Mark Bell's Power Project - 30 Years With Countless Dead Bodies: Health Knowledge From A Lifetime Dissecting Cadavers || MBPP Ep. 1019

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

In episode 1019, Gil Hedley, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about everything Gil has learned from 30 years of cutting into human cadavers and the lessons that can be learned from the dead. Follow Gil on IG: https://www.instagram.com/gilhedley/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! The Athletic/Casual Clothes we're wearing! 🕺 ➢ https://vuori.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   💤 The Best Cooling Mattress in the GAME! 🛌 ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Best STYLISH Barefoot Casual/Training Shoes! 👟 ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   Best 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      You Need Greens in your Life 🥦 ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

If you're about to put a knife to a human body, that's a rare thing and you're never going to forget it. So I just called up a lab. I was like, hello, this is Dr. Hedley and I would like a cadaver, please, in a laboratory in which to cut it up. There's another side of our field who literally say adhesions aren't a thing. You having seen thousands of bodies or tens of thousands of bodies at this point, what do you know about that? You can bring back fluidity to tissues through movement. You guys hear that out there? No.

And those people who say you can't do it won't do it. And they can sit on their asses and turn into wood. We talk a lot about poop on this show. We are in poop trouble. We're in deep shit in this country. What is so amazing about foreskin? Oh, my gosh. How many hours does this podcast go for?

It smells. Yeah, or it gets dirty. Yeah, well, so does your asshole if you don't wipe it. The skin will move back and forth over the glands, and that feels good. What happens if we take that away? And what is the effect in terms of sex function is to take away pleasure. And that was why it was done in this country. It can cause death.

Yeah, people can die. Power Project family, we've had some amazing guests on this podcast like Kurt Engel, Tom Segura, Andrew Hooperman, and we want to be able to have more amazing guests on this podcast and you can help it grow by leaving us a quick rating and review on Spotify and iTunes.

If you're listening to the podcast, just go ahead and give us a review. Let us know how you dig it and help the podcast grow so we can keep growing with y'all and bring you amazing information. Enjoy the show. All right, Gil. Great to have you here today.

Can you explain a little bit of what you do and how you got into all this? Sure. Thanks for having me, Mark. I'm an explorer of the inner space. Let's put it that way. The inner space of the human form. I do that as I call myself a somonaut. So I call anyone who does that a somonaut, someone who's like a sailor navigating the body, right?

So I navigate the inner space. And really, I started out doing bodybuilding as a high schooler. I learned about my muscles from Arnold Schwarzenegger, got real interested in what I could see in a mirror. And then I got curious about what was a little deeper in. So anatomy was interesting to me from high school. My biology teacher gave us a rat. We dissected it, did a good job. She gave us a cat. I was like, this gets better all the time. So I dissected that cat and did a real nice job. And by senior year, I was walking behind my friends as they dissected their cats teaching them how to do it and so uh well i i didn't get to do much of that in college although i bagged a lot of fetal pigs working in a anatomy lab and then i um we bagged a lot of fetal pigs yeah i worked uh it was like a lot of people have in college yeah work study in college i i worked

in a biology lab. And so one of my tasks was to autoclave fruit flies and scrape the maggots out of the jars. And another one of my jobs was to bag the fetal pigs and get them ready for dissection. Wow. But when I got to – and I did a lot of weightlifting, kept up with that, got into Tai Chi in grad school. And that got me even more interested in the body as well. And I took the opportunity to go into the lab with a friend of mine who was a med student. He was like needed a little help on in his study sessions. And I had been simultaneous to getting

my PhD in ethics. I was also training as a massage therapist. And so I had a little background. He was happy to have me there with him on Saturdays in Chicago in a lab there. And so I did my first dissections just with a friend that way. They would have done an arm earlier in the week, and then he's going to study the arm for the test on Monday. So there was one arm left over. He's like, it's yours. And so I dissected that with no instruction, having no clue what I was doing. Did you feel like okay just dealing with body parts? Because perfectly honest, if I just saw arm, I'd be like. I'm out of here. I was intimidated by it for sure, actually.

And I had the whole body on the table. And I was like, do this arm. And so then do this leg. And then do this abdomen. And that's kind of how we did it. I went in there four or five times. I mean, you're cutting it open and stuff, right? Yeah, cutting it open.

And I'll never forget that first cut. It makes an impression on you. I tell that to everybody who takes the course with me. Just give yourself a deep breath. If you're about to put a knife to a human body, that's a rare thing, and you're never going to forget it. So take it in any way you can, but pay attention to what you're doing because I always remember that. But I basically gave myself some kind of PTSD from doing it, to be honest. I was not comfortable, but the information was compelling to me, and so I kept on going.

And when I got out of grad school, I trained as a rolfer. Now, that's a kind of body work. It's like a – we call it structural integration, right? So I practiced that. And as I took up that profession, I was like, golly, I'm digging around and people have no idea

what I'm doing. I need to know more anatomy. And that got me to the lab. So I just called up a lab. I was like, hello, this is Dr. Hedley and I would like a cadaver, please, and a laboratory

in which to cut it up. And the dude was like, you come down here. We'll have a chat. And we made good friends that day. My friend Roger Faison from a lab in Newark, and he made space for me in that lab, and I did exactly that, and I brought some rolfers in. And together we, you know, I led that first dissection class with four days of knowledge ahead of the people in the room. And it was a disaster.

We made an incredible mess but learned so much. It was so compelling. And I was like I got to kind of keep – I got to do that again. That once is not enough. But I was having nightmares over the way that I did it, right? Because the way that I did it was just following the textbook or whatever. And regional anatomy cuts things up into parts, right? It tries to identify this thing and that thing, separate it all out.

Take the machine apart, as it were. Well, we're not a machine. We're a continuity. A whole thing differentiates out of one embryo. Well, we're not a machine. We're a continuity. A whole thing differentiates out of one embryo. And so one thing I had learned in my rolfing training was that there are kind of textural layers, biological fabrics that each have different qualities that you can feel with your hands and you can work on from head to toe. Well, I wanted to see that. I didn't want to see the region. I wanted to see the continuity. So I had kind of dreamed up a different way of doing the dissection. Instead of dissecting by region, I decided I could dissect by layer, right?

And I thought that would be interesting. So I got a few colleagues together, and we went in there. I said, here's how we're going to try and do this. And we did it that way. And I was like, is this compelling? Is this interesting to you? Do you find it educational? And they were like, yeah.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to keep doing that. And I started teaching classes where groups would come together and we'd take a given individual donor form, a donor gift as a present. You open it up. When you're given a gift, you open it up, right? So we would open up these presents and do it by layer. And it's very, very interesting because while you're dissecting one layer away from another, you start to – well, that's me. You start to be able to see the relationships between those layers. So it becomes less about making parts of things than about feeling into the connections within the body. And that's always been my goal is to kind of assemble my own consciousness and relationship to the body internally from doing this work. So I'm not a medical doctor. That's not my thing. I have a PhD in theological ethics.

I took this up as a way of becoming more embodied myself and helping facilitate other people do that. How do you get in there if you have no sense of it, no visuals, if you have nothing to imagine that's accurate, right? So how can you feel interrelationships? Well, you can touch them with your hands. You can take it apart. You can feel the resistance as you try and take tissues apart. And that resistance, instead of trying to make a thing out of it, the resistance tells you something about the relationship, the connection, the strength, the integrity. And so I'm trying to put together the body by dissecting it rather than turn it into parts and things. Can you tell the difference between a body that may have been,

the person may have been stiff or tight or maybe didn't move well versus someone that might have moved more fluidly? And do you have any way of knowing that information like do you have someone you can consult that knew the person or something like that sometimes i knew the person right so i mean i can it's it's getting to be that way now this far in my career at the beginning i was always dealing with an anonymous donations i had no information on them at all uh so i'm just kind of just stuck with what's in front of me, which isn't a bad thing to go by because often people don't know what's going on inside their body. There wasn't enough medical records to determine what was going on inside that body.

So I'll actually end up knowing more about them than they ever did, even about themselves. But I can look at the joints. I can look at the bones. I can look at the texture of the tissues. But they change and alter when you die, right? So if you're embalmed, for instance, if they embalm the body, meaning preserve it, right, it's kind of like a pickling process, like a room temperature pickling process. This is reminding me of Dexter. No, he didn't bother pickling.

So he didn't pickle. Yeah, he was unethical, that guy. He didn't ask permissionling him. He was unethical, that guy. He didn't ask permission. He took liberties, and I don't do that. I just work with gifts. So the texture changes that happen both from just dying, right, and now all the tone goes out of the body, right? So the same thing under anesthesia.

They put you under anesthesia, you go to a puddle, right? You don't have any more tone in the body. Same thing happens when you die. The tone leaves the body, and the tone is the signature of those stressors in your body, right? So some of that is gone, and I don't get to see that. Where do you think some of that tone comes from? Does that come from like nerve impulses? Yeah, absolutely.

It comes from your emotional organization, right? Like in other words, the way you put your nervous system through your body is going to generate more tone in some areas, less tone in other areas. Also, there's going to be more even fibrous buildup in some areas and less in other areas. fibrous buildup in some areas and less in other areas. So the mechanical tissues can be altered by life, right? So that if you use something a lot, it'll grow and build and get stronger. If you don't use it so much, it'll shrink and get atrophied. So I can see the signatures of that in a body. But I'll tell you, a body can change a whole lot in three months before you die.

So you might have been a robust build all your life, but then you get some wasting disease like cancer, and in one or two months, all that work has gone up the flu in a month or two. I had that to be the case with a younger man, 53 years old, who I worked on for what I call my A to Z project, and he had been a very robust build. He was a friend of our lab director who was his massage therapist. But then he was a very skinny, you know, skinny form on the table.

So, you know, there's a lot of illusions that happen, you know, in that transition from the vitality of life to your passing. And so sometimes I get clues that aren't quite accurate, right? But I can look in those tissues and still you can see stuff. Like if you're in a car accident or something, you get pins and plates put in and all that stuff. And your body tries to accommodate for those changes and injuries. You'll see some very strange things in the body in terms of the organization of the tissues. But can I tell if somebody was a yogi or something? I'm not so sure.

Do we know if you can see fascia or not? Like, do you know if you can see it? I've spent my whole career seeing fascia. Yeah, absolutely. And also... What is it? Can you describe it to us or tell us more about it? Yeah, sure.

So fascia is basically, I say, an aggregate of connective tissues that can be dissected into a sheet. That would be a real basic definition of fascia. It wraps around other tissues. So you can define it in a negative that way. But fascia also is a living matrix of your body, right? It's that in which everything else is growing and taking form. It's the shaping element of your body. But it's also a whole body communication system, right?

Because forces transmit through it. So your forces of just your gait or your stepping or your movements, your behaviors, your emotional life, all those forces are going through the fascial network and impacting the whole body simultaneously. There's no escape from it because it's a – well, my friends Rosemary Fides and Lewis Schultz called an endless web, right? So that endless web is the fascial matrix of your body basically. So connective tissue is the larger category in which fascia is like a lower down in the totem pole of anatomical nomenclature. So we have connective tissue and within the connective tissue framework, you have blood, you have bone, you have fascia.

So fascia is an element. Now, I go through a lot of work over my career to help people not just have one idea of what fascia is. So there are different types of fascia in your body. There's dense, regular, fibrous fascia like your IT band. But your IT band is embedded in another kind of fascia that I call perifascia. And that's a more slippery, membranous substance that you can also – there's a connective tissue aggregate that can be cut into a sheet. I can show it to you all day long.

Maybe a little bit akin to like the way that you bite into a steak and sometimes there's fatty tissue that you can easily eat and goes perfectly with the muscle and then other times there's a fatty chunk that you kind of just need to spit out yeah exactly you are nailing it on the head right so the i didn't think it would be that simple it is that simple so the the the the stuff you got to spit out that's the dense regular fous fascia, or you might call it deep fascia, fascia profunda. So we call it that. Does it kind of have that white?

It's like on a steak. This is my only comparison. I've never had to open a body. Oh, it works. But it has like a little – I'm afraid you are steak, my friend. Yeah, I am. It has a little like sheath of like white over top of the muscle.

Exactly. And then if you go to cut into it, you're like, what the hell is that? You can't find a knife sharp enough to cut through it. Yeah, so kind of the delicious fatty layer, that would be like superficial fascia or the subcutaneous adipose. And then that fibrous layer, that would be the dense regular fascia. And the fact that you can get those two apart is because there's a membrane in between them. That would be the perifascia. Gotcha.

Yeah. So it's all there in your steak. What fascia is this? Sorry, Ntima. Well, that would be a dense regular fibrous fascia in that image, right? So you can see there's multiple directions of the layering of that tissue, right? So there's up and down fibers, and then there's cross fibers. And what we're looking at actually there is the IT band, right? So there's the up and down fibers, and then there's the cross fibers. And what we're looking at actually there is the IT band, right?

And I'm going to – if I pull on it in one direction, right, those fibers might approximate and get closer to each other, the up and down fibers. Now that's pulling in other directions. It's like rubber bands. You see that? Yeah. That's amazing.

