Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 374 - Sleep Is Irreplaceable ft. Dr. Burhenne

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Dr. Mark Burhenne is a board certified dentist, founder of AskTheDentist.com, and best selling author, TedX speaker and dental surgeon. At his private practice, he works with patients to help them optimize their health by providing top tier dental hygiene. As founder of www.AskTheDentist.com, he educates those curious about mouth health, and aims to provide a safe place for people to come forward with any of their dental related questions. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support us by visiting our sponsors! ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/power25 Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 25% off and free shipping on orders of $99! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Power Project crew, thank you for checking out today's episode. This episode was recorded on April 21st and is with Dr. Mark Breen. Mark Breen is a dentist and we got deep, deep, deep into sleep. You guys know that we absolutely love this type of conversation. And what's fantastic is, I said this on the podcast, the more you get to know about a certain subject, the more you realize you don't know anything about it. And same goes with, with this, um, the more we know about sleep, the more questions we have. And he was the perfect

person to ask because he gave us straight answers. A lot of times when we have other guests that are just way, way too damn smart, they kind of, they go right over our heads. Uh, Mark did not do that to us at all. Um, so huge, huge value and huge thanks to him for explaining everything the way he did. We also talked about how, um, you know, just nasal breathing in general is healthy for you, but specifically for the Corona virus and how it can protect you. And real quick, I've said it multiple times in the past. If you guys haven't, please make sure you're taking advantage of markbell.com markbell.com is where Mark Bell posts his daily workouts every single

day so if you don't have a home gym uh you don't have a trainer right now you don't have uh obviously you don't have your gym to go to because everyone's been shut down this is an awesome backup plan and it's 100 free please head over to markbell.com register and you'll gain access to the entire website for 30 days and of course I said, absolutely zero cost to you right now. And lastly, we are still running the 15% off home fitness items over at markbellslingshot.com. Home fitness items includes all slingshots, all hip circles, all apparel, and all sport knee sleeves. We understand that everyone's gym got shut down. That sucks. So we're trying to do our best to help spruce up home workouts so that we still stay on top of your fitness. This sale is going to run from April 22nd to April 24th. So depending on when you actually hear this episode, the sale may be going, may not still

be going. So hopefully it is. Hopefully you take advantage of it. Again, that's at markbellslingshot.com. All slingshots, all hip circles, all apparel, and all sport knee sleeves are currently 15% off. Please head over there right now and take advantage of that. Thank you again for checking out this episode. If you guys like what you're hearing, please reach out to Dr. Breen and reach out to us at MarkBell'sPowerProject on Instagram. And that's it for me. So, ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy the show. A question I have for him is, you know, if we eat properly, do we need to brush our teeth?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Kind of see what he says about that. question i have for him is uh you know if we eat properly do we need to brush our teeth oh yeah yeah kind of see what he kind of see what he says about that i actually think that some of the stuff i saw no now we got you can hear you yep okay um well some of the stuff that i saw on him it sounds like he would like for people to to be able to do a lot of home care for themselves and i thought i thought that's genius because all they all they teach you to do when you're young is just to kind of brush your teeth. And then, you know, if you have a parent that cares, they'll teach you to floss. And that's kind of usually the end of the discussion. But you know, you can you can buy stuff online very easily and have a little bit of just like the guy

was talking about yesterday doing your own surgery. You know, you can get stuff online very easily and have a little bit of uh just like the guy was talking about yesterday doing your own surgery you know you can get stuff uh online to help get rid of tartar and plaque and and things like that very easily and it seems like like the dentist thing is is a weird setup too like you go there twice a year but there's like nothing else you do for your health that's remotely close to that that's the only that makes a lot your health. That's remotely close to that. That's the only, that makes a lot of sense, but you don't go to the doctor twice a year to check on your heart and your blood pressure. And I don't know your glucose levels and like,

why wouldn't you? I mean, that kind of makes a lot of sense that that makes more sense to get your body checked on than your teeth almost, you know? Yeah. Dude, that's a sick shirt defensive

rookie of the year nick bosa we made it in house oh really because he because he plants the flag after he uh after he after he sacks the quarterback or whatever yeah that's dope heck yeah yeah we that's how we got on tv i think is because we i think it's because we made we made the shirt i think because they saw us like cheering and wearing these shirts andy and i were wearing these shirts see and now that's definitely a uh i'll say i'll say a wealthy person thing because there's a lot of people that bootleg shirts at the at the stadium and they're not getting on tv right right right what's up in sema you think so like there's a lot of other people making their own shirts dude yeah especially

i can but at uh so obviously not on mark bell's level but like if he back in the day at candlestick there'd be like the most unique awesome amazing shirts that you can't buy anywhere you could only buy them like in the parking lot at candlestick park it was sick like i mean like just really like creative shirts but like if they get caught you know because they can't use the the logo yeah you know it's a little bit different but here's mark bell getting on monday night football i was on their highlights for the whole year oh shit really gosh yeah i was on the 49ers highlights for the whole year yeah it was crazy dude it was it was kind of a longer piece it was like a six minute or four minute segment or something but it was i was like

what the hell that's so cool heck yeah oh i think i discovered the first ever diet steak. So, a Bavette steak from Certified Piedmontese has 96 grams of protein and only 8 grams of fat. Now, everyone that knows me knows I just praise the flat irons like crazy, right? Because it has 90 grams of protein and only 8 grams of fat. But the Bavette steak is like two or three times the size of a flat iron steak. And I was just sitting there and I was actually talking to Joe from Piedmontese. And I'm like, dude,

this is the perfect diet steak because the satiety level is through the roof. The protein is through the roof and the fat is just like almost non-existent with only eight grams. I, I don't understand it i'm not going to question it i'm just going to appreciate it because it's awesome it was so freaking good so when it comes to like like trying to get somebody to be on a diet it's like here have this amazing steak and it doesn't taste like crap it's going to be the best thing you've ever had and they won't even know any different right the macros will be perfect on it yeah i love that shit yeah yeah have you tried that one in sema no i've had it i've had

it i think all of their steaks except like maybe the uh what's the one you grab the handle all their steaks other than like the tomahawk are pretty damn lean then so i don't think you can really go wrong with any of their steaks even even if you're on a diet, it's pretty difficult to. Yeah. I think it's a, uh, an awesome bodybuilding hack that people just need to know more about. Yeah. I've been, um, I've been doing some like protein leveraging, you know, as we've, we've talked about on the podcast before, basically just trying to consume large, large, just really large amounts of protein. I had been specifically trying to do it before I eat. So I kind of almost don't count it as a meal, even though it's a meal. And, you know, sometimes I'm eating like chicken breast or egg whites or some things like that.

But I can still use the Piedmontese steaks because I'm trying to cut back on the overall amount of fat. And it's working great. I can eat like a Piedmontese steak and then I can eat a fattier steak later or a fattier hamburger or something like that. I haven't had a chance to try their 75-25 burgers yet, but I'm scared that might burn my whole house down. But but anyway you know that it's it's it's a great hack you know if you're somebody that really struggles with food like never mind just diet for a second just just try to eat like it's a great plan just try to eat a shitload of steak just by itself and then your second meal or third you know maybe try to only eat two or three meals for the day

you could kind of have at it for that second meal. And over time, you will start to eat less. It won't happen on day one. On day one, you'll be like, oh, he's full of shit. I still ate a Twinkie or whatever. But after a while, your desire and those cravings and stuff will die off. Yep. If you guys want to have at it and have 25% off, you guys got to head over to Piedmontese.com.

If you guys know how to spell it, say it with me. P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout. Enter promo code PowerProject for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 more, you get free two-day shipping. Your dogs got excited about that. They barked as you were reading it at the same time. They gave you a womp, womp, womp. I heard it it but i don't i don't think that was it might have been my dogs and also into the the ad read that i couldn't actually pay attention to anything else around me

just thinking about that bob at stake it's not like my neighbor's dogs i might have to close this window no you're fine it wasn't that bad i i have to close my door because my dogs go insane so you guys uh still been messing with some mouth tape have you guys been doing that or yep yeah uh yeah every night i still find myself stephanie still finds me snoring but uh yeah i mean it definitely helps but i i noticed that when I don't do it, my mouth is just totally wide open and like dry and I'm drooling all over the place. So I've noticed a pretty good difference too with, uh, the, um, the breathe right strips, you know, cause of the combination of the two kind of getting those nostrils pinched open a little bit more. I, uh, have that magnet one as well i messed around with that but i just it's kind of inconvenient you have to put like magnets on your nose every time and then i was just it's a lot of fumbling around in comparison to the the regular uh nose tape but

we had a joel green on here and he was saying his number one thing for sleep and he thought it was this was like one of the best hacks you can do for your body was to get a mouthpiece yeah and we were like huh and i don't think any one of us has a mouthpiece yet so i'm really interested in talking to the doctor today and find out you know what that's about and because i my sleep is just it's never been great you know just picture if picture if you got woken up um every about 90 minutes oh my god no you know i yeah and that's been and i've been like that you know kind of on and off for a decade or so so it's just it i can't figure it out i've tried a bunch of different stuff i tried magnesium and zinc i've tried to, it's not like I'm not calm.

