of the things that with Laird and you kind of describe this too like different levels of black belts. Like as you get to mastery, that's great. Like black belt makes you, you know,

getting towards mastery of this thing. But there's different levels of that. There's virtuosos in this, like, that they're just at a whole different level, which someone like Laird was to the degree of like, okay, well, now there's a ceiling here that like riding these waves. Like nobody could ever ride waves that big. And he's like, well, what if we put this giant 40 pound blade on the bottom of this, like this hydrofoil on the bottom of this board and you told me into it. It's like, you're going to die, you know? And like, no, I think I can do this. And so boom, world broken open a whole new foiling, we call foiling now, like, Borg foiling and riding big waves and towing in. It's like, yep.

And that was like when later than I talk about foiling, which I love to do on lakes and oceans and not 50 foot waves. Yeah, not on 50 foot waves. Oh my gosh. I'm like, is it weird that you invented that, you know, kind of thing. So anyway, like David, like all outside the box thinkers in that, which, you know, again, that's just a reflection of curiosity. I think that's one of these, like, keys to growing older. and being somebody that people want to, you know, pick their brain, like being that sort of like that mentor. Yeah.

They're living their Dharma. There's no question. Like they are fucking, they have walked their path. They've carved new areas because of that. And we all get to be benefactors of that if we choose to listen and try. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely, brother.

Well, tell us, you know, I want to, we got a short time here, but what are some of your favorite things, you know, to, as a dad, like, what are some of your favorite ways to, connect with your kids. Obviously, your job is high profile. You probably have, I imagine it's, you know, you can kind of pick and choose, but still, you know, like there's always that calling to provide and to work more often and things of that nature. But talk about how, you know, you like to connect with your kids and family. I went through that season that you were just kind of talking about. We're sort of like getting lost in, you know, like excellence and achievement in those things, you know, like if I look at my core values, achievement isn't one of them, but excellence definitely is, which I see, have seen that my entire life. It permeates things. And so I got,

I let achievement mix into it at some point too much early on. And I was just like, provide, provide. This is everything I'm doing is for us. So then at some point I snapped out of it and was like, this is not what they want, you know, when they were little. Like they don't want a successful dad. They want a dad who's around. And and so connection has just turned into, I still want to demonstrate hard work and excellence in those types of things. And so, you know, I think we are very much on the same page with a few things about like, you know, just like, I have to hold myself back when they're playing sports, which is definitely more of a mirror reflection of like, you know, I want them to enjoy it and, you know, be intrinsically motivated. But what does that even

look like now in youth sports? And so I work, my wife and I talk about that very active. Huge learning curve from out. Yeah. My wife's an athlete. Your wife was a great athlete as well. Yeah. Right. Start her at ASU basketball, women's team. And I watched her play a ton of games. I think it is very hard for athlete athletes. Right. To see their kids because it's like, there's so much I can teach you here.

And my son doesn't want to listen to any of it. Right. When I'm just like, hey, brother, try it this way. You know, it's like, no. So that's been like a hard, oh shit, all right. I'm not going to have that relationship with him. Yep. So what can I do then?

Well, he'll listen to other guys. He'll listen to other coaches. Okay, let me put him in like the best teams that I possibly can. So he can learn from great coaches that he wants to listen to. Yeah, that's interesting. Try to, you know, set up the doors that he's going to walk through. Like, I don't get to walk through the doors with him, but like I can at least pick which hallway we take.

And then he'll, you know, he'll hopefully get to learn as much as he can from that, you know. Yeah, that's a really good way to think about it because we're constantly on that evolution. What's the right way here? You know, when you're both Division I college athlete parents, it's like, okay, that's not the standard. But, you know, is that secretly like kind of your hope for them? I don't know.

Like we wrestle with that a lot. And we have one of our three. We have a 12-year-old son, a 10- and 8-year-old daughter, just her nine, actually. And one of them is she's an inherent killer. She's the one. But like wants to be better at everything the second she tries it. And so that also helped me realize that they're, and everybody knows this to some degree. But when you see it in front of your face, it's like they're just all built different too.

Yeah. Yeah. And so don't force them into who they aren't going to be. It's like, you know, find the happiness. My son loves animals. and he carries like a deep curiosity. I definitely see that. And so I'm trying to foster that.