So when you say – I've never seen that. So when you say make a muscle, right? If you say make a muscle, right, and the body changes shape, right? You get a bulge in your biceps. You get a bulge in your thigh. That bulging is possible because those fibers going across the screen there, right, are arranged, the collagen is arranged in such a way that it can expand like a rubber band. It has elasticity and it recoils just like you saw it do. So you have that all over your body.

And then the fiber is going up and down on the screen from top to bottom. Those ones are not elastic. So people will ask me, does fascia stretch? I'm like, well, which way are you pulling it? And which fibers of the fascia do you have in mind? Because if by stretch you mean elastic recoil, then there's a whole lot of it in that tissue, right? It's very stretchable. But if by stretch, I mean, you can take a basket woven of reeds and pull on it, and it will distend because of the organization of the weave. It permits a change of the organization of fibers. So you can stretch something.

You can stretch something made out of fibers that aren't elastic. Yeah. Depending upon – if by elastic or stretch you mean change its shape and have it return to its shape. And that also speaks to range of motion. But as we were talking about – excuse me. You're fine. If we were talking about a little earlier, and my friend Jules Mitchell was talking about this on my own show.

She's a biomechanist. And it's like if we have talking about force and load, that's also a way of thinking about stretching. So it doesn't necessarily mean getting to be long like Gumby on a mat. It could mean putting weights into your curl bar and lifting it up, in which case you're changing the force and load of the tissues dynamically. And that could be a way of thinking about stretching as well, force and load. I thought that was a pretty interesting way to think about it beyond range of motion. Because we don't always want to increase the range of motion of a joint. It will fall apart.

If we increase it too much, we're going to fall apart. But if you can, like you just mentioned, if you can strengthen that tissue at a specific range. So don't just stretch the tissue and just passively get in that position, but can you add stress to that tissue in that range and control it back and forth? Exactly. That's a strong tissue. That's cool. Yeah, that's what you want to have that ability, right?

Because just to be Gumby isn't going to get you too far. Question about scar tissue and adhesions. Because as we were talking about fashion, we've had different people that have come on the podcast. We have a guy that we know who's been here twice. His name's Chris Godowski. He's worked with so many bodies. And by putting pressure in certain areas, he was able to feel adhesions and scar tissue.

And then over time, he's able to literally feel these things move away. And then the individual's able to move that area in a much better fashion. But there's another side of our field who literally say adhesions aren't a thing. You can't really work out adhesions with pressure. So you having seen thousands of bodies or tens of thousands of bodies at this point, what do you know about that? Well, whenever people are having an argument, they tend to be using the same words in different ways, right? And so if people want to spare themselves a whole lot of trouble, they should define their terms up front, right? And then they might find they actually agree about something, right? So if we're talking about something like adhesions, right, I mean, what do you do?

If you have an adhesive substance what does it do it sticks one thing to another so if if we uh we have all kinds of things stuck one to another and our whole body is stuck to itself right yeah in a good way all right so we have and it's differentiated into these different tissues that are actually adherent to each other. You want the parietal pleura to be adherent to the endothoracic fascia inside your chest. If you don't, your lungs collapse. So there's purposeful adhesion. There's purposeful connection. And then we can talk about, say, pathological adhesion or things stuck together that don't belong stuck together.

say pathological adhesion or things stuck together that don't belong stuck together or maybe by adhesion we mean things that don't move as nicely as they used to relative to each other maybe a knot and and that's a little different right so so a knot right when we feel our muscle tissue kind of balled up that's excessive tone right right? Excessive tone, that's like hyperactive nerve input to given motor units in your muscle tissue that leave it on when it ought to be off, right? So you want off rather than on if you're not doing any work, right? Your tissues should be soft when you're not using them, and then they should firm up when you are using them. If you're not doing anything and they're like balls of hard meat, well, that's not so good, right? So that's a nerve impulse,

and digging around on that can trigger certain phenomenon that can tell those tissues to relax. I wouldn't call that an adhesion, though. I would call an adhesion where tissues that would move relative one to another, what I call differential movement, are now not doing that, for instance. So they used to move relative to each other, and now they're just stuck to each other. So what happened there? Well, tissues that have differential movement in the musculoskeletal system have that differential

movement because intervening between the two moving tissues is another tissue. And that is continuous, tissue, tissue, tissue. But the one in between is slippery, wet, and membranous, whereas these ones might be muscle fibers. So you have muscle fiber group, muscle fiber group, and between them, a membrane. So there can be activity in one group of muscle fibers when there's no activity in this group of muscle fibers and we do that all day long you don't recruit every muscle fiber in a given muscle group every time you do some if

you did you'd have a charley horse that sucks right that's got you know you know to Charlie horses I know your calf goes long and turns into a hardball that's when all of the motor units of your calf are firing at the same time. That's not functional. But what is functional is some on, some off. And what permits some on and some off to happen is that there's membrane in between them. But if the quality, if the status of that membrane changes and loses some of its slipperiness in any gradation from 100% to zero, right? So we have 100% slipperiness. And say you lose 10% of your slipperiness throughout

that tissue, and it's a little gluey or a little gummier. It's not as slippery. It's getting more viscous. It's getting thicker. Why? It could be dehydrated. It could have certain chemistry that's suboptimal. It could be underused. It could be inflamed. These different factors are going to contribute to a reduction of the capacity of there to be differential movement way down low inside of the system. And it can go further. If you have a place in your body that's chronically not used, that's chronically inflamed, right, then ultimately you're going to start generating like crystal formations inside of that membrane.

And it's going to move from gummy towards brittle even, right? It might even calcify. It could calcify. Yeah, it could do that. And then that tendon is at risk of snapping, right? And you see that in elderly folks who haven't used certain things in a long while. They step off the curb and they pop a tendon or something like that. Well, can you get it back?

You know, so there's to your question about adhesions, right? Because I would call that a growing adhesion, right? When the differential movement is being reduced over time, right, from lack of use or from chronic inflammation, stasis, dehydration, and inflammation cause adhesion, right? And movement is the opposite, use, right? So once you activate those tissues, they're like, oh, this is what we do. We do this, and then your body's going to bring fluid to that area, and things are going to get improved. So you can go in either direction. And you can either move yourself or someone can move you. So if someone's touching, like the example that you gave,

they can work the tissues in such a way that it reproduces the notion of movement for that person, right? And so now you're moving for them. Well, that can be good because not everybody has the get up and go where they need to be facilitated. And then once they feel it and once they've been moved, then they'll move, right? And then it can keep that change, right? Because even the pressure on the muscle is kind of movement in a way and stretching in some degree. It is.

Or the elbow of a rolfer or a body worker, right? Some PT, what have you, right? You put pressure. You call for movement, right? Someone wiggles their foot while your arm is on their calf, and you are literally changing the texture of the tissue, both at a neurological level but also at a physiological level in terms of the viscosity of the interfaces of the tissue, right? So you're bringing fluid. You're bringing life, really. You're bringing circulation.

You're washing out old stuff. You put pressure, and you kind of dry out the sponge in the capillary bed, and you take the pressure off, and the body restores the fluid as you take the pressure off. And so then you can bring back fluidity to tissues through movement, whether it's yours or whether it's through help. You guys hear that out there? Fuck y'all. People are saying you can't do it, but we're big believers.

Yeah, well, that's kind of ridiculous, actually, to say you can't do it. And those people who say you can't do it won't do it, they can sit on their asses and turn into wood you know fuck you so that will be the summary of that long scientific speech fuck you i like it that's awesome that's great hi roger family it's time to step up your barefoot shoe game now we talk about foot health all the time on the podcast, but the winter months are coming, and Vivo's come out with some slick boots. These are their Gobi boots, and they have different colors on their website. Now, these have a wide toe box. They are flat, and they are flexible, and they're stylish and sexy as boots. But obviously, Vivo is awesome because they not only have boots and casual shoes like their Novus right here, which again, wide, flat, flexible, so that your foot can do what it needs to do within the shoe. And you're getting the benefit of having your feet improve while you're walking

around in shoes. But they also have shoes for the gym, like their Motus, again, flat, flexible, wide toe box, along with their Primus Light 3s and all the classics that you know. They also have shoes for running and trail running on their website. So again, for all barefoot type shoes, Vivo is your one-stop shop for pretty much all the types of kicks you need. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at

vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject or for the entire month of December, but December only, you guys will receive 20% off your very own Vivo Barefoot shoes. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. But then there's a whole other kind of adhesion that's going to be arising from what I would say we'll call healing, right? So we don't want to give all adhesion a bad rap, right? So if

you get a cut, right? If you get a wound, if you get a surgery, we have a miracle that happens in our body. It agglomerates. It self-sticks. It forms a bloody scab. I mentioned that blood was connected to tissue earlier on. It's got fibers in it, and under certain conditions, those fibers will activate and be used to rebuild the tissue, right? It'll fill in a hole. This is a good thing. This keeps us on the planet longer. So we don't want to get all down on the fact that our tissues can agglomerate over time. Actually, that's like the

doctor that lives within our body that can put us back together under the circumstance of injury. So I'll fix this. I'll just make it so it can't move. Yeah, exactly. Well, you can. That's right. I'll fix it. And then the question is, like, so are we going to get mad because we have a scar? Or are we going to thank goodness that we have a scar?

Well, you can thank goodness that you have a scar, and then you can work with that scar, right? So you don't have to just settle for nature's version of what was needed at the moment, right? You can approach that tissue, and you don't want to make the scar go away. It's holding your body together, right? But you can change its pliability, the level of circulation that flows through it, the ease with which nerves pass through it. Are they stressed or not stressed? Are they pinched or not pinched?

Are they getting blood supply? Are they not or not stressed? Are they pinched or not pinched? Are they getting blood supply? Are they not getting blood supply? So you can work with scar tissue in a way that restores pliability and circulation. You can have that agglomerated tissue that represents your healing without it being an interrupter, you know, without it taking away your movement potential to a certain extent. You know, there are certain events that happen to a body that you'd just be glad you still have a body and that you're still in it. So we can get some blood back to the area with movement, with stretching, with perhaps having somebody, a body worker working on us.

And I'm not sure how aware you are of voodoo flossing, you know, like wrapping an area. I'm aware of voodoo, but not voodoo flossing. Compressing an area, wrapping it tightly with an elastic band, and then you're cutting off the circulation to the area. And then the idea is when you take it off, circulation kind of goes back into it. Okay, that's interesting.

You've got'll be careful with that you gotta know all about the tourniquets and you don't want to like yeah overdo it we don't want to overdo that yeah right because then the arm falls off yeah not so much pressure where the arms change in color yeah i think we do like uh maybe 30 to 50 percent of a rat you know you're not you're not yanking it well so there's a video of our buddy Kelly Sturette messing with that. Oh, Kelly. That's a friend of Jill Miller's, right? Yeah.

And so what we'll do a lot of times is we will tack down the fibers by wrapping it up the way he's doing so there. And then once it's wrapped, you will spend two to three minutes or so just moving that area around and now that rubber band because of the elasticity to it and the stickiness of it it's going to move the fibers around in the elbow and in the forearm where kelly's wrapping and uh he'll get uh some restoration from that and then he'll release it and then the idea is that more blood flow comes the area we've had a tremendous amount of success with this we don't know like all the science behind it but well that's very interesting because what it's kind of doing is replicating certain types of body work right where they just i mean as a rolfer i would just lean on somebody with my elbow for several minutes right and not unlike that and your elp your skin and the other person's skin could have like

friction a little bit the way that band does and it can kind of pull and absolutely yeah absolutely you're shearing the tissues and pressure and shearing at the same time so that's it's cheaper than roughing i don't know what you pay for the tape but not much roughing session is not cheap but the it also won't love on you quite the same way but i think that's pretty cool yeah when you get an opportunity to look at a body um you know my understanding is a body is made up of a lot of water. And a lot of – you were mentioning hydration and it's important that there's some hydration kind of so that these muscles, tendons, ligaments and so forth will slide and glide and move very smoothly. And then you mentioned the word viscous. I've heard before that some of that water that is in there is kind of

viscous, is kind of thick or gel-like. I don't know. Is there any truth to that? Yeah, not in a bad way. In other words, I mean, we use our words and it generates ideas in our mind about what it is actually like. But the living body is like a gel. Yeah, it's more, but a slippery, a slippery gel for sure.

And then again, the question is is like what's its status? What's its quality? So we're wanting the slipperiness, and you can – there's a concept called thixotropy, okay, where the thixotropic effect is where you take something from a gel state and put it into solution through pressure. And that's like a bodywork activity, right? You put pressure on something, and then maybe you can put it into solution and then facilitate change. That's one idea of how something like rolfing works, although they might,

you can't do that to all the tissues. Your tissue isn't just like a big jellyfish, right? You have some are harder, some are more fibrous, and they're never going to turn to gel. And if they do, you're dead. You're a liquid at that point, and life is not good. But there are those membranes, those interfaces in your body, and that's where that gel quality is represented in your tissues, right? So you can actually intentionally go to those layers and work with that gel. Look at my – we've got that ability. You can't do that to a tree. The tree bark doesn't slip and slide like that, but we do.