You know, I, I'm not like revved up or anything, so I need to figure out how to hack it. Yeah. Hey guys. Hey, how's it going? Hey, how's it going? Fantastic. It's going really, really well. And we're excited to have you on the show. We've been, uh, big proponents of, uh, of taping our mouths shut. Who taught you that? Who weren't you first hear about that?

I'm curious. So we heard about that from Ron Penna. He's one of the original quest, quest nutrition creators and owners. And he told, he, he actually said this to me. He said, I said, said he said do you tape your mouth shut and i was like for what he's like for sleep and i was like uh i i'm like no and he goes would you ever pick up a hypodermic needle on on the sidewalk and like stick it in your arm i was like no no he's like sleeping without he goes sleeping without mouth tape is just as dangerous.

He's like, yeah, well that's good. I mean, it's, it's a great thing and we will talk about it, but you talk to a physician and they freak out. They tell you it's not good. I mean, but it's becoming more prevalent, which is wonderful to see. And of course we, you found out about me through Mike Muscle, right? Right. Okay, cool. He's a great guy.

It's amazing. One thing I wanted to ask you is maybe you can give us a simple explanation on what, like, why is taping the mouth effective? Why would this be something somebody might look into? Definitely. Oh, yeah. We'll go over the anatomy and why we're a lot of us are mouth breathing. I mean, we're all a lot of us, I would say the majority of us

are subclinically hyperventilating. And, you know, that's not how our ancestors did it. And a lot of it is because the facial development and growth and epigenetics and our environment. We'll talk about nitric oxide production, which is important, especially if you're trying to build muscle mass. It's a little controversial. But you know, all the hormones, like growth hormone, that's key for muscle rebuilding. So we'll talk a lot about sleep. I mean, there's so much to talk about. Right? Right. And I've seen a lot of this stuff. You've been, I've seen a lot of stuff stuff you've been i've seen a lot of talking about with the covet 19 and and all that oh yeah stuff too i just saw that you're

breathing thank you yeah yeah um you know it's um uh what was i gonna say about sleep uh i mean it's uh covid is oh i know what i wanted to say josh and michael the owners of uh saint galena fit say hello to you okay cool yeah that's where i work out and uh i miss those guys man doing push-ups at home it is not the same thing and planks meet those weights but anyway uh yeah we can talk about a lot of stuff i mean, we can talk about COVID if you want, how nose breathing actually is beneficial for COVID in a way because it produces more nitric oxide. Nitric oxide, I've got a study here somewhere on my desk that shows how nitric oxide can actually put down the SARS-2 COVID virus.

I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing stuff. Well we just we're rolling so you can uh you can have at it yeah what's a kind of easy explanation of how the mouth tape works oh so you know what i should probably go get some mouth tape everyone wants to know how i mouth tape right should i yeah absolutely i think that'd be great yeah let me let me get something i'll be right back y'all i'm hardcore excited right now yeah this is great like he there's oh god this is gonna be a long podcast if we can keep him i only i only kind of know why you know like uh it's one of those things where it's like you kind of forget why you do certain things like i don't know man i picked it up a long time ago just Just do what I say, you know, just, just listen to me, bro. Just do it. And, you know, it'd be nice to be able to

have a real good, clean explanation. Let's not forget about that face development stuff that he mentioned. Like we gotta, we gotta get into that too, because, uh, I'm, it's, it's, I'm really curious about what he has to say about that. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, I think a lot of times, you know, that with the computers and phones and stuff, you know, we end up I have I have kind of a little bit of a forward head position just anyway. I don't know if it's from my phone or, or what, or if it's from like lifting or whatever, that's like a little bit of my posture. and that that can cause you to kind of like be forward your jaws forward your jaws kind of relaxed and it can kind of turn you into a mouth breather which is uh it's kind of funny there's that there's a there's a tv show where they talk about mouth breathers where there he is yeah mouth breathing has a very poor connotation historically i mean in the old days you if you didn't like someone,

you'd call them a mouth breather, like they were an idiot or they were mentally retarded, that kind of thing. But the thing you just mentioned about forward posture of your neck, that's very interesting. I had a lot of neck pain and I thought it was an occupational hazard being a dentist, sitting like this over a patient. And I did a lot of Pil pain and I thought it was an occupational hazard being a dentist, you know, sitting like this over a patient. And I did a lot of Pilates and that seemed to help, but it was all very palliative. What it turned out, I had a diagnosis of sleep apnea finally. I finally figured that out. It was mild sleep apnea.

But people that have a small airway tend to move their head forwards. And that's where you get all the neck problems. Also, when you're sleeping at night and you have apneas, you know, where the airway closes, you tend to lift your head off the pillow. You're struggling to regain that airway. And then you wake up and you can't really turn very well. You know, your muscles, your traps, maybe a little tight. It's almost like whiplash. So that forward posture is very interesting. A lot of people cannot stand up straight because their airway collapses. It gets smaller.

So that forward posture is very important in terms of identifying where your neck pain comes from. But also, you know, a lot of weightlifters, you know, they say the size of the neck is very important in sleep apnea, right? A lot of people, a lot of physicians will measure your neck size. And what they're looking for is fat, right? So the bigger your neck gets, the more likely you are to have a collapse of the airway. Well, a lot of guys that are lifting, they have big necks and a lot of that is muscle. And it's a little controversial,

but I think it's more about the head posture than how much muscle you have around your neck. So if you have a big neck, you may have to look at getting a diagnosis or getting a sleep study for even though it's muscle. Because, you know, all this muscle in your neck does determine your posture. But it can also impinge upon the airway. So if you think you're sleeping poorly, it doesn't matter whether you're a weightlifter or not. You've got a lot of muscle or a lot of fat. Just get a sleep study. Everyone should be verifying their sleep at least every five years because it's so important.

How does somebody go about getting a sleep study done? There's a lot of different ways you can do it now. My understanding is you can maybe even do it at home. Is that effective? Well, they have home studies. They've had that for quite a while. And they also have the attended sleep study where you go to a hospital or a clinic. And that actually is still the gold standard. But if you're pretty healthy and you're beginning to wonder why you're tossing and turning at night, maybe you're going to the bathroom in the middle of the night once more than you normally do. I would get a fit tracker. My favorite one is this ring here. I don't know if you can see it. It's an aura ring. I know Mike wears one. Exactly right. So you know a lot about it. That is a pretty good test. That's what I use to verify my sleep daily. And then every four or

five years, because I have that diagnosis of mild sleep apnea, I go to a sleep study and get tested. And the nice thing about this ring, we can talk about it later, is it really can differentiate nights between mouth taping and not mouth taping. But a sleep study, however you want to do it, start looking into your sleep. I think most of us think it is innate. In other words, we're all good sleepers. That's not true. And as we get older, it gets worse. And there's so many things in our digital lifestyle, like blue light, smartphones, carbohydrates, processed food, air pollution, lack of breastfeeding, late intervention, orthodontically, poor facial

development, all these factors that we may or may not know about affect our sleep as we as we get older. We get a lot of people on the show that say they have trouble like falling asleep. And we'll hear some people say, my brain just doesn't shut off, you know, maybe their creative personality type person, maybe they're creative personality type person, maybe they're into art or music or writing or something like that. And they feel like they can't shut down, you know, their brain. Is there some truth to that? Or, or do you have some information on something that somebody who's in that position could do to help them fall asleep? Right? Well, if you're talking about insomnia, which is pretty prevalent, there are so many different causes for it. I mean,

it could be hormonal. It could be stress. It could be that, you know, you're so tired that you can't fall asleep. That is a condition. And so it could be related to, you know, very severe sleep apnea. I mean, personality types, but also what's your room like? Is it too warm? Are you overdressed? Are your covers too warm? Are your sleeping conditions not optimal for sleep? But here's what I find, because I do treat, I work with sleep, patients that are suffering from sleep as a dentist even. And the go-to thing there is the circadian rhythm. We are just butchering our circadian rhythms.

We are abusing it left and right. We go to bed too late. We stay up late. We sometimes try and go to bed early thinking this would be a good night to get some sleep. That's not how the body works. It's a very, very strict rhythm of things that happen. You know, when your cortisol levels rise in the morning, melatonin starts increasing. You've got the adenosine, which is responsible for the sleep drive.

All those things, you cannot turn on a dime with these rhythms. Even your organs have a circadian rhythm. Blue light, of course, disrupts all of that. I think red light therapy is a good thing if you do it at the right time. Turning off the lights at night. I mean, when the light bulb was invented, that was the beginning of the end, even though it was a warm light. But now with blue light and LEDs, oh my goodness, it's really tough to allow the body to do what it's good at if you allow it, and that is to sleep. But it has to be on schedule.