As we hear birds in your house and things like that, we're talking about them. I'm just like, oh, I love that because that's, you know, you're doing, that's happening here. And lots of different ways that I think probably we don't even realize and sort of how you drive it. So I just love, you know, being present and around them and trying to connect.

And, you know, Jiu-Jitsu became part of our family as they, when I started rolling, which was much later in life. You know, I did not grapple. I did not wrestle. I was a, you know, more traditional like court or ball athlete and then picked up grappling much later on, which is maybe the best thing I ever did for my career, too, because it was maintaining the white belt mentality quite literally at first and kind of keeping it forever. You know, it's a there's, I will never be a master or, you know, I will never be a master or,

virtuoso at this thing that I like so much love and I'm humbled every day and I you have to check your ego and you know it doesn't matter who you're with or what you're doing and um I face fear with it every day because I don't want to get injured um and my crew knows that and so I have like a bond with people that I can't couldn't even have imagined before where it's like everybody knows why we're there I'm not trying I want to win but I'm not trying to win like I don't it's not worth sacrificing injury to win and so it's been a very crazy ride. I actually started with Grayling. We went our first day together and I

was telling you he's my training partner so I spent a lot of time in bottom side control hours. Graylings, he's lost little weight. He's done a 250 pounds. Yeah, exactly. From 330 to 250, offensive linemen. But then, you know, I just, I've loved that martial art journey later in life kind of carrying over from a very competitive

athlete mindset. It's hard not to be competitive there and I still carry that in but then also check like, why am I doing this now? Because I want to, I want to be hard to kill. That's why I do it. And I don't think that's wrong, but it's never a mindset that I had before. But it also just kind of perpetually makes me like, I'm making a hard decision every day. I'm in very difficult circumstances trying to make decisions, which is kind of like what happens in an operating room. And so it just makes me better in that other challenging environment.

And so when I go to the operating room, I'm very much in control of that, right? Like I have a whole flow state routine that I do before I go in. I'm in a hyperbaric chamber every day. And I have a little friction cognitively in there where I kind of like visualize, rehearse through the most challenging parts of what, because I know my patient inside out before I step in that room, right? And then after that like cognitive friction in the hyperbaric chamber, it's about an hour, hour and a half usually. Then I step into the sauna with the red light and I do a quick little quick workout,

you know, not overly taxing, very balanced based, trying to stimulate the two hemispheres of my brain to kind of get things firing. It's called a release when you're getting into a flow state, friction release, so then you go to flow. And then I'll be in flow for four to 10 hours, more often like eight to 10 hours of just like one case. I only do one person per day. I don't, you know, I don't like do three in a row. It's like one person.

That's my only focus for the day. Then I'm done because you have a big recovery after that type of an experience, you know. So it be like I can imagine being in a fight. Like you, there's even even on top of the physical recovery. There's just a big cognitive recovery after something. It's a bigger load than just physically. Yes. And so I kind of face that all the time.

And so I can be in control of that. But when it comes to Jiu-Jitsu, being in that, it's like, you're at the mercy of, like, so many things are out of my control. And so it's a very, it's very uncomfortable. But I love it. I love it for that reason. That's awesome. That's a great nod to Jiu-Sit-Soo. And I think you approach it correctly.

Like you come with the beginner's mind. Yeah. You know, and that's something. And I tell this to my son, you know, because he just assumes like, oh, you're a black belt. When are you going to get your coral belt? And I'm like, you have to have, like, teach as a black belt for 31 years is one or requirement there's six more uh been a world champion i'm not going to be a world champion as a black belt raised guys from white to black belt who have also become world champion like that that's possible

but it's probably not on the docket yeah uh you know and then like change the sport of jiu jitsu for the better possible probably not going to happen yeah you know and i was like i'm there's plenty i may never as odds are i'm never going to get a coral belt i love that he sets that standard for you But at the same time, like, there's shit that I'm learning, I'm learning brand new positions, brand new moves that I've never seen before. You know, and I was a little bit, you know, what do you say? I was in a bubble within a bubble as a fighter, right? Because it was certain shit where I was like, that doesn't apply to me.