Now that's – And I've helped some people before with their pain and pain management and just a little bit of body work stuff and some people's tissues won't move like that yeah exactly yeah at all you'll try to move their forearm around or something yeah it's like a brick it is that's right there's no differential movement and it may not be differential movement on the outside and you may not have differential movement on the inside. It could be like sclerified, right? It can get solid. And so now we've talked about knots, right? So if you have knots that last for years, right? Eventually that tissue quality is not having that gel quality. You know, it's gummed up, right? It can get permanent, right? Permanent in the sense that it's long-lasting.

I'm not saying permanent in the sense that you still can't change it. I do believe you can change just about anything. This is an expression of mind, an expression of consciousness, and we can change our mind, right? And if you can change your mind, your body is going to follow suit. So that's just the way it goes. So that solid feeling is the loss of differential movement. But you can lean on that. You can move it for them. And it's the same as them starting to do exercise. You can engage a person's consciousness there. Because we leave the building. You get an injury or something, right? And you're like, I don't like that anymore. That's

a mean part of my body, and I'm going to leave it, right? And we do. Instead of petting the child that bumped its knee, you say, get out of the house. You're gone. And then eventually you reject all parts, different parts of your body because we keep on getting injured, right? And then you're just living in this tiny little room in this incredible mansion. And the abandoned rooms are turning to solid you know so when you give a person body work or you touch them as you described then you're inviting them back into that room of the mansion that they might have checked out of

and and thought the you know they don't have some nice relationship with that what's your personal relationship to your whole body are there areas of it that you into and that you like and other areas that you reject and won't go there? You know, a lot of people, they're like, I want to be all musculoskeletal and don't even know they have guts. You know, like you have guts in there and they're interesting. That's part of your life. You can't make it through the day without them, but you might not give them any credit. You might not go into that room. You might not make space for your guts.

And then what's going to happen to them? They can get gummy too. You know, things can get a little stale in the visceral pathways. Your heart can get hard like the Pharaoh's heart. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't have the same dynamic range of motion that it could, right? Even your heart has a range of motion, and we can reduce it through behavior

and emotional states, right? Like what type of behavior? What do you say that? Say you hold your heart in anger, right? For years and years and years. You think that doesn't affect your physiology? Yeah. It sure does. It changes everything, actually. You can't reach out and hug somebody. You're too angry. You know, so the heart center can lose its range of motion. It's like being in a neurological rut or a movement rut. And the same for your guts as for the rest of you. Everything's got to move. Yeah.

You know, I just want to, because Mark, you mentioned the hydration thing, and that is like an extremely practical thing that applied we shouldn't really gloss over because a lot of people, they're not drinking many liquids or they're electrolyte deficient. So when they try to go do these things or when they go to a body worker, when they're trying to move, they lack hydration. They're lacking the thing that will allow them to actually start to feel better when they're trying to move and see these ranges that maybe they haven't before. Let's talk about that. So hydration, right? We can chug some water because we're thirsty, and then we can piss it all out a few minutes later, right? Because basically, your tissues have to call for water, right? So if you drink water and don't move, like you drink water at your desk, you're writing your book, and you're chugging water and you got a bucket underneath the desk and you just put it in one end and piss it

out the other right you're not getting hydrated from that water because you're not integrating it through movement into your body you're not the tissues aren't demanding they're not thirsty they're not calling for water like they're thirsty you know they may be thirsty but they're not they're not shouting out for it because and water to a certain degree can be dehydrating even because you could be just kind of pissing out a lot of those minerals and so that's right that's exactly right so you have to uh it's a little different to like sip water right and and wiggle around a bit right and maybe integrate it into your body than to chug it and stand still. But there's a whole other thing going on.

We can be like chronically dehydrated in a sense. It takes about two gallons of water to digest your day's food. Now, we don't drink two gallons of water a day. Definitely don't. Damn. Right? And thank goodness, right? It's just not that fun unless you're, you know, carrying 80 pounds of pack and you're

in Iraq, right, in the sunshine. Then you might drink six gallons of water in a day and you could process that right because you're eliminating it as you go through sweat but uh normally we're not like that right so so if we need two gallons of water to do that where is it coming from well we're recycling it right we're reusing fluids in our body over and over again. So you make a quart and a half a bile a day. Your liver makes that, right? And then that fluid goes into your intestines, it gets to your cecum, it gets reabsorbed, and you do it again, right? And your gastric juices, your saliva, right? Your saliva all day long, you're producing this juice. Well, where does it

come from? It's recycled water from within your body. So you have like a reservoir of water in your body that you keep on using over and over again. It goes in one place. It gets reabsorbed in, for instance, the bile, that quart and a half of bile. Your gallbladder is basically a bile dehydrator. So the bile is produced. It gets shunt up into the gallbladder. That pulls the water back into the general circulation

and concentrates the bile to be a fat emulsifier. So we reuse our water is my point. Well, what if your whole body reservoir is chronically a little low, right? Well, then where is the water going to come from? If it's not coming from your mouth, right? Well, then where is the water going to come from? If it's not coming from your mouth, right, it's going to be coming from your joints. It's going to be coming from those membranes, right? That gel, right? That jelly-like membranous interface that's permitting all that differential movement we talked about is a reservoir right of water for your digestive processes if you're not adequately hydrated right so that's not good right if you

can't reclaim it from your juicy bile and you got to start taking it out of your joints and your muscle tissues you're going to be like a piece of beef jerky you know uh i'm not literally easily snappable but you're moving in that direction so best to top it up a little bit how do you avoid stiffness you're on the road right now 115 cities doing seminars

how are some ways that you have found for yourself to avoid you want to get into me now you think you're gonna like get some kind of health advice from me it's not this is um i saw you in the gym when we were talking to you were doing squats and stuff and you were on the ground and you were moving around that's because the first time i've been in a space bigger than four square feet in the last three

days i also think you're an rv right. One thing that's very interesting about you is the way that you move. Like you, like you, you are an amazing communicator, but you are naturally just moving your joints. Like, and this is a great thing because you're, you're just by living, you're lubricating everything. That's the best I can do because walking around lubed up. Right. Yes.

Just, I'm like a living astroglide so i i'm i'm uh i'm a cautionary tale about where do you think that stiffness comes from like when somebody kind of get somebody sits around a little bit and they go to get up and because like sometimes it's not even for that long. You might have only sat down for 15, 20 minutes before you get back up. Well, let's go back to that body work. When you're body working, you lean on somebody. What if that body work leans on you for 20 minutes?

It's too much. It's too much. Well, what if you put all your body weight on your ass for 20 minutes? It's too much. It's the same thing. You're literally like your ass. Put all your body weight on your ass. Your ass is ass yeah that's such a great way to look at it right what you're doing putting all your body weight on your ass like that for so long and your ass is a sponge right

and you're compressed a sponge and you squeezed all the water out of it and all that vasculature is getting compressed right i like that i like and uh and so and when you stand up it's like you know your ass is just going like sucking the water back into it from the rest of your body your cheeks get smaller you know when you stand up i'm teasing you can't you imagine you go from one cheek to the other you know depending upon whether you're lying on your face or your ass and the cheek compression it's like a pump back and forth if you say that seriously yeah shit you can fool me but that's the thing it's like like i was teasing about my posture in the laboratory right when i'm bent over a table for hours at a time and i joke about the yin yogis right they'll hold a posture

for five minutes i'm like that's candy as compared to five hours you should try it but it's not good for you the five minutes is amazing for you but the five hours is not good for you the five hours of sitting right is is like holding a posture for hours and hours i don't there's nothing that could be good for you for that long even standing or walking yeah yeah i mean. I mean, or sex. Can you imagine? Five-hour session? Nope. There'd be nothing left of you. Need a break in there somewhere.

Need a break in there somewhere. Just get a little hydration, et cetera. Yeah, so sitting is never going to be good for a long period of time. But it's not to say don't sit. We're capacitated to sit. We can do that. It's one of our options. It just can't be the only option.

You can get tired of standing too. You spend eight hours on a factory floor. You're going to be tired, right? So one way or another, you've got to do different things. It's not about what the behavior is. It's about that it's not the only behavior, right? Because the things that we repeat, they become grooves and habits and neural ruts. So you have to do something different.

You know, if you never move the same way twice, life's going to be good. You know, you can just keep, and, but we, again, we talked about behaviors in our conversation before we got on and certain, certain neural ruts are, are good for you right there. You want to, you want to, when you're doing power lifting, you want it to be perfect, right? When you're doing powerlifting, you want it to be perfect, right? You want each movement to be in a groove where you're accessing all the strength that you have to accomplish that exchange of force. And you don't want someone to give you some big wiggly, giggly massage right before you do that, right?

Because it's going to put you off your game. So you don't want to tweak an athlete's groove right before their Olympic trials or something like that. They need time to integrate it and to make that change. It's time to step up your wardrobe. Now we've partnered with Viora Clothing because their clothes are stuff that you can wear in the gym, but also on the go to a dinner, on a date, pretty much anywhere. This is their Stratotec tank, and this is their rain shirt jacket. You guys have probably seen me wear these types of combos on this podcast for a long time now, and this stuff is super comfortable. It fits super well, and the winter months are coming, so you need to get yourself some nice long sleeve wear from their website. They also have a lot of other stuff like their Stratotec tee, their Core Shorts, which they have a ton of different colors and they're pretty damn amazing. Their Ponto line, their Ponto Performance line with their Dreamknit fabric is super soft, like a baby's bottom,

as weird as that sounds. They have a lot of amazing stuff on their website. Their Boulevard shirt jackets, Aspen shirt jackets, their sweaters. Let me show you something real quick. This is their Echo Insulated Jacket and it is so warm. And since the winter months are coming, I'm going to be rocking this so much more. Guys, there's endless stuff for you on their website that just looks so good and performs so well. How can they get it? You guys can get it over at Viori.com slash Power Project. That's V-U-O-R-I.com slash Power Project. And you guys receive 20% automatically when you go to that. Links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. We were talking about the viscous of the muscle and the water and so on. Are there any changes? Do you know like with heat or cold, like what kind of difference does that make? You know, sometimes people, their bodies might be stiffer when it's cold out.

Oh, it's raining. You know, my ankle always hurts. What do you think is going on there with stuff like that? That's something to think about. Well, with the changes in temperature, you're going to have change in the way the blood flows through that given tissue. And so if your blood is withdrawing from a certain area under certain temperature conditions, then that might have been just what was necessary to have made it feel good. When you take it away, it doesn't feel good anymore. So I would lay most of that at the door of changes in circulation based on temperature.

I've seen your speech on fuzz, and you were talking about this fuzz this uh um kind of a fascial layer and you were saying that it will almost melt away as you're touching it is that from heat from your hand or is that from that's from an illusion okay okay so what i called fuzz early in my career because i'm telling you i didn't have you know i just went into the lab and started taking bodies apart i didn't have this buzz instruction yeah exactly exactly i'm pulling the tissues apart and i'm seeing cotton candy between them well what is it oh there he is that's oh look at when my hair was dark yeah so so that that um that cotton candy tissue right it does appear to melt away when you touch it but what i'm actually doing is we've been talking about these membranes that are the interface of differential movement earlier in our

conversation. That's the fuzz, right? What we're looking at in the cadaver is that membrane being torn apart. I have pulled it out of position. And the organization of the collagen in that particular type of fashion is chaotic it's like felt right so if you have a see that felt and see that it's like felt now if i if i weren't pushing that away or pulling it apart and laid it back down it would be a membrane and if it weren't a cadaver it would be slippery right so what i'm doing actually in in those images is i'm pulling apart in that slippery membrane in a more dry condition and demonstrating the organization of the fibers within it,

which, because they're chaotic, mean that it can go in any direction, right? Now, and if we're alive, then that tissue is jelly and fluid, right? And so when I say melt it, what I'm really, again, I was saying that the images in this video are a little confusing because they give you the impression that we're dry, right? And we're not dry. And it gives you the impression maybe that those fibers don't belong there, what they do. But here's the thing. Even though the visuals can be a little distracting, we can have aberrant fiber growth in our tissues. We can have dehydration

in your tissues. So the words I'm using are accurate, but if we take it down to a microscopic level, right, you're never going to not have that tissue there. You'd be dissected, right? So you always are going to have that membrane there, but what's its quality? What's its condition? Is it in that slippery state or has it been reduced even 5% of its slipperiness? If you have a total loss of 5% of slipperiness in a given muscle tissue, it's going to appear stiff relative to something else. We're not talking about going down a beef jerky like I joked earlier. We're just talking about a slight change enough to change the viscosity of that slipperiness in a negative direction. So we don't want to make the fuzz go away. We want to change its texture in the direction of slippery as opposed to the direction of what I would call gummy.

Because when it's getting drier or gummier, it's getting to be like glue. What do they make glue out of? Boiled horse's hooves, right? What do you make marshmallows out of? Do you ever take a marshmallow and stretch it like this? And you do it and you do it and eventually you have like this taffy. Well, what is a marshmallow?