So some people will say they get away from their phone an hour before bed or something like that. And that's probably a great practice. But I think that people aren't realizing that it's any screen and any light, right? So maybe we should switch to candles. light, right? So maybe we should switch to candles. And then also, maybe you can have different light fixtures in your house that you switch over to later on in the evening or something like that, correct? Well, you're absolutely right. So a lot of people will put their phone down, and then they're reading a nice book by a LED light, which has flicker fatigue and has had the wrong temperature. It has a lot of blue light in it,

even though they're trying to make it warmer. You know, it's a problem. I think a Kindle is pretty safe, they say, if you read a Kindle in the dark. But we really have, you know, people get this second wind, right? A lot of people were very proud of that. I was very proud of that. people get this second wind, right? A lot of people were very proud of that. I was very proud of that. It's artificial. It's induced by light. It could be diet. Maybe you ate too late or close to bed. It's a real problem, but you're right. It's a very complex thing. You can't just put away your phone. You have to do a lot of other other things i think the house of the future will be something that has the right temperature bulbs in it and that automatically uh start you know based on maybe feedback from your aura ring uh you know because this will tell you what time to go to bed it will start dimming the lights and then turn them off um and and that and then the lights will

have the right temperature will get warmer as the day goes on or as night approaches. But really, the best time to set an alarm clock is when to go to bed, not when to wake up. Man, that would be awesome. I'm going to look at maybe messing with my light fixtures. But you had said something about doing a red light therapy at the right time. Can we go in on that, please? Yeah. So there's some debate on that. I currently

think the right time based on all our exposure to blue screens, like right now I'm in a brightly lit room and they say that if you're going to look at your laptop, make sure there's a lot of sunlight nearby so that your eyes are not being fooled. My nightshade, you know, where my phone and my laptop turns to bright orange, I start that at 12 p.m. at noon. Wow. Yeah, and it takes a little while to get used to, but now I don't even think about it. Everything's orange from noon on. That's cool.

But then, so when it comes to red light, red light is a signaling in a way. It's a signaling device. It tells your brain when to start shutting down. Red light is a signaling in a way. It's a signaling device. It tells your brain when to start shutting down. So if you've been looking at all the blue light, I think the best time, and again, you know, some people may disagree with me. Some people say morning time. I think it's good to go outside before noon for one hour. I think it's better to go outside before 10 a.m. for an hour, you know, and not a lot of clothing, you know, get some good trunk exposure of UV. So the best time to exercise is outside before 10, before 12, and then go orange

during the day, especially with all your devices. And then at around, I would say right before dinner, maybe after dinner, depends on when you eat dinner, but around 5 or 6 p.m., do your 10, 15 minutes of near infrared and red light. I think that is a great way to feel tired at 10, 10.30 and to go into deep sleep quickly. And that first deep sleep, that N3 stage is the most important. In fact, that's when all the growth hormone is released. And you really want to prep for that. If you wake up at two or three or four in the morning, those are less important stages of sleep. We can talk about how that's not great, but from the time you go to sleep, and it shouldn't be right away. In other words, if you fall asleep in a few minutes, you're too tired. It should take 10 to 12 minutes.

And then because you've gotten rid of the red light, you've primed your circadian rhythm with all the right frequencies of light at 6 p.m., you've done your sunlight exposure before noon, you've stopped drinking caffeine. I love my iced teas. I stop at 2 p.m. If you've done all that, you eat before 6, not too much alcohol or no alcohol, then boom, at 10, 1030, you're going to give in to, you know, that sleep. You're going to fall asleep slowly. And that first hour of deep sleep, that N3 stage is what's going to build muscle. It's going to make you feel better.

It's going to fix all the damage you've done to your body during the day. That is probably the best part of your sleep, the most important part of your sleep. Is N3 sleep just also considered deep sleep or are they different? Yeah, it's deep sleep. And so the Oura Ring kind of condenses all that. But it's deep sleep and then there's REM. But we spend most of our time actually in this N2 stage, but most Americans will spend 60, 70% of their time in that stage when it should be about 40%.

So that's that light stage of sleep where you're just kind of miserable. You're tossing and turning. You're going to the bathroom all night. That's not a pleasant. You want to go past that. And as you know, Mark, with the Oura Ring, and I don't know how old you are, but as you get older, it's harder to get deep sleep. My best nights are an hour and a half of deep sleep, hour and a half of REM.

All the deep sleep stages are in the first part of the night and the REM stages. That's why you get the dreaming in the morning stages. So from about 3am on, you get more of the REM REM takes center stage in the beginning of the night from 10 on. If you go to bed at 10 or whenever you go to bed, uh, the,

uh, deep sleep takes center stage. So it's a real, it's a very highly organized, complex system that our body has kind of created. And the problem is that it's all based on something that happened 4,000 years ago. And we've changed it all in the last 200 years. Blue lights, light bulbs, food. How detrimental is it to not get good sleep? Because, you know, we're all trying like diets, we're trying, we're out there exercising, you know, we're,

we're working so hard, and we're our work day, and so on. And you end up with a lot of stresses, how detrimental is it to, you know, be getting five hours of sleep and six hours of sleep and maybe not trying to maybe not being able to follow the principles that you're mentioning at the moment. Well, let me put it this way. It's life changing. In other words, if you want to live a short life, be miserable, especially in the latter part of your life, with lots of heart disease, being overweight, obesity, susceptibility to viruses, novel viruses, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, I mean, you name it, flaky skin, hair loss, periodontal disease, loss of tooth structure and supportive structures around the

teeth. I mean, I don't know how, you know, to make it painted any worse. But for example, people that have sleep issues when they go on a diet, 70% of their weight loss is muscle mass. I mean, yeah, it's like you can't function if you're not sleeping well. Your personality may be different. You may be a different person. Sleep essentially determines your destiny. It really does. It's big.

It's one of the pillars of health. And if you don't, that's why you've got to spend a lot of time. You've got to work on it. It's not guaranteed. Yes, we're sleepers. We sleep like babies, although babies these days aren't sleeping that well because of a variety of factors because of our environment. But we really got to work at it. Just like you want to have good muscle mass. You want to have a low BMI. You want to be smart. You want to be sexy, all these things. Sleep, you got to work on it. You got to verify it. You got to test it. And you got to know a lot about it. And that's why I like the

Oura Ring. It's a great entry into that whole segment of what I just referred to as knowing a lot about your sleep. So it's pretty accurate. And it kind of gives you, I don't typically like trackers, but it's great data. And it really does. I highly recommend it. I wish I was on their payroll. I always tell people nice things about the Oura Ring. I have no association with them. There are a lot of other trackers I really dislike. Oura Ring is the only thing I'm using right now. And I wear it all day long and it's not a great tracker for activity. In fact, you have to input all your activity. Mark knows this because it's not recording that, but it's a great sleep tracker.

It's wonderful. And it really will get people started in the right direction. Well, since we're talking about sleep trackers, the Oura Ring, you kind of said there are others that you don't like. So what are the others that you think are kind of crap? Well, I'll try not to mention names, but you know, things like the Apple watch Fitbit, all these motion based sensors that aren't recording, like it's all about the algorithm. And this ring is, was developed in, I think, Finland somewhere in Scandinavia and their

algorithm really works well. I have tested my sleep, as you can imagine. I worked for a startup that was developing a camera that would give the same results as a regular sleep study in a hospital. And so we were testing sleep all the time. So my sleep has been tested probably 40, 50 different times. So in the conventional way. So I look at the data that I get from this, and it's not perfect, but I think it's the best out there. It correlates very closely to how I test my sleep. I can also, I also wear an oral appliance that if I take it out, my apnea has come back because my airway collapses. So I can test with and without. And then also when I mouth tape, there are differences on the aura ring that you can pick up. So, I mean,

Fitbit, they've got things that go underneath your mattress. There is one, and I mentioned this in my book on sleep there, and it's not available anymore, but there are other apps out there that are similar. One of the great simple apps, and it's not based on movement, it's based on sound. It's a recording device that in the morning you can just play, and there are several apps that do this, that plays back how much snoring you've done in the middle of the night. And you don't have to listen to the whole night, you just listen. It tells you when you were snoring, and then it gives you an idea of what it sounds like. That's a great app. I mean, those are free typically. So a good snoring app is great. But right now, the apps that measure how much movement there is in bed,

that's not that accurate. You can still sleep well and have some movement. You also mentioned the mouth appliance. I think we had this guy, Joel Green. He was talking about having one of the biggest things. Mark was talking about this before that he says that people are missing out on that. We should be having is like a mouth guard while we sleep. And he mentioned that with your apnea. So I'm curious because you were talking about like bodybuilders and guys with big necks and a lot of them report getting sleep apnea machines. Right.