I can't learn a geat choke. It means nothing to me. I'm not going to focus any mental awareness on that because I'm, you know, even though I'll train in the I need to do moves that are going to work in no gey, you know, moves that will work in the fight, that kind of thing. And so, like, getting into the ghee and things like that after fighting is like a whole world open up. But the fact that I've been at it for, you know, I just got my third stripe.

So I've been coaching as a black belt for close to 10 years. And I'm learning brand new shit when I go out there. And it's like, wow, dude. That's so awesome. And the sport is continually evolving. We're seeing, you know, the whole leg game takeoff from Dan of her and so crazy. Dean Lister. And then, and now we're circling back.

in the more like top traditional like let's let's let's let's fuck the legs let's get on the upper body and just pin people and work in conversions and all that I'm like it's just a rad thing to see how much when you have this many people participating in it how quickly something can evolve and then does this work in the ufc level who has you know like who who's a brilliant jiu jitzu artist like damien maia i loved watching damien maia because i was like this dude you know exactly what he's going to do and and and he's so good at it that he's just going to go in and do it you know and it's a lot like hoist was back in the day. Like what, you know, people have had time to prepare. He's doing this on wrestlers and other black belts. And it was just remarkable to see. So, uh, I think, you know,

being a lifelong martial artist from a protector standpoint is, yeah, you know, that's a no brainer. But also just from a novelty standpoint, it's really refreshing to be able to do something where it's like, I don't know what's going to happen today. I don't know what we're going to learn today. You know, there's just so much to it that I think is really, it's filling in a unique way you don't get from, you know, hitting the gym. Absolutely. Yeah, it's hard to describe until you're in it. Like, it's that novelty, our brain loves novelty too, right?

Like, we seek it everywhere. And so it gets very captivating and engaging that way. So as you're talking about the leg game evolution and all the new things in my head, I'm going, well, what's driving people to do that? And it's a lot of it is that the novelty of like the kids. I don't know if you call them the kids who are, you know, 20-year-old like phenom sport, jujitsu athletes, the novelty drives them to create these new, the new guard or the new leg attack or whatever. And I do love, because I've been very resistant to legs in general. I'm like

a mid-end purple belt now kind of. And so I appreciate the curiosity of it, but I'm also cautious. I can not, that's where I'm most likely to get injured. I don't fuck with heel hooks anymore at all. It took me out for the last time I had a knee injury from a heel hook. It was an eight-month recovery. And I was like, my son was three. And for six months, I had to tell him, sorry, Daddy can't run. and it's like, oh, your knee still hurts. Like, yeah, it's not going to get better for a little while, buddy. You know, but like he's just, come on, let's run. Sorry, Daddy can't run.

Like, that freaking broke my heart. It's kind of the opposite of what you said as one of your goals, right? Yeah, so it brings it back down to Earth. And so I've been cautious about that. But I do love that now the legs have may become another route to the back again, you know, like back to the foundation and fundamentals of top game stuff. Absolutely. Well, listen, where can people find you if they're interested in going to visit you

or see, you know, your offerings from a professional standpoint, where can people follow you online? Yeah, I'm most active in the socials on Instagram, and it's my name, Chestnut with no T in the Middle.md. Just start a little podcast. That's like a very new thing. I don't even really talk about that much called Five Codes, which is like my five core values,

kind of like it's just been an internal thing in our practice that we are starting to take out. So anyway, that's kind of fun. Then our website's linked on there, Clinic5C.com. 5C, the secret of that for you. years was that actually stood for five codes. Oh, cool.

Nobody, I never advertised it that way. So it's like an internal thing. But yeah, those are the best places I talk a lot about my socials, as you mentioned, is very much a mix of like life performance, parenting. Then, of course, my practice on there. My practice is built off of before and after photos, which have evolved to videos, which have evolved to, you know, things that can't be tampered with, you know, as much anymore, which is a whole funny evolution.

but so I'm grateful for social media because my practice could never exist without it. I have my challenges with it, as I know you do too, there's like the hard wrestles, but I'm also very grateful because I literally nobody would know I existed without it. So kind of cool. Yeah, it was cool. I'm in a very visual specialty, thankfully. Hell yeah.

Yeah. Well, brother, it's been awesome getting to know you and hang as well. And train together and podcasts. We'll do it again. Thank you for opening up your home. Absolutely. Yeah.