It's connective tissue, actually. It's actually boiled horse's hooves giving you collagen. It's collagen fibers plus sugar and that's what you got and that's pretty much what fascia is so we're basically marshmallow people yeah we're we're yeah and so and it's delicious at the right temperature right so because here's the thing too if you if you take those tissues and you go from slippery towards gummy yeah right you're moving in that taffy marshmallow direction if you go a little further you're getting into the crispy duck region right so

you can go from gummy to to crystal we said so that's basically the the approach progression from health to to uh to problems yeah right and if you have crystalline buildup in your tendons and things, they're going to snap, but they're going to taste better, right? Because it's the Maillard effect. It's a French scientist. The Maillard effect is describing what happens in cooking, like when you caramelize onions or something, right? What are you doing?

You're creating a complex chemical interaction between the fats and the sugars, right? And it starts to become delicious. It puts out smells and stuff. A little crispy. Yeah, a little crispy and it's delicious, right? So the same thing, basically, your tissues can be like slow cooked from chronic inflammation

so that that same kind of Maillard effect is actually happening in your tissues. And that's why I'm joking. But you do taste better. Oh, I'm not sure which is the joke. You've seen so many spines, right? A lot of them. Yeah. And an interesting thing that I see happening in the fitness industry right now is like, there's a lot of people that are realizing that we don't have to only, you know, there's a lot of movements

like the squat, the deadlift, all these movements, people are like, keep your spine in neutral position. And that's the way that most people train. But some people are realizing that, well, the spine moves in a lot of ways. And you probably should. Like you just mentioned before when you were talking about sitting, you don't want to stay in one position all the time. And your spine, you probably don't want it to be in one position all the time too. So what have you noticed from seeing spines, good spines, bad spines? What do you notice? It's an incredibly dynamic structure.

And we have sometimes an approach to the body that's mechanistic and we think okay our arm is a hinge you know and it goes like this and you just do that but if you look at an elbow on the inside it's super complicated and there can be all kinds of fancy movements trying to get too far away from the mic oh sorry you can do all kinds of fancy things, micro-movements in a joint. Now, the spine, similarly, right, has its organization, and yet it's capable of all kinds of tiny micro-movements within it. It's incredibly dynamic, and it's not so much a set of compression members, right, because it's actually kind of floaty, right? We have our guts, right, are under different pressure differentials inside of your body

so that your organs are actually migrating up towards the low-pressure zone of your chest, and that gives your body a sense of lightness and lift, right, that we feel weightless in our guts. We don't feel the weight of them. Why? Because they're trying to pop out your mouth. This is a low-pressure zone here, and they're migrating up. And that upward migration of your viscera takes pressure actually off of your spine and makes your spine like a – it's like your head is a helium balloon,

and your spine is a string, and your pelvis is like the handlebars on a bike. And you've tied the string on the handlebars, and you're going along very happily, and it's kind of an undulating weightlessness to that string. And you can think of your spinal column that way. Now, when you put 400 or 800 pounds on top of it, then it does become a set of compression members, and that's a little different, right? And that being said, though, you can do all kinds of and should do all kinds of movement, even if you're repeating these behaviors that you're describing where you're like keep it in this absolutely perfect position. So fine, maybe for that moment you do that, but don't quit there and think that that's how you should live your life. I walked around like I had a pole up my ass as a Tai Chi guy for years because I thought I'm supposed to breathe from my belly.

Perfect posture. Yeah, my belly is breathing and my pelvis is slightly tucked because that's how we stand when we're holding the ball. And now I just walk through life holding the ball and I look really ridiculous actually. Always ready for a punch to the stomach. Always ready for a punch to the stomach. Exactly. I live my life like I was ready to take a two-by-four to my belly. Hey, you never know.

And you know something? It didn't happen. You explore all the potential movements of your body, even if you are like in an art form of your lifting or something that asks you to do certain things. So like I have friends who are way into Pilates. Now, Pilates, that's hard stuff. And those people are like black belts in their work. in their work. And if they keep doing it that way, they're going to have a hard time having babies because the pelvic core is so tight

that they can't literally get anything to go through it. So you have to dance. You have to move. You have to do other things, even though you also do that to restore it. So if you're in the habit of consistent spinal postures, I'm just going to say, do something else later. Wiggle around on the floor.

Get to wiggling. Get to breathing. Breathe and wiggle, and it'll be good for you. Go for a walk and allow yourself to undulate while you walk. Allow the driver of the pelvic gate to send waves through your spine so that it doesn't get stuck in that position. Can tissues in the spine get dehydrated? Oh my gosh, they can turn, the whole thing can just turn to a block. Okay. I did this project. It was a 17-month-long dissection. I called it the Anatomy from A to Z Project. I dissected two bodies for 17 months. I documented it all on camera. And one of the forms, I went literally bone by bone, muscle by muscle. I documented every muscle in the human body and put it all on camera. I dissected it on camera. And one of the forms, I went literally bone by bone, muscle by muscle. I documented every muscle in the human body and put it all on camera. I dissected it on camera. I demonstrated a

comparison on camera. I did that with every muscle and every bone. When I got to the spinal column, the one formed, Z, he had about eight fused vertebrae. It was just a solid block. The bony osteophytes formed across the cartilage that would normally be this flexible cushion that would allow that dynamic movement in multiple directions, but not in his case. It was literally just like a solid block. So he would have walked around a little bit like a 2x4, literally, because there was no movement going through there.

And that was a natural formation. That was not fused through surgery. That was just from holding himself in a certain way for a really long time. And we do that. We'll hold ourselves in certain ways forever. You're like, oh, that's Bob. Here he comes. You can spot Bob from 40 yards away because Bob moves a certain way, right?

And if it was moving a different way, you might not recognize Bob, but it might be Bob because Bob could move a different way if he chose to, right? But if you don't choose to after a while, your body will take a clue, and it will solid it all up for you and make you look just like that forever, right? Yeah, that's really cool because – so real real quick backstory, I had lower back pain for damn near two decades. I didn't move. I was Bob. You know, I was, you can see me coming a mile away. I've been working on it, doing all kinds of stuff. And then a little bit over a year ago, I started jujitsu, a thing that I thought I'd never be able to do because of my back pain.

Now I'm being put in these weird positions and I'm rolling on the ground. I'm getting folded up. And here we are a year later and I can say that my back pain is pretty much gone. So I'm assuming what's going on there is I had some pretty crystallized fuzz going on in my back, but because I actually got some movement in there, it started to like gummy it up and then make it more fluid, right? Gummy is, yeah, you went in the right direction uh and so and and changed it you we are so changeable so malleable and we don't and and i'm telling you even even those osteophytes crossing those vertebrae i was astounded because

when i played with that spine with my hands and put pressure in different directions i could actually get movement between the segments. You're talking about Bob. I'm talking about Z. Yeah, I'm talking about Z. Yeah, same thing. Bob Z. Bob Z.

Andrew. All the same. My last name is Zaragoza, so it's Z. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So I was astonished to see, like, in other words, a tree can be green or dry, right? And even your skeleton, skeletosomy is dried, right? But your bones aren't dried, right? So there's moisture in your bones.

There's flexibility in your living green bones. And in those osteophytes, there was some give. And that surprised the heck out of me. I was like, oh, gosh, there's a little give in these. I bet you if you kept putting movement through these tissues, the body would get the signal to take that away and it would dissolve it. We can dissolve even bone. We do it all the time. If you break bones and they get them lined up again and some are sticking out in bubbles and stuff, well, that stuff can realign, right? As the forces transmit through those tissues, the osteoclasts will gobble up those extra bits of bone and make it nice again. Well, and in the same case,

you might have had osteophytes going across your vertebrae, for all you know, and then those activities put a demand on the body, and it changed. We can change all the way through our whole life, but mentally, we can be in a rut so deep that our body just follows suit. Sometimes you get pain as a feedback, and you're like, I'm not doing that. And someone's like, come on, man, just try a little bit of it. But it does hurt.

So you're like, or you even try a couple different things, and they they hurt or the results take a little longer than you wanted and then you're kind of grumpy and you're like i'm just gonna shrivel back up i'm gonna stay right here don't give me any advice yeah or people will get uh body work and they'll feel amazing and maybe they'll they'll move with a little swag you know in their pelvis and they come home, and the family situation will be like, we're not ready for that. You'll clamp that back down. Or the reaction could be, I've been waiting for that for our whole marriage. It could be that too. It could go either way.

You don't know. But again, our very movement patterns and the way we hold our bodies, And consequently, the patterns of adhesion, right, and stiffness that are generated in the body are also at the function of our social relationships. We move differently in different environments. You move differently at the club than you do in the library. And if you don't, you're going to get kicked out of the library and you're not going to have any fun at the club. So some people though will be in a given way of movement. And this is what fits my church, my family, my job, right? And that's my social environment that's actually literally constricting my movement, right? And we have to find another

path if we want to break out of that. And I'm not saying get a divorce and quit your church or whatever or quit your job, although you might, but you might just add something like, yeah, and I'm going to go to the roller rink and I'm going to go do something that's fun. I'm going to go for a walk or jog. I'm going to do something different so that my movement pattern isn't wholly formed by the social structures in which I'm moving because we are. And we change how we move depending upon where we are in our communities, in our space. It seems like the body, mind, and spirit almost cuts off a certain area just like you might cut off a bad relationship. So I have a – someone says I have a bad knee. And it's like, okay, well, that knee is bad and we can't use that knee the same way we use the other knee. So every time you get up and every time you sit down, we're just not going to use it. So there's

less circulation. Do you think the body kind of cuts off? Yes. You know, it says like, Hey, like we don't need to send help there anymore. It's going to calcify and it's going to be fine. It's not that the body cuts it off. The person cuts it off and the body obeys. The body is nature, and nature will follow our intention. As rulers, captains of this ship, we set the direction and the purpose and the intention, and the body follows it. You want to do something, your body will step up to the plate 99% of the time.

it. You want to do something, your body will step up to the plate 99% of the time. And if you on the contrary direction, say I'm not going to do something, your body will step up to the plate and it'll reduce itself relative to that intention.

What you got, Andrew? I'm just, I'm blown away. And I love what you're saying there because Nsema reminds me of this all the time about just checking the way I speak and the way I say things. Like, I suck at this. He's like, no, you don't suck at it. You're just not there yet or whatever it may be because it's usually about a jiu-jitsu related thing. But what you're explaining, you know, about like, again, going back to my back, I used to say like, I'm that person with the back pain, you know, that became my identity.

Yeah. And my body followed suit. But the second I kind of started moving and getting that hydration back, it's like I am a different person now. We curse ourselves. We literally curse ourselves with that kind of language. And we don't realize how powerful that is because the subconscious takes that information in and organizes you accordingly.

I mean, I was also that person who I was afraid I was going to be in a wheelchair. takes that information in and organizes you accordingly. I mean, I was also that person who I was afraid I was going to be in a wheelchair. I had so many back outages during grad school. And then I was like, well, I guess if I keep doing exactly what I'm doing, I could end up in a wheelchair. But instead, I took up Tai Chi, and that expanded my movement repertoire far beyond the monk-like movements that I had reduced myself to as a grad student reading books for 12 hours a day. I would literally walk from the south side of Chicago to the six miles, reading a philosophy book. I get on the bus to Jeffrey 6th. Lucky you didn't get robbed.

Come on back to Hyde Park. Yeah. Chicago's a little rough. It turns out nobody wants to steal books, though. Like, oh, he's talking philosophy. Exactly. My behavior made me safe. it's a great deterrent but the thing was that kind of movement that kind of limitation of movement head down all right book in front of my

face and and just moving along i mean walking was better than sitting but i would walk around the library like that with my hood up i was literally like a monk and i took up tai chi and i started like oh you can actually do this with your arm. You can go up, and you can go down. You can go up and down on one leg. This is amazing. And I was having such a great time. But after six or seven years of that, that became the rut.

I was like, now, every day I spend two hours maintaining this particular movement repertoire, and I think I'm going to jump from a bridge if I do it one more time, you know, because it became, it became a rut. I need to expand beyond that. I need to just wiggle in every way that it's possible to wiggle and see what else I can occupy in this form. You know, what else, where else can I find differential movement and throughout this form? Because if I don't, I'm going to go crazy. You know, a fun habit that I've found too like it's something that has happened over the years. But kind of like you, whenever I feel something that's kind of odd, right, because I move so much, I just have a tendency to like feel that out, feel that out, feel that out. I just keep triggering it a little bit until it's like it starts to feel better.

And it's one of those things where it's like someone that stays very still, they maintain that form. And over the years, again, they just maintain that. But if you're moving like you and you just keep your body adventuring and moving through these ranges, you're going to be able to deal with a lot of things better. I think so. Do you get a chance to see the brain as well? So many brains. And they're so pretty. I've looked at hundreds of brains yeah and

it's quite a world in there in fact at the moment i'm actually in the middle of a tour where i do a two-hour lecture on the brain as part of the uh part of the thing and we even do meditations because i like to take people in so that they can have kind of an internal awareness of that space and become present to yourself. So you can actually move your attention around the body, put it anywhere you want, right? You can pay attention to your body in different ways. And to your point earlier, like can you cut stuff off? Well, yeah, you just stop paying attention to it.

You just ignore it, right? Or you can bring your attention to it, and when you do, you bring it it life and you bring energy and you kind of put it back into the into the system but do you have any particular curiosities about the brain that i could yeah um for sure uh what like are there things that you can see uh physically on the brain much like with the muscle like i wasn't sure what your answers would be today about whether you could see fascia or how well you can detect it and so on but it seems to be pretty apparent oh yeah with the brain is there stuff that you can i know i know you can't see like thoughts and stuff but could you potentially observe that uh someone had like a potentially larger brain than another person sure you can what are some things you can see that that might give you clues about how the person lived?