To deal with this problem. But I feel like that mouthpiece you're talking about is probably a better solution. Well, it may be. It depends. So I have mild sleep apnea. Anyone under 15 interruptions per hour due to a collapsing airway will be mild. Anyone from 15 to 25 is moderate. And those people are good candidates for the oral appliance. Although I take it one step further, I actually have an ENT send a camera down your throat because I want to see where the collapse is. It goes through the nose. It's easy. It takes five minutes. They spray something in

your nose. They send a little camera down. They have you do a kind of a maneuver where they close off the airway and then they see how the collapse occurs. Think of this long kind of tunnel. And if the collapse is up here near the top here, the pushing, pulling the jaw forward, pulls the tongue out of the way and that will make the storm go away. And that works really well for me. I go from 12 apneas to zero apneas when I wear this thing. And, you know, imagine someone waking up 12 times

an hour, just bumping on your shoulder. That's what I was dealing with 10 years ago, right? And even the physicians that I saw the ENT said, Yeah, don't worry about it. You're fine. I wasn't complaining of anything other than my kids sent me in and said, Listen, Dad, you got to go in because you're just too noisy. We can hear you across the hallway. So, but I wasn't really feeling any worse. I was thin, I was fit, I was mountaineering, mountain biking, skiing. And so that's the problem in America is everyone doesn't notice that creeping up of poor sleep. And so people that are in that state where they have maybe not a collapsing airway, but they're snoring, or the airway will collapse, but in a minor way. And if it's collapsing up high, then the oral

appliance works great. If during that maneuver that the NT sees that the airway is collapsing lower down, pulling the jaw forward or supporting it or preventing the jaw from falling back, which means the tongue goes back too, then it doesn't work as well. So you really have to make sure you're a good candidate for the oral appliance, which is called the mandibular advancement device. But yeah, they're great. And they're way better than CPAPs. And a lot of people can't wear CPAPs. They just can't tolerate that positive pressure on their nose, on their mouth, and going into their lungs and, I mean, into their airway and keeping it open via positive pressure. It's, on their mouth, and going into their lungs and, I mean, into their airway and keeping it open via positive pressure. It's very uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Compliance on the CPAP is low. So to follow up on that real quick, there is a product that I've seen. It's called like a Zipa. It's a mouth guard that Andrew was showing me a video where like they were taking videos of people that snore. And then when they put that mouth guard in, they don't snore. Obviously, though, it's not a custom-made mouth guard. It's something that I think you mold to yourself or whatever, but it stops you from snoring and your mouth shuts when you sleep. So, would that be something you suggest for the general population to use, or what is your take on mouth guards for the general population? Right. So that's a good place to start. I mean, obviously a custom made one is way better and I'll explain why, but they're expensive. Insurance sometimes will cover the oral appliance as long as you have a sleep study and a prescription from your sleep physician recommending the oral appliance. So that can be covered. Medicare covers certain oral appliances as well. But the little devices that you're talking about,

they're called boil and bite. You can't really open with it in place where the other professionally made ones you can. Sometimes that's important to people, but it's a good place to start. For 40 to 80 bucks, you may want to try it of course how do you tell what if the results are good do you feel better in the morning does your sleep partner tell you that you stop snoring does your aura ring give you better results those are the ways that that would be the way i would do it but yeah i think so if a patient is a little hesitant and i've looked at them and i know that they're a good candidate for an oral appliance but but they don't want to spend $3,000 to $4,000, their insurance may not pay for it, whatever, then that's a good place to start.

There's another device that's kind of cool that's very inexpensive. I think you can get them. I think we have it on our affiliate store. It's called a tongue retention device, a TRD. Every time I see a Toyota, a souped-up Toyota drive down the highway, it says TRD on it. I think a Toyota, a souped-up Toyota drive down the highway, it says TRD on it. I think that there's a tongue retention device. It's a little, I think they're made in Canada. It's got like a little fluting. I should have brought it down. But basically, you squeeze a

little bulb at the end, you stick your tongue in it, and then you put it, it's a flange, a very soft silicone flange that fits between your lip and your teeth on both sides. And basically, it grabs your tongue all night long and keeps it in a forward position. And for some people, that works really well. And that would be a great way to know if that works well for you and you get a lot of good feedback that it's working well, then you can go to the custom-made devices.

Custom-made devices are more comfortable. They're smaller. They give you more room for your tongue. They last longer. And also, I mean, you've got a professional adjusting it. You know, how far forward do you want to go? You can go too far forward. You can go too far open at the vertical dimension.

That can actually block your airway, changes the angle of a little floating bone here called the hyoid bone and other things as well. So it really, again, when it's professionally done, it's typically better, but it's a great place to start would be my answer. What are your thoughts about mewing? Have you heard about mewing before, like where you are trying to reshape and reform the mouth? There's a doctor that talks about that quite a bit, pushing your tongue to the roof of your mouth and things like that. I think what you're referring to is myofunctional therapy, and it's really fantastic.

I mean, I think the myofunctional therapist, no one, she wrote an appendix in my book. Um, Sarah Hornsby up in Seattle. I mean, they are worth their weight in gold. I mean, and, and dentists aren't trained in that area, even though we should be. I mean, um, you know, facial development is determined by the position of your tongue, whether your mouth is open or closed. If you don't get that width in development, um the airway and the nasal passages will be compromised. When the face is developing, and that's from, you know, as a fetus all the way through to age four, age five, that's when about 60% of facial development is complete.

By age 10, it's done. That's all influenced by our muscles that are involved in swallowing, speaking. If our tongue is tied, then we're not able to keep our tongue in the right position. Tongue tie is on the rise due to our diet, lack of good proper nutrition. If the tongue is tied, then the tongue won't be able to sit upwards and put pressure on the palate to give us that width of the face. The width of the face. For some reason now, a narrow face is considered to be very sexy, attractive, and all that. That's a person that's suffering. They can't breathe properly. You want a good wide face, that good

jaw position. You want downward growth. These are all important things. If that mouth box doesn't grow to its full potential, the nose box and the airway box are compromised. So I think myofunctional therapy has a lot to offer there. Buteyko breathing, all of those things are fantastic. If you're a mouth breather, if you have a tongue tie, and you just realize that now as an adult, you're going to have to go see a myofunctional therapist to relearn where to put that tongue at rest. And right now, and I always think about this when I'm lifting, because I try and breathe through my nose mostly. It's not always possible.

But in my dental education, which was 35 years ago, we were told that the rest position was lips parted, teeth about six millimeters apart, and just the jaw kind of resting, relaxing. The optimal rest position is lips closed, teeth touching. In other words, your teeth should be together, and the tongue should be forwards and upwards, pushing up against the palate. Not pushing hard, but resting up against the palate. That is the ultimate rest position when you're not talking, eating, and just sitting there. Not a lot of us are doing that properly. So it's – myofunctional therapy is fantastic, to answer your question.

It is – Yeah, what does that entail? It's seeing a professional that would basically analyze what your muscles are doing, your muscles of mastication, swallowing, breathing. Are you using your upper intercostal muscles or good diaphragm breathing? How do you swallow? Is there a problem with the tongue tie? They're great at diagnosing the posterior tongue tie,

which is very difficult to see at birth. Most physicians and even nurses, delivery room nurses are catching the tongue ties, but those are the obvious ones. There's something called the posterior tongue tie. If your tongue is tied down, you're not going to develop properly. You'll be breathing through your mouth. Real quick, you were mentioning, you kind of touched on breastfeeding um so i wanted to ask you about that but for the tongue resting on the roof of the mouth um because i found that like some people mentioned that they they can't do it like it just seems

like when i think about how my tongue rests it's like it grabs a little bit of saliva and then it just kind of glues to the top of my mouth. Is that what's supposed to be happening? Like just because you don't really think about that, right? Yeah. Well, you have good saliva flow if you're, I mean, you have your flow is one thing, but you have good saliva content in the mouth. If you're not always talking like I am now, that's why I'm drinking water, right? If you're breathing with your mouth open at night, your saliva flow is down. That makes things very sticky in here. Things tend to stick together. The airway, if it's collapsing, will stick because it's not lubricated.

But yeah, if your mouth is closed a lot of the time and your tongue is in the right position, it should be up against the palate. But if you have a dry mouth, then you're peeling your tongue off your palate, right? Yeah. If you have a dry mouth and you're, you're peeling your tongue off your palate, right? Yeah. With the, uh, the TRD device, are you still able to like, I don't know if you even would need mouth tape at that point, but are you still nasal breathing at that point? Uh, it's a good question. So the TRD blocks the mouth.

So if you, if you, that's a great question. If you cannot breathe through your nose, the TRD won't work because it's blocking. It's got this flange, very soft flange, looks like a butterfly. And then it's got like a little pacifier, but the pacifier is sticking on the outside. It's a bulb. You stick your tongue into it. The suction of that grabs the tongue and it blocks your mouth. So it forces nose breathing, which is good, but it also gets the tongue. It's pulling the tongue forward so that it's not blocking the back of the airway. And that helps you sleep better. Does that lead to a lot of drooling by any chance? That's my first thought. If it's already sucking out of my mouth.