Well, that's interesting. The brains actually are kind of soft, right? They're kind of like semi-firm tofu kind of thing. And they're inside of like a fluid space, right, with the cerebrospinal fluid. And then there's fascia inside your skull that's continuous with all the other fascia in your body. The dura mater, for instance, is like a tough fabric that lines the skull and surrounds the brain. And forces, right, of our behaviors are going through the whole body, right? So you have torsion in your hip.

That torsion is going to convey through the fascia inside your spinal column. It's going to convey into your skull. It's going to change the shape of your brain. So you actually, your brains are actually responding in their shape because they're soft and malleable to the torsions that are going through the fabric of your body that actually changes the position of your skull bones and changes the shape of your skull. Your skull changes shape, your brain changes shape. It's kind of interesting, just that, you know, to realize, oh, I can have scoliosis in my brain, you know, because if I have that torsion in my spine, it's going to be reflected in a bony position

and the brain will get a little twist in it. It's kind of interesting. Is the brain ever stiffer or drier than, or not the same as muscle? Well, again, if i'm working with on preserved tissues then it's getting softer by the minute if i'm working with the preserved tissues then it's a little more firm in terms of a living person i can't speak to it you know so i'm i'm i'm having high hopes that all of our brains are nice and juicy. But we have seen some people whose thoughts are pretty stiff, and it makes you wonder, doesn't it, if that does convey in there.

Can you see alcohol or tobacco? Like, is that apparent when you're dissecting a body? Yeah, because I remember in junior junior high the thing was if you smoke weed you're gonna get holes in your brain is that true yes okay just making sure that is true no no what what when yeah in the 70s it was like friday night people would say we're gonna go and fry some brain cells that's what you say it turns out that your brain cells regenerate so even if you try to fry some they'll still come back and it's hard to get rid of those brain cells and if you succeed well good for you but um so you can't see a stroke in in the brain which will literally make a void so if the blood circulation fails to a certain

part of the brain from like a blockage right then that tissue will vanish and you'll have a gap. And so I've seen many brains like Swiss cheese. They've got holes in them, right? But in terms of, say, smoking, I've dissected so many smokers' lungs. And I've got to admit they make you a little sad when you look at smokers' lungs. That's just the feeling of it, you know, because you get feelings when you do this, right? Yeah, like this guy sucks that he couldn't stop doing it, right, and cause a lot of damage. Well, I mean, for some people, that's their only pleasure.

Like I had an uncle, my uncle, he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and his one pleasure in life was smoking. I wouldn't take that from him, even if it kills him. And he managed to live into his 80s because some of those old headlies were indestructible. But now my dad, he had COPD and died at 75 because he didn't live as long as his brother. But he smoked for 50 years. And I know what lungs of a person who smoked for 50 years look like. They look like little shriveled black sacks and they and they have bubbles in them that can't ever expand or contract because the tissue is dead

there and so you get like hollow parts of the lung that's emphysema right when when you have that means blown up so that means that the air has gone in there but it can't get out right because there's no more elasticity and the tissues that have lost their properties, right? And then they're like black as charcoal. A lung that has been infiltrated with carbon, right, is going to change its color. They're normally pink. We all have pink lungs. But if you fill it with carbon, that's super easy to see see and even the lymph nodes of all of us are actually uh are actually black with carbon in our in our chest here because we're breathing smoke from cars and stuff and they're doing the work they're doing the job for us and pulling

that out and i always think if we were living around kitchen fires right uh like we used to in a little cabin with a kitchen fire, and it would smoke up the house. We would have had much, we would have had smoky lungs back then, you know, but the smoker's lungs, they get nodules, they get adherent. So lungs, when they expand, they twist on themselves. See, they have differential movement too. Each lobe is like a joint. And so there's a spirillic filling of the lung. And as it's a spirillic filling of the lung. And as it twists inside while you breathe, then the lobes slide over each other. It's quite beautiful. There's a light fluid in there. It allows them to be slippery relative to each other.

But in that smoker, as long as they stick and it just fills up like a block, it's like a knuckle ball. There's no spin to it anymore. So those are a few things that are the downside of smoking, other than the fact that it also kills you. Now, something like alcohol, you drink too much, you can see an alcoholic's pattern very easily in the guts, right? So if someone's having a liquid diet of alcohol and many people are like that, well, what's going to happen? Your intestines are going to shrink down because they're not doing any work particularly. It's just liquid going through them.

It doesn't take any muscle power to get the liquid to go through particularly, right? Just a little bit, not what it takes to get regular food to go through there. So the intestines will change. The liver will change because alcohol gets broken down in the liver, right? So what is one of the byproducts of that breakdown is basically, it's like formaldehyde, you know, basically as you break down alcohol formaldehyde, what is formaldehyde? It's a preserver, right? So it's also a carcinogen. So you have a carcinogen that preserves things. They use it to make plywood, right? You put formaldehyde on it to

keep the molds and the mildews out of plywood. So if your liver is producing that through the processing of the alcohol, then those toxic fumes, right, are perfusing through the liver tissue and pickling it while you're alive, right? So it starts to kill cells within the liver. And when a liver – that's the lungs expanding there. It's just tripping me out. So when the liver hardens like that, it gets scar tissue and gets hard and lumpy. And you're like, okay, we've got a liver that's going lumpy and hard. We've got skinny intestines, right?

And you start to see these evidence of alcohol poisoning, basically. You are asleep for one-third of your entire lifespan. You might be doing everything while you're working out, your nutrition, everything during the day to optimize things, but your sleep might not be where it could be. So that's why we partnered with Eight Sleep Mattresses, because the temperature of which you sleep at makes a big difference on your sleep quality. And Eight Sleep has all the metrics to make sure that your HRV, your bed temperature, all these things are moving you in the right direction. Eight Sleep has totally changed the way that we approach and the way we sleep for the past three years now.

Andrew, how can they check it out? Yes, that's over at 8sleep.com slash powerproject. And when you guys go there, you'll automatically save $150 off this amazing technology and the best sleep of your life. Again, 8sleep.com slash powerproject. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. You know, I don't know if you can tell if somebody, well, maybe I have some some background on some people if they're like an athlete or if they did yoga or whatever but we've had quite a few people come onto the podcast and talk about breathing a lot of times you can see some people who breathe it's always shallow breaths perpetually up here and then some people are able to expand

and contract this area you know their diaphragm and it's like they're they're breathing there and i wonder if you're able to see how that breathing has a difference on the cadaver, like the organs and the muscle tone and all of that down there versus somebody who doesn't. You can see differences, and it shows up even in the skeleton, right? Okay. So some people have like what we call like a fixed inhalation pattern where the ribs kind of are flaring up, right? And they're kind of stuck there.

And you'll see that like the ribs will change position permanently, right? Or you can have a fixed expiration where the ribs are pulled in and down. So that's one sort of impression that can be made upon the skeletal form by the breath. It's interesting. And then you can look at the diaphragm itself and see like an atrophied diaphragm of a person that doesn't,

they're not working it out, right? Or you see it in a living person, like an opera singer. Rachel's an opera singer, by the way. Oh, wow. Yeah, it does, you have a strong diaphrag, like an opera singer, Rachel's an opera singer, by the way. Oh, wow. Yeah, it does. You have a strong diaphragm. Opera singer, the muscle tissue can actually get thicker, so you can see that too.

So with respect to what you're saying, you see some people have shallow breathing. Some people maybe see their belly moves. Really, a breath is like the filling of a balloon and when you fill a balloon it fills in every direction right yeah so you good luck trying to blow up a balloon on half of the balloon right it doesn't work that way so an ideal breath would permit the balloon to fill and expand in every direction. Yes. Right?

So from up to the bottom, it's going to expand like that, from out to out. Right? The whole thing, everything. 360 degrees. Upon which, exactly, upon which the breath could make an impression because of the expansion of the lungs, it's pushing the abdominal organs, which has to give space for that by the relaxing of the abdominal wall. If people are chronically holding their abdominal wall, right, then it doesn't permit, right,

the displacement of the viscera in this way. Yeah. Because you think, oh, I look fat. No, you're just breathing. That's breathing, right? But so if you are chronically trying to give that washboard abs on the beach, look to your body and wait for that 2x4 to hit it at the same time, then you're literally holding your breath for your whole life. I know. I did it myself.

I was a breath holder. And my Tai Chi teacher had said, and I didn't hear quite what he was meaning by it, right? And we misunderstand things and then we do it for 10 years, right? So he says, breathe from by it, right? And we misunderstand things and then we do it for 10 years, right? So he says, you know, breathe from your belly, right? Which could mean relax so that you allow the air to fill you in every direction. I took it to mean don't allow your chest to expand when you breathe. And so I was like, God forbid anyone see my chest moving when I breathe. And I held my chest down. My little belly went back and forth all the time. And basically I held myself in that position for years.

Well, I was suffocating. I was terrible for my body, right? When I finally went to my roffer, he's like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? Stop doing that. And I was like, oh, my gosh, he's right. I'm doing something. I'm actually holding myself in a certain way relative to an idea. And we all do that. And I was like, oh, my gosh, he's right. I'm doing something. I'm actually holding myself in a certain way relative to an idea. And we all do that.

But it depends on what your idea is. Your idea might be I'm a free spirit. And then you move very differently than if your idea is I'm a monk or I'm a Tai Chi guy. We were talking a little bit about digestion in the gym. And you were talking about people just allowing kind of natural peristalsis, and I found that to be interesting, so you could elaborate on that a little bit, because we talk a lot about poop on this show. Well, Mark, I've thought a lot about poop.

Yeah, and basically we are in poop trouble. We're in deep shit in this country because we're throne sitters, and we think that's how you should go to the bathroom. And we sit up straight on a toilet and wait for something to happen, and nothing happens. And so we push because nothing's happening. We've got things to do, places to go, things to see. The book is over. The chapter is done. The fact that we have books in our bathroom is because it takes us a long time to shit yeah right because it's not coming out because of the way that we're

sitting on the shitter right so if if we we have to change those things right in order to restore the muscle tone of our colon and we have massive colon sickness in this country and i tell you it goes back to the way we poop. Or you need coffee every single morning. And coffee. There's all sorts of ways that we can make ourselves poop given the fact that the positional element is off. So we might drink coffee and that caffeine will get it going. Or we might push.

That's extremely common. We do what's called a Valsalva maneuver. I'll get it going. Or we might push. That's extremely common. We do what's called a Valsalva maneuver, right? We hold our belly wall and we push down and create pressure against our colon that way. And then the body's like it's just squeezing a tube of toothpaste manually, right? But that's not the design at all. We have a wave, a beautiful wave of muscular contraction that moves naturally through the intestine. We have a little ring at the end. It's called external anal sphincter.

So if it's just not an appropriate time to take a dump, we can actually say, sorry, body, no. It's not socially acceptable to lay this one out on the kitchen table. We have to move to another room, right? So it might just be you're on a bus. There's no potty. You got to wait, right? That's okay. You know, but the thing, or there's a blizzard, and then there's another blizzard, and you're in a little cabin in a little house on the prairie, and there's a rope going out to the outhouse, and the whole family's going to die in the blizzard. So you just hold it for a week, or you're just Protestant, and that's how it's done.

So God bless all the Protestants. I got nothing wrong with that. But I'm just saying that in the old days, you know, that was the thing. The whole family is going to shit on Sunday whether you want to or not. So if we have these patterns, you know, how do we overcome those patterns and restore the natural peristalsis, the natural undulating muscular contraction that's native to our colon for health. Because if you're pushing, you're going to get hemorrhoids.

If you get hemorrhoids, you're going to be sore. If you're sore, you're going to bleed. And the toilet paper is going to be like rubbing. All these things get in the way. So we want to have pleasure in our body, not pain and soreness and risk of infection. And that can be not good. So what you do is instead of using the fake tricks like pushing, you just fold. Fold what?

All the whole planet shits by squatting. But we have a chair. So it's hard to squat on that chair unless you can get up on it. And you can. You can do that. But then they're going to splash and there's going to be all kinds of – you're going to have to lay paper towels down into the – Take your pants off all the way. Take your pants off all the way and then it gets splashy.

But instead, you can just lean forward. It's the simplest way in the world. It doesn't cost a penny. All you got to do is sit on your shitter and lay your belly onto your thighs. It's easier to do than squatting, right, because it doesn't involve the ankles, right, where you might have shortness of the tendons there, and you might not be able to squat down. But if you just lean forward on the toilet, on your belly, and breathe, right?

Or drink a glass of water instead of a cup of coffee, and sit on the toilet, and lay your body to your thighs, right? And breathe, and wait. And you just, and don't force it, don't push it. Just wait for that peristalsis, because this is how your nervous system is built. Your nervous system is built so that when that thigh approximates the belly wall, it's against the colon on either side. And you're talking to your colon. As you breathe, it changes the internal shapes, not pushing but breathing.