No, no, no. You're right. So drooling is one of the, I wouldn't say the most common side effect of wearing any oral appliance, but it is one of the side effects. But usually that goes away after time. But yes, there is, there can be a lot of drooling, but that may be related to how you're breathing and, and, you know, a host of factors. So. With the mouthpiece device that you use to use the mouthpiece and the tape as well. I do. So that's another great question. So back to the CPAP, you know,

if you have nose pillows, you know, with a tube and the air is being pushed through the nose, that's ideally, I think, the best situation for CPAP. Not for everyone, obviously. But that's, you know, if you open your mouth and you lose that positive pressure lock, right? And then the machine ramps up and makes a lot of noise and you may even wake up. So it's kind of the same thing with oral appliance. So based on studies, a CPAP, CPAP compliance is better when the mouth is closed and oral appliance therapy is better.

It's more efficacious, it works better, and the compliance is better when the mouth is closed. So clearly we do better when the mouth is closed, even though we are adding these devices to help us sleep better. So I tape So I tape. I tape. Let me show you. Oh, yeah.

Give us a little demo here. 3M Next Care. I've got facial hair, of course. And I do this in the dark at night after I put my eye blinders on. I pucker my lips just a little bit just to get part of the fleshy part of the lips. Lips are closed, but in a rest position. It shouldn't be forced. It comes off very easily. Your teeth can still move. I think a lot of people think,

oh, the teeth are locked into place. But if you give it a lot of exertion, it will come off in the middle of the night. If it comes off in the middle of the night, you're not able to breathe through your nose properly. Then you need to go see an ENT and fix that because breathing through your nose is key. Nitric oxide production, happiness, feeling better, sleeping better, fewer obstructions in the airway if you're kind of borderline, a better oral microbiome. Once the mouth dries out, that essentially is a pH change. In other words, it becomes more acidic because saliva is the big buffer in the mouth. And so then all the bacteria change, then you're more likely to get cavities, more likely to get bad breath, more likely to get gum disease if you have a dry mouth for four, five, six, seven hours at night. So mouth taping has many benefits other than just sleeping. But by pulling the air through the nose, here's the big point. Nitric oxide,

certainly, oral microbiome, the quality of the mucosa in the mouth and also in the nose, filtration, you've heard a lot about that, especially with viruses and bacteria. But when you breathe through your nose, you tend not to over-breathe CO2. And you need, if we breathe through our mouth, a lot of the CO2 escapes, and you need a certain pH in your blood for the red blood cell, the hemoglobin in the red blood cell, to release the oxygen to the muscles. If you breathe through your mouth, you're blowing out too much CO2. CO2 is kind of like carbonic acid when you mix it into a drink, like a bubbly

drink, carbonated drink, that reduces the pH a little bit and allows that exchange of oxygen to occur. And of course, you want that to happen at night, right? Especially if you've just torn up your muscles during the day, and you want them to rebuild, you want that to happen at night, right? Especially if you've just torn up your muscles during the day and you want them to rebuild, you want that oxygenation to occur of your muscles, your tissue as part of the repair program that occurs at night. So keeping your mouth shut at night is key. And that's why I tape every night, because even though I can breathe well through my nose, rarely does the tape come up.

Maybe if I have a cold, my mouth still falls open. And I don't know why that happens to us and many of us. Why would that happen, evolutionarily speaking? Is it because we're sleeping in beds? Maybe we didn't sleep in beds. If we sleep on your side, your mouth is more likely to stay closed. Your mouth, your jaw is heavy when you're sleeping on your back. I don't think our ancestors slept on their backs. I don't know, but why not use this? It costs nothing, takes very little time. It really helps in so many ways. You know, real quick, I'd like us to clarify because there's a, probably a lot of people like trying to find mouth guards right now because we've been talking about them so much, but, um, how is like, what is a way without maybe having to get a sleep study and going to a

doctor to figure out if it's something you need and how do you know if it's something that you don't need? Right. Great question. And, and that could be, you know, I mean, that addresses pretty much everything. You know, what do you need? Do you need a sleep study? Do you need a CPAP? Do you need to lose weight to open up the airway? What are the other factors? So what factors? What is waking up at night? Is it your low glucose or high glucose levels, high cortisol?

Is it your sleep partner who's snoring? Who we sleep with determines a lot how our sleep is, obviously. So I would say this is what I say. This is what I say in my book. I think everyone should be tested for sleep from day one. I think, I mean, dentists, well-trained dentists in this area, I always ask people to bring in their babies. They always ask, when should I bring in my kid to look at the teeth?

And typically the answer is between one and three. I tell them, bring them in right away. In fact, I think there should be a dentist or a skilled physician that knows how to identify a tongue tie at the time of birth to make sure it gets caught early. Because in those first three days, if baby can't latch on, you're going down a different road in terms of health and development and all that. So I think everyone should be tested. I think anyone, even if you think you're healthy, which is what I thought, I didn't go in until my kid said, Dad, you're making a lot of noise. Turns out my wife was too.

in until my kid said, Dad, you're making a lot of noise. Turns out my wife was too. You know, she's thin and petite, but she had worse sleep apnea than I did. So I think living in the world we live in today, because of all the factors that are new to our bodies, like, you know, poor diet and blue light and, you know, being able to stay up late at night, I think we should all be tested for sleep apnea. That's a kind of a cop out answer to your question. How would you know, you can buy my book, I'll plug that a little bit here on Amazon. It's essentially, it's a quick read and it's got lots of lists in it. Just go through the book and check off things that seem, you know, that, you know, that something that you, you, you think you're doing, you know, do you snore at night? Do you go to the bathroom at night? Are you having problems losing weight? Are you kind of foggy after 10 or 11 o'clock? Are you craving the wrong foods? You

just can't, you know, you see a carbohydrate there or a snack and you just can't stay away from it. I mean, I've got, you know, hundreds of things in there. If you check them off, then you'll know that could be you. You want to catch sleep apnea before you start gaining weight, before you start getting sick, before your heart's affected, before your blood pressure is affected, before you get cancer, you know, before all these things, you know, before your hair falls out and your skin ages prematurely, you want to catch it early. So those are my two answers. Forget wondering if you have sleep apnea, just get tested. Or if you don't want to do that,

just start early and really start asking yourself questions. And is that me? Yeah, I'm positive. I have sleep apnea. I'll do the mouth tape. I have tried a mouth guard, but my fiance is like, do you still snore through both of those?

And I mean, I feel like I'm in good shape, good health, and I've always been thin, but I still snore like a bear every night. And when I do the mouth tape, it helps. It definitely helps. I don't know if it's because it's just muffling things, but it just seems to help.

So I'm not sure. Yeah, you're probably a borderline case, and it is helping. It is actually making you snore less because when you force the air, when you breathe in through your mouth, a lot of volume of air is going back and forth and it's also drying out the airway. So when you pull a lot of air through a collapsible airway, the Bernoulli's principle, it's going to get sucked closed. But when you humidify the air and moisten it, and it comes through all the baffles and the maze of the nose, and it's warmer, and it's moister,

and it comes in at a slower rate because it's being baffled, that's less likely to pull your airway closed. So you're kind of probably borderline. Although as you get older, it's going to get worse. So I think now is the time maybe to get an Oura ring and really start getting a baseline. Also get a real mouth guard that is adjustable to keep pulling you forward because there is this point where if you got it set right, we call it the sweet spot in the titration of these devices, the adjustment of the device. And again, you can go up too far or too far open. But when you hit that sweet spot, then the snoring just stops. So, um, so, but you know, it's, I mean, it's great that you can say that a lot of, a lot

of my male patients, I ask them, you know, their wife will say, or their partner will say, oh, he's snoring. Can you say something to him? And the guys come in and the, and the bigger, the stronger and the healthier the guys are, the more likely they're saying, I'm fine. I'm good. I don't snore. Their whole family is saying, this guy is snoring.

Yeah. Well, I have my fiance and my daughter. They both can definitely confirm that I'm snoring like crazy. But something you said was real eye-opening to me was, I will do the mouth tape. And on certain nights, it will come off. And I'm like, okay okay i'm having a problem there so other nights i'll just like double and triple the tape hoping that it'll stick and i do like i survive and i do feel better but i also think like okay maybe i'm doing something wrong

if i keep waking up with the tape falling off so some people can tape they're aggressive at it because they're trying to make sure it doesn't come off, which is admirable. But then they'll wake up in the middle of night because they're having hypoxia. They're able to get the air through the nose back and forth, but not enough. So they start getting headaches. So, you know, that's also a borderline patient, even more so, but closer to a person who has sleep apnea. So, I mean, it's not all black and white. There are all these grays. And it can vary from night to night. It can vary based on what meal you had.

It can vary during seasons. It can vary based on bedtime, how much alcohol you had, how close to bedtime. There's so many factors, and age is one of the big ones. And why does it seem like it's mainly dudes that are snoring and not as many females? Right. Well, um, you know, dudes do snore more. We're better at it. Uh, you know, we just, we're just good at things, you know, no, um, you know,

women, women actually do snore. Their snores are cuter and lighter. You know, they have a different structure here. You know, their, their, their resonance is different and all that. But here's the thing. Women catch up with men and they catch up at menopause because their estrogen and I think it's progesterone are hormones that are lacking, you know, as menopause approaches, they're waning. And those are protective hormones of the airway muscles. So they catch up with us. Their likelihood of sleep apnea or degree of sleep apnea is like this, and then it ramps up. And then men start from early on and just slowly, slowly ramp up. So I think we do it longer and we're a little bit louder earlier. But you know, for example, like menopause,

a lot of the symptoms of menopause, signs and symptoms are sleep related, the hot flashes, the irritability the next day, all of that, that's related to a sudden lack of good deep sleep. What about, you know, in terms of nutrition, and stuff like that? Have you seen you know, have you been able to help a lot of patients, you know, just simply change the nutrition and end up with better sleep? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. It's a tough one to answer. You know, being in ketosis, that can actually make your sleep worse. Although long term, I think if you lose a lot of weight, due to that type of diet, that will actually make your sleep better. Although long term, I think if you lose a lot of weight, due to that type of diet, that will actually make your sleep better. It'll affect your sleep in a positive way.

I think really, diet is very important for a variety of reasons other than the weight gain, which you can gain weight in your tongue, by the way, you can get a fat tongue, you can get a fat airway. When I was just getting into sleep science and all that, they said you couldn't gain weight in the tongue. That was absolutely wrong. I was seeing it in my patients. But anyway, so diet is very, very important. Absolutely. Diet affects just about every part of our bodies. I think the most important answer there is your resting glucose levels. I think that really has a very beneficial effect. And also, if you have high cortisol and there are a lot of foods that can cause inflammation,

which increase your cortisol, you want your cortisol to be low as you go to bed. It ramps up after the melatonin drops at 3 a.m. But I would wear a CGM. If you're healthy and you're very thin, you're not snoring, but you still have sleep issues, I recommend the continuous glucose monitoring patch because a lot of people that I've seen, I was treating a Stanford physician, and that guy was super healthy,

but he just wasn't sleeping well. It turns out his blood glucose was peaking at around 2 or 3 a.m. And then, of course, that tells your body, that's one of the ways your body wants to dump more volume into your bladder and then get to go to the bathroom, even though he had no collapsing airway. So I would, I mean, that's related to diet, of course. If you're fat adapted and you're not snacking on like, you know, a sweet before bed and your blood sugar levels are going up and down at night, you know, your blood sugar, I like it if my resting blood glucose levels 85 to 88 in the morning. I check in the morning. I check my ketones. And that's a good night's sleep.

Last night, I got a 92 on my aura ring. And you know, my deep sleep was over an hour, which is fantastic. And that was basically I stopped eating at five o'clock, I had a pizza paleo meal. I did not have my little my little snack, you should sell like a keto cup or something. I did not have that. I did have a glass of red wine, but it was done by five o'clock. And then I stopped eating, went to bed at around 1030. And that was a good night's sleep. If I were to eat later, or maybe eat a piece of bread, I mean, it just upset that the ramifications downstream are there. So diet is very important. are there. So diet is very important. Good nutrition, nutrient-dense foods, of course, stay away from carbs, have a little snack before a weightlifting session. Certainly,

I think that's beneficial, but nowhere near bedtime. Keep it real simple and make sure your stomach is empty. Make sure you're not trying to digest something while you're trying to sleep. I've heard somebody recently who is on kind of a more like carnivore style diet. And they were saying, you know, when their nutrition is on point, along with some of their supplementation, that they, this guy actually said that he hasn't brushed his teeth in a decade. And I wanted to get some of your thoughts on that. I mean, I don't think there's any reason to go that far and not brush your teeth since it's probably not hurting anything to brush our teeth. But I wanted to get your thoughts on that. Like, you know, if your diet is on point, then maybe brushing and some things like that, maybe they're not as important.

No, I think he's not that far off. I mean, it was funny. I did an Instagram video yesterday on a study. It turned out to be a paleolithic diet, like a diet from about 4,000 BC, which was like raw butter and honey and meat and berries. And they were allowed to go out into a kind of a, kind of a green area where they could pick things and they wanted to clean their teeth. They were using sticks and or chewing on things,

but they were not allowed to use a toothbrush and floss because they didn't have it. And there were actually security guards preventing all this, and it was a reality show. So it was being filmed. I would love to see the show, actually. But they also did some baseline measurements before and after of certain bacterial counts in the mouth and bleeding points, we call it, which shows us where inflammation is in the mouth, and all of them improved, and they weren't brushing.

And I'm fascinated by the carnivore diet by the way i really that's kind of my next thing i want to just try that for a while but but um you know going from paleo to carnivore i think i think there's a lot of interesting stuff on it but back to the brushing yeah if you ate like for example the mongols right the mongol horde they were so efficient at what they did. They were probably the greatest army on the planet ever that we've ever seen. They defeated the Chinese very easily because the Chinese were eating rice. The Mongols were tenderizing their goat meat under the saddle.

It was dried. It was fermented. They did some fermented goat milk. That was their diet. And they didn't brush. And they had great health. I mean, if you look at the skulls from four or five, 6000 years ago, before the toothbrush and toothpaste was invented mouthwash, there were there were very few problems, very few problems. So he's

not that far off base. You really brushing is a modern affliction based on our diet, and mouth breathing and, you know, a host of things. Right. And there's probably, you know, so much advertising for toothbrushes and toothpaste and mouthwash and everything because of all the advertisement of Coke and Pepsi and all the other bullshit. I mean, and, you know, the tube of toothpaste costs about, I was just talking to a toothpaste manufacturing a few months ago in Europe. And, for example, Colgate or Crest, it costs them about 13 to 15 cents to get a tube of toothpaste on the shelves. I mean, this is a big, and what does it sell for? Four to six dollars, right?

I mean, this is a big business. And, of course, they're telling you, you need toothpaste. You need to floss well that study that reality show it indicates that it's overhyped i mean it's more about diet right yeah so of course they're going to tell you that because it's huge money huge money to be made how is the plaque on our teeth related to maybe the plaque you know in our heart right that's a really good question it It's not, I mean, it's not directly related. It has that term. So the plaque and the fat buildup in the arteries, that's different. Some people, though, will tell you that if you have a lot of plaque in your mouth, you have

a lot of potential for getting a lot of plaque. And there is a very distant connection there it's it's you know metabolically and biohormones and health it's it's related due to inflammation and you know there's that there's that oral systemic connection but you know there's there's no connection right yeah i mean there's calcifications of the arteries if you're taking a calcium supplement you're not taking enough so calcium we get through our diet or we take a supplement. And then I think it's vitamin D3 that gets it past the lining of the gut into the bloodstream. But once it's in the bloodstream, you don't want all this calcium circulating around, depositing. It can get onto your teeth because saliva is basically blood without all the red blood cells.

It's the same kind of fluid. And so calcium can get into saliva and deposit on your teeth, but all that calcium in your blood vessels can also deposit on your blood vessels. So that's why you need to be taking lots of K2. K2 is a substance that basically takes the calcium and directs it into all your bones and calcified tissue. So there's that connection. But the plaque in the mouth and plaque on your arteries, those are two different things. I know a lot of people that say that when they drink a beer or something or a few glasses of wine before bed, they sleep great, right?

But you were mentioning that when you drink wine, you make sure to have it before maybe 6 or 5 p.m. And I'm assuming it's because of the effects that it has on your sleep. So can you kind of detail us, if you're an individual that drinks close to bedtime, what effects that has on your sleep, even though you might think you're sleeping well? Right. That's a great question.

So yes, it does knock you out. That little nightcap, you know, or a few beers and or you're partying late into the night, and then you go right to bed. Most people will say, God, I went, I just got knocked out. Well, it does affect sleep latency. And sleep latency is the time it takes you the time it takes to get to sleep. But it affects your REM patterns, it has an effect on the brain to a point where your brain never goes into deep sleep. And actually, I don't know if you've noticed, but if you drink, not a lot, but if you drink too close to bedtime, you'll go to sleep

quickly and you'll like that. You'll remember that part of it. But then you'll wake up in the middle of the night. And that's because all your timing of when your sleep stages is all off. It's going to be a really bad night of sleep. Can you achieve deep sleep if a person's using sleeping pills? No. So it's another great question. I'm blanking on the most popular sleep medication out there, but that actually suppresses deep sleep. So all these drugs that help you go to sleep are actually, they knock you out. So if you have insomnia, the analogy I like to use is when I go camping,

when I'm at high altitude on a glacier and a tent and all that, and the ground's cold and, you know, you're kind of worried about the next day and everything. That's a lousy night of sleep. It really is. You're tossing and turning a lot. That's what these sleep products do is they knock you down. Let's say you're on a plane.

You're bored. You don't want to be staring at the ceiling and be awake. It knocks you down, but it doesn't get you into the deep stages of sleep. In fact, it prevents you from getting to those deep stages of sleep. In fact, it does, it prevents you from getting to those deep stages of sleep. Would you say that even though it's not deep sleep, it's better than not sleeping? You might as well just get up and do something. You might as well get up and be productive.