And your body will be like, oh, yeah, and it will start that wave and that poop will come out. All right. Let me ask this. Does your shit come out on the inhale? Does your shit come out on the inhale? Does your shit come out on the inhale? When you're breathing, does your shit come out on the inhale? Yeah. Yeah, see, yeah.

Absolutely. Your shit comes out on the inhale. Because when you take that inhale, you notice it starts to relax. That's right. Your bowels, it goes up. That's it, that wah. I like that. You should play the sound

wham. That could be an additional thing. So this guy needs to lean forward a lot. Okay, now look at this picture. See, there's a problem there. He's got his squatty potty, but he's sitting up still. Lean against your thighs, right? Because the squatty potty, if there's no flexibility

in the hip or ankle, it's going to push your back against the seat, and you just change the position of the body without changing the relationship of the abdomen to the thighs. You have to change the relationship of the abdomen or the thighs to poop naturally. And that's what squatting does automatically. When you squat, it brings your thighs to your abdomen. But it doesn't matter, squatty potty or no squatty potty, the goal is to orient the thighs and abdomen into contact.

And as you breathe, you bring them into contact. When they're close, you breathe, they'll get closer. So it's that breath. And that's like a structural signal to your nervous system that this is the pooping time, and it'll kick in. We had a legendary jumper slash dunker on our show before. A dumper? A dumper. Legendary dumper.

A legendary dumper. They could just lay it down by the pound. He might be able to. Maybe. So did I hear that wrong mark dunker dunker dunker basketball oh cool cool yeah and uh he talked about eating in a position where um he would eat with uh seated on seated on the floor with his uh knee kind of pressed against his stomach so they didn't eat too much. It was like natural, like in his culture where they would do that. And so it just wouldn't get like, you know, in America we tend to, you know, eat our food, get pretty full, and then go back for seconds,

and then go back for dessert, and just continue to eat. But we're in a regular seated position. We don't have any pressure built up. And so if you're in that built-up pressure position while you're eating, it should prevent you from overeating. That's interesting. Yeah. Might be a tougher one to do. All these things happen around the planet.

You sit around a family plate squatting. Right. And it makes it more challenging to breathe. So then your breathing should be better. The amount of food that you consume should be a little bit better. Everything should be slightly improved by just this small, like weird for us, but these small changes. Yeah, the eating is an interesting, interesting thing. What's the right amount of food?

What's your body's signal? When do we feel satiated right and uh we tend to eat fast there's no time to be satiated and you can put a lot of food in a short amount of time no intention yeah no intention when we chew our food and the enzymes from our saliva mix with it it digests it in our mouth and there's like sweetness comes out, different flavors come out that you might taste if you just bolt your food, right? And actually, those flavors give you pleasure, and pleasure actually gives you a satiation trigger.

So if you skip the pleasure in your food, you will not feel full and you'll just eat more of it, right? And it's interesting that way. Like my dog does. My dog pretends that she didn't get fed. She eats it in like one second. She's a bolter. Dogs bolt because they're trying not to get killed.

Right. So then they're also fighting with the other dogs, right, in nature, right? Yeah. You got a pack of dogs and they're all trying to eat the same carcass and they're going to bolt it down and run away and throw it up and chew it in their own time. We don't have to eat that way. Yeah. Yeah. We can slow it down a little bit.

We can slow it down a little bit, yeah. Are there some other diseases that are very visible? Are there some things that you've seen that have kind of surprised or shocked you where you're like, man, I didn't know I would be able to see that somebody had diabetes or something like that? There's so – well, I'll tell you, cancer can come up in a thousand different ways. That is not one thing for anyone who thinks cancer is one thing. It's a whole lot of different things. It can look like a lot of different things to you. It can look like a lot of different things to you. It can look like a lot of different things.

So, for instance, the cancer can look like blue cheese, you know, where it's kind of gone through the organs and there's like patches of different color and it looks like blue cheese. Or it can be a tumor. It can be a tumor wrapped around something. a tumor. It can be a tumor wrapped around something. I've seen tumors crawling up the spinal column, you know, that end up in the brain and go all the way right through the whole spinal, like a cancerous spinal column. That was pretty strange. I mean, there's so many. But maybe what surprises me more than the weird things I've seen that way is that someone was alive with that, you know, and our incredible resilience as human beings. We're like weirdly fragile and resilient at the same time.

I mean, we're not promised a day, and you can walk in front of a pickle truck and the gig is up right then. And then also, we can endure these incredible, bizarre states within our bodies for years and years. I mean, I've seen bodies congenital one lung. That was crazy. Like this lady had never had a lung on the one side. She was just a one lung person. We had a woman on the show that had one lung, right? She was like a MMA fighter.

Wow. Right? That's amazing. Long ass time ago. I think she was friends with uh gabrielle lion but yeah and what happened was is her one lung sort of took over the one lung became kilo killer gilbert or something or the one uh lung became like almost as big as two lungs wow well that's and that's that's adaptation right and we're good at it this other version of it i saw the

person's liver just migrated into where the lung was so she had a lung on one side and a liver on the other side instead of the liver being down here the liver was here it went all the way up did the body look fairly normal she was 90 something years old wow she was a trooper yeah so i mean folks we we can you know just because you don't have this lung or that liver, we can model along on this planet and do just fine. Like with you being someone that actually sees inside the body, are there things that really concern you with obesity that might not be well known? Well, some of the issues are, again, are going to be impediment of movement.

Now, I had a 400-pound client in my rolfing practice who danced beautifully. He was a mover. He loved to dance. He rode a Harley. You know, just because you're heavy doesn't mean you can't move. But a lot of people will tell themselves that because they're heavy, they can't move, and then they'll stop moving, right?

Your knees might not be able to accommodate the weight that you're carrying, and that can inhibit your movement, and then that becomes a negative feedback loop of weight and lack of movement. But some of the things that surprised me about weight, I've dissected very heavy bodies. I had one embalmer who was convinced that I wanted the heaviest body that he could find, and so he scoured Boston for the heaviest body that he could find. And so he scoured Boston for the heaviest cadavers that could be found and gave them all to me. So I dissected numerous 300-400-pound bodies over the course of several years.

And it's interesting, like the fat around the kidney grows. Like where do you put it, right? So there's the surface sleeve of the body where you can store fat. But there's also within the visceral spaces around your organs. So we have these little floating fatty appendages on our colon, and they can be like little flower petals along your colon, and that's typical and expected. But if you're 400 pounds, those little petals are going to turn into like weighty appendages. So they can be like a half a pound a piece, right, all in a chain along the colon. Or you can have incredible thickness in the mesentery or the mesocolon,

which are like the linings of the cavity can become thick with pads of fat or the packing fat around the kidney, which we need. If you don't have fat around your kidney, you're in trouble. You have to have fat around your kidney. Fat is not a bad thing. Our culture makes it seem like a bad thing. Fat is a necessary and normal part of our body. But if you have like a whole lot of fat, right, say around your kidney, and maybe that's where your body has a propensity to accumulate it, then it's like an avocado, right? You have like this little pit inside, and that's the kidney. And you can have a fatty body around your kidney that's as big as a watermelon.

I've seen it that way. And when it is like that, then what does it do? Well, it takes up space, right? And so that's going to displace your organs forward, and they kind of fall out of your pelvis. Now, instead of being a source of lightness in your body, in that visceral space that's being pulled up into your rib cage like I talked about, now it's become a source of weight, and it leans and falls out of your pelvis,

and now it's dragging you down. That's going to inhibit your movement as well, right? Negatively impact the whole structure. Yeah. So we're talking about large amounts of weight here that do that. You can have a nice, even distribution of 100 pounds of weight on the sleeve of the surface of your body and look pretty hot and elegant. And that's not a bad way to move through space. So we can't really say what's the right amount and the right place from one body to the next. But for a given

individual, we can say, oh, you carry that really beautifully. You carry that well. Or it looks like you might have more than your frame can accommodate. And you might be doing yourself injury by carrying that much weight. But then again, we don't always have a choice. We tend to think that weight is all about choice. But there are people with lipedema have a choice. We tend to think that weight is all about choice, but there are people with lipedema, which is a connective tissue disorder in the fatty tissues where the lipids don't stay in the cells, and they kind of leak out,

and you have free lipids that you can't remetabolize. Those people could eat a small amount of food, and it's going to all end up below their hips in giant legs like elephantiasis or something like that. And that's not something that you can point out and say that's all about you. No, that's a connective tissue disorder. How common is that though? More common than you think.

Okay. Yeah, and it has multiple stages, lipedema. And so folks can be sort of first or second or third or fourth stage lipedema. You may end up in a wheelchair and no amount of dieting is going to change that. It's a connective tissue disorder, and it's actually more common in women than in men, although men can have lipidema. It's an interesting and troublesome disorder, particularly because we have so much antipathy towards people who carry too much weight in our culture, and we have fat hatred in these people. They've got no choice about this, and yet they're

going to be put into the category of an overeater when they're actually having a connective tissue disorder. What about the actual structure of the body? Like even in these larger individuals, I'm guessing, totally guessing since I don't know, but like I'd imagine the bones are similar. Like the bone structure of a male and a female are probably similar i know there could be small differences in like how much they weigh and i understand there's bone density but uh bones are as variable as your face right so i mean between us we got eyeballs and noses mouths right so you know there's a basic pattern, but we all have very unique visages, right? You can go to any given bone in a body.

Your ulna, your ulna, your ulna, your ulna, your ulna. Put them all in a row and marvel at how different they are, right? Even though, like, there's still faces, right? There's still certain bony prominences on each one of those bones that are recognizable. And yet this one is this thick and this one is this thick and this one is twisted a little bit. And this one, because it all depends on what that person has been doing, what forces have been placed upon those tissues to generate a certain kind of shape. I do dissection classes for the last 30 years. And one of them is a 10-day class where I have the last four days and we skeletonize.

So I have the groups where we take off all the tissues of the body except for the ligaments. So it all holds together, right? And we sort of suspend them by the shoulders, and we put four bodies side by side. So we started from scratch, from the skin, brought them all the way through, get down to the skeleton, and we just stand there with our jaws hanging open at the beautiful differences in the skeleton and the continuity from one to the next one. So we tend to think of the female pelvis, right, as more of a flared thing, right,

that's able to carry a child, and maybe the male pelvis is more organized this way. But when you actually look at pelvises, those are tendencies, and you can see little old ladies are 90 years old with a very uh upright kind of pelvis and not flared and vice versa and so we put them one in a row and we just compare literally bone by bone and they're different everyone from body to body and from side to side because not even from side to side on your own body are they're the same maybe you're a tennis player maybe maybe you did some behavior

that changed the bony morphology even because we can't change our bones what do you notice about like maybe the density because i remember we were talking the gym like you've seen some people with bones you could literally stick something through so yeah well osteoporosis is a serious a serious problem because you can get super fragile in your bones. We know that's an issue in our culture. I have a friend, Rebecca Rothstein. She's got a business called Buff Bones where her whole thing is all about facilitating, helping people osteoporosis through functional movement,

using their bodies in a way that creates stress through those tissues. But you've got to be careful at a certain stage of osteoporosis. You're going to break if you do certain things, right? You have to be a little careful. But in the lab, it's so easy to see. I mean, you can knock on it with your hands, or you can bat on it with a scalpel handle. Or in some bodies, I can literally, as you mentioned,

I can pass the scalpel into the bone. There's no resistance because the outer surface of it, that hard outer core of the bone has become like a sponge. And those bodies break easily. Even when you're turning them in the lab, they'll break. And when you've gotten to that stage, that's a troublesome way to live. And we can see little fragile people and they're really at tremendous risk from a fall or something. Pelvis shatters and there's no putting that humpty dumpty back together again. Do you notice the difference in the thickness of like tendons too of like individuals who resistance train versus maybe people? I mean, I know you don't always know the history, but like resistance training is getting more popular amongst older populations because they're realizing it can improve your bone density.

It can improve the resilience of your tissues. It would be so satisfying to have a ton more information on the bodies that I work with. We have a funny thing about anonymity in our culture of donation. I don't think it's necessarily to the advantage of our education. I don't think any harm really comes from knowing who the donor is. The project that I just did that I'm touring around the country right now, the donor was a friend. I actually knew this man.

He was my friend's dad, and he had visited our home many times, and this is a friend of the family, right? And he donated his body for the project. And so we knew a lot about that body is all I'm saying to your point. But most of the time, I know nothing, and I'm just trying to put pieces together. It would be interesting to have more information. But even then, I'll tell you, there was one program that I used for many years, and I would get a sheet of paper with the handwriting of the donor with a page of their medical history that they would

write out for us, which was super interesting and often wrong, right? Because, you know, you go to the doctors, they say something, it's fancy words, you don't know what they said, right? And then you start to tell a story about what happened to you or what they did in your surgery, and it's not actually what happened, you know? And then you write that down that down for me and i'm like you didn't have that taken out it's right here you had something else done you know i'm saying so they that people don't even know what happened to them oftentimes so you know we're we're not we're not an always the own best stewards of information about our body Yo, are those woman sandals? Hold up.

These sandals are rooted in millennia of masculinity. Pretty much all the ancient Greek warriors wore them. Also, the ancient Aztec warriors used to wear them in the battle. They're called cacti. The Zulu warriors would march hundreds of miles in them. And so did the Romans. They conquered a bit of land themselves. That's great to know.