Okay. It's that bad. There's no benefit. Yeah, that's the kind of the comeback that I always receive whenever I try to explain like, hey, you're, you're not really sleeping. You're being sedated. And it's like, Oh, well at least it's, it's better than nothing. And I'm like, Oh shit, maybe it is, but I'm not sure. But thank you for that. Sedation is actually the correct term that is well said it is a level sedation, but the brain isn't reorganizing. It isn't, you know, uh, doing everything. It's not repairing the brain. The reorganizing. It isn't, you know, doing everything. It's not repairing the brain.

The brain repairs itself. The liver repairs itself in certain stages of sleep. And this is really important. So you're not getting any of that. How often can you do that? Well, I mean, you can, if you stop eating, you can maybe survive a month. If you stop drinking three to six days, if you stop sleeping, if they've done studies where they keep people awake after three or four days, you become, you're insane. You are legally insane. I mean, it's that important. Yesterday was a four 20. So a lot of, a lot of people were pretty excited about that. And we,

we hear people sometimes say that they feel that marijuana helps them with sleep. And we've heard some people talk about CBD and things like that. Do either one of those, have they been proven to positively impact sleep at all? Yeah, it's become very popular. And now that it's legalized, it's even more available. THC does not help your sleep. In fact, it makes overall, over the long term, it changes does not help your sleep. In fact, it, it, it makes overall over the longterm, it changes the kind of physiology of your brain. And, and it's not good for sleep. CBD on the other

hand is fascinating. And the question is, is dose and how to give it. But I've used CBD. I've tested CBD on a lot of people that have sleep issues. And there is definitely something to be said about CBD. It's just difficult to find out what works well for you and all that. Now, if, for example, like, you know, I have a patient who is 90 years old, and was on heavy, you know, sedation drugs to get her through the night. And we took her off of that slowly. And that's hard to do, because that is very addictive. And we gave her a, we started with a 10 to one, actually a 20 to one and then a 10 to one. And that not helped knock her out. And then the CBD kind of kicked in. And now I increased her magnesium levels. And now she's not necessarily always on the, just on CBD or nothing

at all. And so it's a great transition, uh a great transition for people that are on the sedation drug. So I'm okay with CBD. I think it's wonderful. It's just a matter of what works. Too much CBD can kind of prevent good sleep. I think the optimal dosage is going to be, and this will be probably shocking to many, it's going to be 60 to 90 milligrams,

you know, where most people are taking 15 or 30. So, but it depends on a lot of things. So, and I think when you take it, and I also think taking it in the floor of your mouth is important as a drop rather than ingesting it, ingesting it, there's too much of a delayed response. You can't really know when it's going to start working. And if it didn't work, you know, what was the delay based on digestion? So, but CBD has a lot of promise. And it's an amazing compound. And again, it's been around longer than we have. And we have systems in our body, the ECS system, the endocannabinoid system that is in place. And the fact that we were not allowed to use that stuff, I mean, and we evolved to it is really a crime.

It's crazy. What about things like zinc and magnesium? You mentioned magnesium briefly. How can those help us sleep or do they? They do. Magnesium is big on sleep. In fact, I'm always tweaking my sleep. magnesium is big on sleep in fact i'm always tweaking my sleep and my recent deep uh deep sleep scores went from 25 minutes to an hour and a half and it was based on a magnesium supplement

that i'm taking um and i've i've told a lot of other people about it and they have experienced the same so uh selenium is important uh I mean, zinc, certainly. I mean, these are all signaling. These all help our signaling molecules. In other words, if you want the brain, there's messaging going on. As you go down into the stages of sleep, the brain has to reach out. There's hormonal messaging. There's neuronal messaging.

If you don't give them all the products that help the highway work, you know, and unclog the highway and get the message out, then you're not going to sleep. So magnesium is very good. It's great. And it's a specific kind of magnesium because magnesium can sometimes be a little rough to digest, right? This is like probably a magnesium glycinate or therionate or something like that. Right. Yes, that's correct i actually i mean if you want i can go get it now but there's this one magnesium that i really like unfortunately is out of stock um but it's the first magnesium that really helped my deep sleep

scores and it's six or seven different types of magnesium also uh trace minerals i would recommend drinking you know especially if you're working out a lot and sweating a lot. And those are cheap. I mean, you can get a little $10 bottle on Amazon of trace minerals, 75 different minerals from the Great Salt Lake in liquid form. I put a few drops in the water. That really can help your sleep because that, again, helps all the signaling. It can also help everything that goes on during the day as well. helps all the signaling can also help everything that goes on during the day as well. So minerals are very important. We live in a society where we are lacking in minerals, our food supply, our topsoil, we've obliterated all that. We're just being on a mountain bike ride and I see a lot of dust. I take a deep breath. I mean, that's all important stuff. Since we're on the subject of magnesium, like there are some people that talk about magnesium sprays instead of tablets. How do you feel about that? Is there efficacy to using the spray instead of tablets?

Yeah, that's oral absorption. I mean, you can absorb a lot of things through the mouth. The mouth is like the gut. It's one cell thick. Oh, it's like spray on the skin. Oh, on the skin. Oh, I don't know. Okay.

I mean, absorption occurs through the skin. It's not as great as it is in the skin. Oh, I don't know. Um, okay. I mean, this absorption occurs through the skin. Um, it's not as great as it is in the mouth, but, um, I mean, I don't, I don't, I can't answer that question. I don't know. I've heard of it though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How about that? Uh, that, that brand calm, that one seems to be pretty popular. Yeah. Calm is very popular. Um, I've, I've used it like when i'm traveling and i run out and it's the only stuff available um i think it's fine i don't think it's as good as what i'm taking but because it doesn't have all the different forms of magnesium but i think it's fine i think it's

great calm has some other things added to it though doesn't it uh yeah i'm not sure yeah i know it tastes pretty good so it must must have something. Yeah, exactly. What about a good pillow or a good bed? How important are these things? Yeah, well, that's sleep hygiene. I'm glad you asked that question because it often gets forgotten. I'm big on pillows. If you're a side sleeper, back sleeper, stomach sleeper, you can't sleep on the same pillow.

They're now making pillows very similar to what I thought of five, six years ago. I should have put a patent on it and invented it, but it's great that they're out. These are pillows that as you roll back and forth, adjust the height. So if you sleep on the side, which I think you're going to sleep well if you sleep on your side, but it's hard on your shoulder. So you need a soft mattress. You need a mattress that gives based on heat and weight. That's a foam mattress. Coilover mattresses, I don't think, I wouldn't recommend them. I think that's a dead duck. I mean, those are obsolete. And even the little toppers aren't thick enough. I think a foam mattress based on weight and what you like, I wouldn't go too firm if you're a side sleeper, go firmer if

you're a back sleeper. But I would encourage you to try and sleep on your side. But the pillow is important. You have to measure this distance from your shoulder to the base of your neck. And if you're a side sleeper, that distance, you have to support that. If you're sleeping on your side, and you've got a wimpy down pillow, you're doing that, you're kinking your airway a little bit. You're also going to, your muscles won't be relaxed. You're not going to breathe well. You're going to toss and turn a lot. So I use a MyPillow because you can throw them in the washer and dryer. You can move the foam blocks in there. They're well-made. They have a 10-year warranty. Again, I don't have any affiliation with them, but there are plenty of good pillows out there.

But most people, I would say, are sleeping on a pillow that's too thin or two that gives too much. Now, when you're sleeping on your back, you don't want to be like this, you know, you want to be able to fall back a little bit. You know, when you give someone CPR, that's the first thing you do. You make sure that the airway is open by, you know, positioning their head properly. So you mentioned my pillow, as far as the brand of pillow. Now, as far as mattresses are concerned, I'm assuming that you may have done a lot of research on different mattresses. What are some brands that people could look at from potentially more affordable mattresses to higher-end mattresses that you think are good? Yeah. There are a lot

of good mattress companies out there. Since the you know, since the millennials and, and Google and you know, our new world has come. I mean, that has been democratized. I mean, you can now buy direct online, it comes in a box, it gets sent to you, you can send it back, and you can try it. I think that's wonderful. The old model was you go into a Serta or a, you know, mattress store, and you you jump up and down on a little bit, and then you're stuck with it, right? And then you have to rotate it, right? So I'm very happy with where mattresses have gone, and I think that has helped a lot of us. So, I mean, there are lots of good brands out there. I think it has to do, again, if you're a side sleeper,

how far does your hip go in? Do you have big hips, small hips? Do you have shoulder issues? Do you wake up with a numb hand in the morning? If you sleep on your side, also temperature of the bed is important. You want body temperature to reduce at night. That actually helps you attain those deep stages of sleep. So some of these foam beds historically sleep a little bit warmer. My answer to that five, 10 years ago when Tempur-Pedic came on the scene, I actually was

a Tempur-Pedic dealer as a dentist. I actually was a Tempur-Pedic dealer as a dentist. I could drop ship a mattress to you and clean your teeth and do a filling because it was important, I felt. And my answer to that was, well, just get thinner sheets. The reason you're warmer is because your blood flow is better. There are fewer constriction points. But anyway, a lot of people, they'll say, I won't sleep on a foam mattress because it's too warm. That can be fixed. They now have these little pads that you can sleep on that you can put over your foam mattress that adjust temperature for you. Like the chili pad. I haven't tried that. I know a lot of people that love it. A lot of health influencers

that I respect and they like that. So my answer is easy. I just crank the window open. My wife and I sleep in a room that's between 60 and 64 degrees. It's cold and we don't sleep with a big down comforter. You do want to be a little bit, you want your body to do the heat regulation. That's important because that helps you ramp down. Taking a warm shower before bed is a good little trick that works. Yeah.