Is that the new Victoria's Secret job? Grab your Flex Sandal now at powerproject.live. What is so amazing about foreskin? Oh my gosh. How many hours does this podcast go for hopefully at least a little bit more okay mine's gone man i'm sorry chopped away when i was a wee child yeah and and that was that was not nice uh i'm telling you the foreskin is amazing and the thing is if you lead with what's amazing about the foreskin then you're going to start scratching your head and asking questions like, why did they take it away?

So the foreskin, right, is not an extra, it's not extra skin, right? The foreskin is the skin of the shaft of the penis when it's erect, right? So the flaccid penis is a different shape than the erect penis, right? So when the penis becomes erect, it has to still have skin covering it, but it's changed its length. It's changed its girth. It still needs to be dressed. It still needs to be covered. The foreskin is the skin that's there to accommodate the shaft of the penis in an erection.

Now, if you have an intact penis, is what I like to call it, an intact, undissected penis, then also there'll be play, right, in the skin because you have enough for the erection and then some. So the shaft of the penis is designed to move in and out of itself, of the penis is designed to move in and out of itself right and the skin uh because it's a little loose even an erect penis will move back and forth over the glands and that feels good and that fore skin is is the most erogenous part of the organ it's the sexiest most nerve so fucking it's the nerve filled part of the organ. And what it does is it gets a little slippery down there at the end, right? Because you have that viscous substance that comes out of the glands, right?

And it's kind of clear and slippery. And that's to lubricate the movement of the foreskin over the glands, which makes it feel even better, right? Now, you take that whole unit and you put it in something else, a hole in the wall, a good friend, someone you love, right? And you're – Fucking going glory hole over here. He said we can talk about stuff.

That's amazing, though. Talk a sock puppet, whatever you got. Lots of crusty socks, bro. Hand with a velvet glove. I don't care what you got. And then what you're going to do is you're going to facilitate the movement of that skin over the glands, and eventually you're going to reach a point where the electromagnetics of that reaches a point where you ejaculate, right? The electromagnetics of that reaches a point where you ejaculate, right?

So if you put that in another place, right, then that place that you put it is protected. Wow. There's no abrasion, right? You have, say you're in a vagina, for instance, right? Now, a vagina has a different design, right? It has kind of a circumferential erectile tissue that expands like a like a filling donut right and then as a donut fills then that aperture gets tighter right and it squeezes on whatever might be inside of it so the vagina pins right it pins the skin the foreskin to the shaft of the penis which is moving in and out of itself.

The penis is not supposed to be abrading the vagina. So if you follow that design, then the vagina is enjoying pressure. The whole vulva enjoys pressure. That's the kind of way those nerves are set up, the pressure of one pubic bone pressing against the clitoris and all that. You have a pressure system that's pleasurable. And then it's not – the pleasure doesn't come from rubbing your penis off on a vagina for the vagina partner. That's just abrasion and irritation. It's injuring the delicate epithelial walls of the vagina. That's

not the design. The design is that you move in and out of your own skin while your partner enjoys the pressure of that movement exchange, right? They get off on the pressure. You get off on the friction of yourself to yourself, right? And then the whole party is nice. Now, what happens if you, right and then the whole party is is nice now what happens if you there's more but wait folks there's more right so the the because the the glands of the penis is normally covered in that skin it's protected it's an aperture it's an opening in your body and all the apertures of our body are protected right we got eyelids we don't you know we get the sand man you don't cut the eyelid off right it'll dry it out, right? So what happens to the glands when you take away the foreskin?

Dry. It gets dried out. It gets sclerified. If you look at it under a microscope and cross-section, you'll have 20 extra layers of squamous epithelium dried out there. It's a callus. It's like the butt of your hand instead of the inside of your lip, right? That's the design.

It's like the inside of your lip, of the inside of your lip, right? That's the design. It's like the inside of your lip and it's protected and covered, right? And as the skin, right, because this is skin that goes two ways, right? You pull it back and you see skin. You pull it forward. So there's an inner layer of skin surrounding the glands. And that skin, like all the skin of our body, sloughs off, right? So how does it slough off? It's like apoptosis.

It's little enzymes that like explode the cell and it sloughs off. So those enzymes in the normal structure slough off, and they have an antibacterial property. Because if they could kill your cells, they'll kill bacterial cells too. So that's your immune system. Right? That foreskin is your immune system for that part of your body.

It's a mechanical protection of the opening. Right. It's also creating the right moisture environment. And it's sloughing off skin that we call it smegma, which is a Greek word for soap. Right. And that's not a bad thing. That has enzymes in it that have antibacterial properties. You don't want to build up too much. Right. Because it can Because then it gets sticky and the skin can stick to itself and you get adhesions, right? So you clean yourself.

But still, it belongs there, that stuff. And the vulva also has sphagma and we can take a bath, we can wash our face, we can wash our intimate parts. So we have that foreskin as the immune system of the penis. It's also the most erogenous aspect of the penis. It's also the protection of the partner in terms of the movement and the friction, and it's also stimulating, right? So this is all good stuff, right? This is all good stuff. Now, what happens if we take that away, okay?

stuff now what happens if we take that away okay so if you take that away and they take it away in a serious amount yeah they do now they actually protracted right in order to get more like more is better somehow in this case and it is if you're going to sell it because they do upsell that foreskin right because they're going to sell it into the biologicals companies who are going to – and they're going to – you can look it up online. They're going to call it neonatal dermal fibroblasts. Which is soup for rich people. I fucking knew it. Some billionaire out there fucking ate my foreskin in his sleep. It's worse than that.

It's hand cream for facials is what it is. And it's not that kind of feet. It's worse than that. It's hand cream for facials is what it is. And it's not that kind of facial. It's the other kind of facial. Type in facials, Andy. Don't type in facials. So what they do is they take those cells and they multiply

them in the laboratory and then they sell them to companies and they use them for product. And you pay for it. So you pay for the surgery which you've been told is useful or purposeful. And then you pay for the disposal

of the tissue. And the disposal of the tissue fee means you're paying them to sell the tissue. And you signed away for it on that consent form that somebody handed you. It's a whole fucking business. This is fucked. It's the most common surgery in America

is harvesting that skin and giving it to somebody else. So, and what is the effect in terms of sex function is to take away pleasure. Okay? Because that's the most erogenous part of the organ. And you just took it away.

And that was why it was done in this country. It was done in this country as part of the great awakening. And the Protestant moralizers wandered around this country having tent meetings. You can read about it. And Tom Sawyer and the whole town got religion. Right? So you have those tent meetings. And they preach circumcision as a cure for the moral ills of lust and masturbation. Right now, fellas, did you stop masturbating?

No. So it didn't work. It was false. But it did change the sex dynamic, okay? So someone like that crazy man Kellogg back in the day, have you talked about old Mr. Kellogg? Please talk about Mr. Kellogg. Well, Mr. Kellogg was as much of a nutcase as ever was, and it's not because he was the genius behind Corn Flakes.

It's because he was as anti-sex a Victorian as ever was born. He never had sex in his life, except he did get an enema from his male servant on a daily. So I don't know what that was all about, but he had adopted children because he was so anti-sex that he never had sex with his wife wow but he didn't take it up the ass on a daily with yogurt and coffee and anything else he could put up there probably gumby and gerbils and god knows what else made it up there so anyway

he um so he he advocated putting like little spiky underwear on small boys and cauterizing the clitoris. Oh, what? Cauterize the clitoris. This was recommended. All he had to do was just come out. It would have been fine. It would have saved so much trouble, right? But he was part of a general movement.

The doctors were on board. Everybody was on board with this. So circumcision was introduced in this country for the specific purpose of reducing sexual pleasure right to change the dynamics of sex take that away from us right and then what years go by and maybe they change their ideas about that a little bit but once it becomes part of the culture and it's part of the money system and stuff like that and then you realize you can use the stuff in the biologicals market then, then they'll create every conceivable rationalization. Oh, it cures AIDS. It does all kinds of things. It's ridiculous. Every year, there'll be one or two articles come out in the

New York Times telling you how glorious and wonderful is circumcision. I read an article from the CBS News that was online on their website. This was some years ago. And it was basically being sad about how people don't do circumcision anymore. It's as if they don't like vaccination or something. Oh, my God. They literally tried to tie circumcision to vaccination because this is clearly a powerful prophylactic for health for boys. It's not. That's garbage. Think about it this way.

You take away the skin. Now it's not. That's garbage. Think about it this way. You take away the skin. Now it's tight, right? You get an erection. You don't have enough skin to accommodate the rectal tissue. You end up with a bent stiffy, right? It doesn't look quite the same anymore. And where does it get the skin from to cover itself? It's got to recruit it from the pubic area.

So now you've got hair halfway up the shaft of your penis. And now you're putting that in your partner. That's not hygienic to be filling your partner with your hair. It wasn't designed that way. The penis shaft is not a hairy thing. The pubis area is hairy. But if the skin that you're putting, that's not hygienic, number one. It's also not hygienic to dry out the glands.

They get cracked and sore, and you can have bacteria get into it because it's no longer protected by the substance your body produces. That's an antibacterial to protect that opening. And you're abrading your partner and putting that partner at risk, right, because of microabrasions inside of their body of other infections. So all of these are not in service of health at all. And the fuck thing is, like, some parents maybe think that they're doing it out of love for their child because it's in the Bible, right? Like, so a lot of, like, I'm Christian. I was circumcised.

And it's in the Bible. Let's talk about that Bible bit. Okay. So it's in the Bible. But what part of the Bible? It's in Old Testament. It was the covenant between Abraham and Abraham's God, right? So that all seems fine. They made an agreement. This is what it looks like. And you're going to be my people. And this

is how we're going to know you're my people. He had just about to execute Isaac, his son, but the angel of the Lord stayed his hand and a goat showed up and he sacrificed that instead. And let's call circumcision at that point in history an improvement on child sacrifice how about that how about they came into the land of cana and they saw them doing child sacrifice and from an anthropological perspective well let's not kill the boys let's just take a little bit of their skin right that'll be better right so so then you do that but how much skin did they take just just a little bit they didn. The process that you endured as an American in this country is very different than what the Abrahamic tradition did at that time and place, right? They made the mark of circumcision. So there was the exposure of the tip of the glands.

They didn't protract the skin forward and cut off half the skin of the shaft of the penis, right? No, they just took off the end of it. And this little bit of exposure became the sign that you were part of the covenant. Well, all well and good. We can do whatever we want. It's a free will universe, right? Now, what they're doing to us in America today is the stripping of the glands. It's a different process where you protract the skin forward of that infant, you clamp it, you put a cigar snipper on it, and you cut that skin off in the majority. You take that and sell it upline, and you tell everybody you did a favor to that person.

You didn't do a favor to that person. You just robbed them of the sex mechanics for the rest of their life. Now, as surely as they invented circumcision, they also invented restoration. How long is the restoration like is there too late to get restoration it's never too late whoa it's never too late okay i've been working on restoring my foreskin i don't i'm not urgent about it you know what i'm

saying i'm running around all the time it so when you it depends on the level of cut what it takes to restore your foreskin right because not everybody's been cut the same way so you can look at someone at a gym and you're like oh is he circumcised i'm really not so sure you know so i i never i didn't know what i was looking at i was i was at the at the turkish baths in new york city at a at a stag party right and we're all sitting around having a steam room and the guys on the other side were these orthodox men. Yeah. And they're sitting there and I'm looking across through the steam. Hey, he's staring at their junk.

And I'm saying like, what do they got over there? Because they got more foreskin than any of us. Right. And they had been circumcised by a mohel in the pattern of their tradition. And the foreskin. Did you get in conversation with these guys? No, no, no. I just stared rudely.

Yeah, I have a question. This is going to sound weird, but you can trust me. I cut bodies open for a living. Everything's cool and I am staring at your dick. You just have amazing foreskin. I couldn't help it. It's like you're having a chat over there. Is he staring at my dick? I'm like, yes! I am! I am not shy here.

So what I noticed was that the skin was over the corona of the glands, right? And just the tip of the glands was exposed. And I look at us, and we got the whole corona. So what are the stages that could be done? So that would be one, let's call that stage one cut, right, where just the tip of the glands is exposed, but the skin gathers up over the corona of the glands and covers most of it. Stage one cut.

Stage two would be where the skin bunches up to the glands, but doesn't quite get over the corona, doesn't quite cover any of the glands. That would be stage two. Let's say stage three is where you have some wrinkling, right, in the skin of the shaft of the penis when it's flaccid, but it doesn't actually bunch up to the corona at all. And then say stage four cut would be where in flaccid, normal temperature hang length, there's no bunching at all it's it's it there's no um there's no wrinkling of the skin at all right and then say stage five is when you've actually had other parts of your penis injured through the procedure so where that cigar slipper snipper slipped and cut off half of the glands and that happens every day in america folks this is not this is not impossible

right this must cause some sort of trauma it can cause death yeah people can die they they'll do sex changes based on the accidents that happen in circumcision in our culture i'm not saying it's happening you know a hundred thousand times a day i'm saying this is part of the risk circumcision is not without risk and people are rudely surprised when it goes wrong right and you de-glove the penis that can kill you right like oops we took it all right so that can de-gloving injuries can you die from that you get sepsis and you die right so uh so you can think about what i just said in terms of the scale and say well how much was took from me, right? What have I got left? And

then where can I start? So if you have skin already over the corona of the glands, then there are devices, stretching devices. Even if you have it wrinkled up to the glands, you can pull the skin over that stretching device and wear that device and it'll hands-free stretch you while you go about your business right now if you have a stage four cut which is what i started with where there's no wrinkling no nothing if you have an erection it's tight and you kind of like it's like strained right and what is that that's an abrasion stick you got there right and and you should take responsibility for it before you rub up rub some friend down to to give them a rug burn inside their body right so what you can do when you you can't use any device

there's no extra skin to put on the device right that you could put and and again i'm saying this is not extra skin this is your skin right so So you take a circumferential hold, circumferential hold around the shaft of the penis. You pull in opposite directions gently. The idea is not pain, right? You just create tension because skin grows under tension. That's one of the miracles of the human body. You put skin under tension and it grows. That's how your body got bigger.

Your skin grew with it. How do you do it? You put it under tension. So the tensions that run through the forces of your fascia are going to impact your skin. Stretch it, and you're going to end up with more skin. You can do that to the shaft, to your penis, right? So you stretch in opposite directions and change the hold. 20 seconds, change the hold.

Change 20 seconds, change the hold. Change the hold, change the hold. Depending upon how big you are, change the hold. Change 20 cents. Change the hold. Change the hold. Change the hold. Depending upon how big you are, change the hold. And then within months, it'll feel different. Sex will feel different. You'll feel different. And you can feel some pride in that you're restoring your birthright. Because that's your birthright.

And you're protecting other people when you do that. I've never been happier to have what i call an uncut gem and and when my son was born we got a lot of pushback like oh you're not gonna like what do you what do you mean and then even like um people like uh in the family and friends of the family like oh but it's gonna look weird oh my god i'm like well yeah he's not going to marry you. Oh, it smells. Yeah, or it gets dirty. Yeah, well, so does your asshole if you don't wipe it.

Right? So you have to. And then the infection and this and that. And I'm like, look, I figured it out. That's right. No, my sons are intact and they're grateful. And people are like, oh, well, he should look like his father. His father is ugly.

Punch that baby in the face until it looks like pop. You shouldn't do that. And they'll say it's hygienic. And I'm like, it's not hygienic. It's the opposite of hygienic. And they'll say, well, it doesn't pull back. He has phimosis. Well, that's a confusion on the part even of pediatricians in this country.

They see an infant and the skin doesn't pull back. And it's adherent. It's not supposed to pull back. The organ is immature, right? So the foreskin is actually adherent to the glands in the infant. And when you're born, your liver is not the same as it ought to be. Your brain is not the same as it's going to be. And your penis isn't the same as it's going to be.

So it's normal and appropriate for the skin to be adherent because the urine flushes out the area underneath there. The urine is the number one humectant on the planet. It's the best moisturizer you could possibly have. Pause. That shit's getting very popular. Yeah. So urine therapy? This is a little different.

Okay, thank goodness. Urine is the most commonly used medical substance in the United States today. And you don't even know it because they fraction it and they say creatinine, urea, and your hand cream. These are fractions of urine. We are using urine in our culture all the time. It's a common medical substance. It's the most common medical substance on the planet, including in the United States.

But they just call it different things, so you don't got to think about it. And the reason why they put that in hand cream is because those uric acid crystals absorb water. They're moisturizers, right? So the best moisturizer you can have is the urine going over that glands to keep it moist. It's supposed to be moist, not dried out. So you don't want to take that away. And you don't want to prematurely retract the foreskin of an infant because, A, you'll tear it and it hurts. And that's the first thing they do in a circumcision is they take a probe and they scrape.

They scrape the foreskin off of the glands. That's the first injury. So if you just leave it alone, right, the penis will grow and the child will have erections. All night long, you have an erection, erection, erection, right? And that's going to break down those adhesions. And by the time you're 12 or so, you know, your foreskin will fully retract. And if it doesn't, you still, you don't force it, right? So this, and people will say, oh, well, I had real phimosis and my penis was being strangulated. Well, there's more than one way is to skin a cat, right? So you can actually stretch that skin, right? You can use light therapy, you can stretch

it, you can do all kinds of things. And there are real, an occasional, rare medical circumstances where circumcision would be appropriate, but to what degree, even in that instance, you can do a minimalist job. You can do a minimalist job. You can just cut that band. You don't have to do a full stripping of the glands. Andrew, let's get this man a penis pump. Can you pull up the video that I sent you? Going away prison?

Yeah. I sent you a video. It's from – Oh, a penis pump video? We're going to get to watch it it's a how-to yeah how to this is a quick aside we're gonna get to this video before you play it yeah when you were talking about stretching uh the force kid it reminded me of college soccer we had a guy i don't know if i told you he had a guy in the locker room i'm not gonna name his name jb

you know who you are he would be just chilling at locker, and he'd have a stack of pennies. And one day, you know, this is my freshman year, and I was like, guys, what does he do in the corner? He's over here sticking pennies and seeing how many pennies he can stick in his foreskin. I think he got to like nine pennies he was able to stick in there. I was like, dog, what the fuck? Swinging around. That's not that different.

That's not that different from the techniques you might use, like a weighted bell to stretch the foreskin back to restore it. Maybe JB was onto something. I think JB was onto something. Yeah, I want to know where it is now. Is it like throw it over your shoulder? Tie it in a knot? I mean, because you can keep on going.

Is that a scarf, JB? It's so warm. I didn't use your real name, bro, so no one knows who you are? It's so warm. I didn't use your real name, bro, so no one knows who you are. It's so soft. It's so soft, this scarf. It's like alpaca. Let's see. What do we got here, Mark?

Yeah, get some volume on there. Feel that. Tell me that doesn't feel like a cock. What is it? It doesn't. like a cock the other day I pleasured myself to the image of Mrs. Buttersworth she got me there like I was on the express A train bing bang boom talk about a river of ejaculate a volume I had never seen in my lifetime now i know what the villages of pompeii felt like so this was going through my head as you were saying certain things

well now i know what those sad villagers of Pompeii felt like. That's awesome. So there's – well, you pushed one of my buttons there. Hey, back to the penis pump. The penis pump will promote blood flow to the area. So the whole time we've been talking about getting blood flow to certain muscles and stuff, as you already know, since you've been dissecting bodies for so long. The penis works very similar. So the penis pump can help kind of restore getting blood flow to the area. How is the penis pump different than my hand?

Oh, well, the penis pump has like a vacuum seal. Vacuum seal. It like sucks your penis like this way, like if this is the cylinder and it like pulls it. I'm all for any form of penis sucking. It gets more blood flow to the area. The thing is people always are thinking about like, oh, it's going to like increase the size or increase the length. And it can because it can promote promote more blood flow to the area but it's not like you're going to be two inches bigger than what you had previously

you know what i mean yeah but you're you'll be circulating well and yeah it'll be functioning better which is the key penises are super interesting to dissect as well oh okay right because of that blood flow is very interesting penises are are like erectile tissue, which basically means spongy fascia. So it's spongy fascia that fills with blood. And I've seen fibrous penises. I've also dissected out length helpers and erection helpers. So people who get things installed to improve a situation. So there's kind of like expensive ones and cheap ones.

So you have penis pumps and different things. Yeah, I interviewed a doctor recently, and he said that he's doing these surgeries all the time. Penis implants. Yeah, penis implants, yeah. So yeah, I had one dude who had a... It was... He had the cheap version, which was just two 8-inch nylon stiffies that were installed in the dorsum of his penis.

And so he kind of had a permanent 8-inch long hard-on, which, of course, now, you know nylon. You have nylon things. It's flexible a little bit, right? So he had to tuck that thing obviously where are you going to put it and then it kind of froze in the tuck position so he had an eight inch curved penis and when we just laid those painful yeah and we laid those two eight inch devices out on the table there and we all stood around it and kind of stared at him sort of took it in at an

emotional level and then one woman at the table looked at it and said, that's my husband. And we all looked at her and we looked at it and she's like, and it's fine. We're like, awesome. I was intimidated. Oh, my God. Go ahead. I was curious. Did you want to stay on the dick though like i don't want

to move away from the subject if there's something else go ahead okay um i was curious about the feet because like we we've talked about that along the podcast and you know you can literally see how the you know the footwear someone's been wearing for their life you can see their feet literally crush in like oh yeah My grandma lived to 100. And one of the things I noticed, because she kept active, but there was a point where she had to really slow down. But her feet, it's like they calcified a little bit and they didn't move as well. Lost the differential movement in the feet. Right.

That's a huge problem. So, yeah, what do you notice with feet? And I guess we do a lot of stuff with bare feet, barefoot shoes and stuff. So how do you notice uh what do you notice with feet and i guess you know we do a lot of stuff with bare feet barefoot shoes and stuff so how do you see this affecting people yeah we could go off of on shoes the way we went off on toilets okay right because uh our shoes are not doing our feet any huge favors uh my grandma talk grandma, she had feet like pointy triangles, right? And so she had bunions on both of her feet. That was ultimately her end, right?

She got operated on her bunions, and that was the end. But she was 90. Anyway, that's a shoe thing, right? And that is not healthy. And when your feet are forced into an arch that doesn't belong to them, right, and you're not having differential movement, you need to – the foot is like a diaphragm that's pumping your lymphatics. It's pumping your blood. It's a pump helping to improve your circulation, right? Yeah. Improve your circulation, right? This is why walking is so important because you get that pump in the lowest diaphragm of your body to help facilitate the blood flow and the lymphatic flow back.

So you need to have that differential movement. And we lose it because we put our feet into boxes called shoes, and then we reduce the movement potential, the dynamic movement potential. Now, all three of us, no, all two of us are standing on these crazy mats that you offer me, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Like, I just love it. Like, I'm just giving myself a foot massage through this whole conversation, and that's changing the position of my bones relative to each other. But in the lab, I absolutely see the frozen form of the foot, right?

And the way the bones have conformed to that person's favorite shoe and and the way that the bones have moved out of position in order to accommodate those shoe and then you lose that diaphragmic function of the foot and your whole health deteriorates from it so i mean that's the foundation of the tower and you need to have it be a dynamic foundation because gravity is going through this body and it's never still you know you can't hold still you put it you can hang a pendulum off your dick and put it down to the ground right and and then you just stand over a piece of paper and put a little piece of graphite on the end of that pendulum it's going to just be tracing a little scribble on the ground all the time no matter how how still you try and be. You could do it on your tailbone too.

So that's the thing. We need to have that dynamism. But I think as much as we use shoes, get out of them too. I'm not saying don't ever wear a shoe. And there are people who get fanatical. I had a barefoot marathoner take my class, and his feet was like Sasquatch. I mean, he had the most amazing feet. They were thick, muscular feet. Barefoot marathoner?

Barefoot marathoner. Yeah, he was a barefoot marathoner. Wow. And he had some crazy ass looking feet. His body had adapted to that behavior, right? It took practice to get up to that, of course. But what he evolved in his feet were these thick, muscular, widely spread feet. And they were really cool looking. I wouldn't want them. You can't even put a shoe on, probably. You probably couldn't put a shoe on, yeah, at that point.

But, you know, you grow massive calluses. You grow moccasins on your feet if you're barefoot, basically. You're going to grow massive calluses that are going to protect you. Who are the types of people that show up to your seminars? I heard the one here was very successful, sold out. Oh, for the talk, yeah. going to protect to protect you who are the types of people that show up to your seminars i heard the one here was very successful sold out oh for the talk yeah i yeah we packed out the railroad museums theater what a beautiful museum that is we had a good time visiting it rachel and i and then we filled the theater yeah and folks come uh massage therapists uh we had biodynamic craniosacral osteopath types coming we had yoga folks pilates

folks structural integrators we had the 10 security you from from Nevada City 20 of them came down and came to the talk so those are the kind of folks who filled the talk yeah pts probably a couple of OTs those kind of folks all just from following your interest following what you love following yeah it's all word of mouth i haven't really advertised and i got a mailing list and a facebook page but i don't know how to spend a dime on advertising we just don't have that diamond so we we just um people talk about it and they're excited and i do have after 30 years folks kind of know i'm out there and if i say i'm going to come visit they get they get into it so the moment, we are traveling a country. My partner in all things, Rachel and I, we're going to 111 cities over the course of 15 months to deliver a five-hour presentation on the nervous system.

I had the opportunity to dissect a beautiful donor form. I spent five months in a lab dissecting this one form. full donor form. I spent five months in a lab dissecting this one form. And that became the basis for the conversation that I can bring about the nervous system, trying to help people connect to it. If you see it, you can connect to it. If you connect to it, you can change it. You can live in it differently. You can embody it. So that's kind of what I'm doing on the road right now. Do you have a link? Oh, a link. Or the link will be anything?

GilHatley.com. If you go to GilHatley.com, the nerve tour, that would be the link. There we go. Outstanding. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure, Mark. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later. Bye. Woo-hoo. We did it.