I always, I always found it very interesting that the way that things are set up with the dentist, that typically if you have dental insurance and you have decent, healthy dental practices, you go and see a dentist twice a year. But I find it really odd that you don't normally see a regular doctor ever. Like, I just I don't understand like, what, like why things are set up that way. Do you have any insight into that? Right? Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, a lot of people will, will say it's a scam. You know, it's like chiropractors, you know, wanting to see you. And I don't think that is the case.

How we came up with six months is a different story. It wasn't as scientific as I would like to have been, but it's a great cycle. Some people come in every three months if they have gum disease. It's important. I mean, a lot happens in the mouth. And unfortunately, I think physicians kind of miss that boat. They should be seeing their patients more often. It's an advantage to us because I can recognize sleep apnea in a patient decades before a physician can.

So if they're seeing me every six months, you know, that's a good thing for the patient, obviously. But in general, you know, oral health is connected to overall systemic health. If you have an infection, one of the most prevalent infections in the world, two of them are gum disease and cavities. In fact, they are the most prevalent infections or diseases in the world. So again, I mean, the mouth is a very unique place. It's open to the rest of the world. It's the gateway to the gut microbiome. It's not very well protected. We eat, we speak through it, but also, you know, we get our nutrition through it. There's a lot going on in the mouth and it's a problem. So again, dentists were, I mean, we separated from physicians back in, I think it was 1840. And that was a big mistake because physicians don't know anything

about oral health and most dentists don't know much about systemic health. And that was a big mistake because physicians don't know anything about oral health and most dentists don't know much about systemic health. And that is a real problem, that division. There needs to be more collaboration between the two. But because of that, we, I think, have a more preventative approach because we see things in a different way. And also, dental disease manifests itself differently in many ways than systemic health. So there are a lot of reasons. And it's not for financial necessarily, but it's a good model and it works. Although I have some patients that come in once a year because I don't want to see them in six months.

It'd be a waste of their time. Those are the carnivores. Yeah, right. I really, I like it. I think that it makes a lot of sense from a dental perspective and I don't feel that it's a scam or anything, but I just feel that you should be seeing your doctor at least once a year as well. And so that, that side of it doesn't make any sense to me. And that side of it's where it just, it, it doesn't make any sense at all to me. And that's where I would, I would say maybe there's some like foul play there because why would there because why would it be set up that way?

Are they just waiting for you to get sick and then you need medication? It's too late by the time you have to. Yeah, you want to treat a disease in a prodomal period. That's the early stages or prevent it to begin with, obviously. Medicine, I don't know. I think it could be related to the third parties, the insurance companies. They're always pushing back. They want to reduce utilization.

In dentistry, there's a lot of that going on too, and dental insurance is different than medical insurance. They're divided. Dental insurance is not real insurance. It is a – it's just kind of a benefit because let's say you're bench pressing one of your bars and it falls on your face and you knock out 10 or 15 teeth, that's $40,000 to $60,000 of work. And your insurance, dental insurance, stops at $1,500. It maxes out. Where your medical insurance, which wouldn't cover that, it would cover maybe the jaw breakage, but not the teeth.

And it's ridiculous. Dental insurance is just a product. And it's very lucrative for the insurance companies. They don't make, you know, the volume of money on dental insurance isn't greater than medical insurance, but the markup is fantastic. I mean, because it's very definable. If you can cap what you spend, worst case scenario, then you can really define the profits. I mean, you'll know what the profits will be because the actuaries really like that kind of formula. But in medical insurance, you never know when someone's going to need $500,000 worth of hospital care, right? So it's more difficult. It's more difficult to predict. How do you feel about, because I've heard a lot about chronotyping and I was curious because like, you know, some people like Mark, I think he sleeps pretty early. I find it hard to

like get to sleep at nine or 10, even though I'm really active. I typically get to sleep by around 11. Is chronotyping legitimate? Because obviously we want to be able to get a lot of deep sleep, which you said happens at the beginning of the night. But if you go to sleep at like 2am, which no one probably should be going to sleep at 2am, then obviously, that's not really good for you. So how should people determine what time they go to sleep? Yeah, well, that's a great question. There is a guy out there, I can't remember his name. He chronotypes everyone, you know, there's a there's a wolf, there's an owl. I think, I mean, some people that go to bed late, you know, they have a, they go to sleep late. I mean, I'm not, I'm not big on that. I'm not going to say I disagree

with it. I think everyone really, I mean, there are chronotypes, but when it comes to sleep, I think the only chronotype that works is the one that matches our sunlight and when it gets dark. And so I think the chronotypes become more apparent when you have external factors like artificial light and, you know, and stimulants and the need to stay up late at night and looking at blue light. So I think that differentiates us more into chronotypes because some of us are better at it than others that's all it is i don't think it's that everyone it sleeps differently we all sleep about the same if we're sleeping well our systems are all very similar do you think epigenetics at all falls into

that like for example i my ancestors actually my mom who was born in nigeria where there's probably a different cycle in terms of sunlight and down then you you know, here in the US. So would that have an effect on an individual like me or her? Yes, definitely. That's a, again, a very good comment. I actually spent six weeks in Nigeria in Joss, which is in the central part. I was a dentist. And, you know, if you live close to the equator, yes, compared to being in Alaska. But, you know, yes, your ancestors have evolved to that doesn't mean that you can't take on a different chronotype. But there is something to be said for that. And the example I always use and a good friend of mine, a physician in Palo Alto, Ranesh Sinha, MD, who would be a great interview, the guy's amazing. in Palo Alto, Ranesh Sinha, MD, who would be a great interview. The guy's amazing. He has kind of that thought when it comes to the likelihood of diabetes. And people that live closer to the equator are more likely to get diabetes. So there are some epigenetic factors, as you say. And that's an epigenetic factor that's not bad. It's just it is because of the planet we live on. So, yes, there are external factors that would – I don't know how anyone gets sleep up in Alaska in the summer.

I mean, you know, I don't get that with the sun not setting, and that would be very disorientating. But they've done studies on that. They've done studies on astronauts and in zero-G, and there are a lot of factors that can affect our sleep. But overall, we have a system in place that wherever you are, and if you're in that area long enough and you respect the circadian rhythm, you will adapt. You were mentioning how dentists can help with the pandemic that's going on and maybe help lighten the load a little bit on what's happening. A, how could they help and b um is that something that would be accepted because people would be like oh well you're not a you know this type of doctor right everyone's all up in arms about whether you're immunologist or whatever the hell right right well certainly i i i'm not saying that dentists should be

immunologists or vaccination specialists, but always practice within the scope of what you're able to do. But I just found it, and you're talking about this tweet that you retweeted, thank you, that I tweeted about two, three weeks ago. And I just thought dentists have been shut down. And the reason for that is, and rightly so, and I actually tweeted that a week before the ADA recommended that, because the first thing they teach you in dental school is that we create this aerosol. Dentists are great at creating this big cloud of bacteria, because we're working in the

mouth, and we're working with saliva, and we're working with instruments that spin at half a million RPM, and ultrasonic stuff that liquefies this and spreads it all over. So we are big spreaders of disease. Although, historically, we've done a great job at not transmitting hepatitis B, C, AIDS, and all these diseases. We have a great track record because we're trained to prevent that. My point was that since the dental offices are down and not full and not working, why not let us do the testing? We're great at putting swabs up people's noses and the back of the throat and collecting samples. And that doesn't necessarily create an aerosol. We have the PPE.

At least we had a stock of it unless we donated it. A lot of dentists are set up for this, and we can test for immunity, for infection, whatever, as long as we have the test. But that was the issue, right? We didn't have the test. But if I were Trump or Gavin Newsom, I would have just opened up those offices or the ones that wanted to open and just start getting testing in a dental office. What a perfect place we're set up for it. We have operatories, we have suction, we have the protective equipment. We have the knowledge of the nasal pharynx and the oral, you know,

diseases and all that. So I, I thought it was a good idea. A lot of other dentists thought it was a great idea as well. So, but it remains a good idea. A lot of other dentists thought it was a great idea as well. But it remains to be seen. I don't think dentists are going to go live right away. Dentistry has been affected, greatly impacted by this novel virus because now, you know, we're going to need different equipment. We're going to need negative pressure rooms, filtration, a lot of new equipment, and also we'll have to be tested. We have to protect our staff members, our auxiliaries, you know, the liability of it. What if someone gets COVID and dies and, you know, the only time they were out and about was at the dental office. So there are a lot of things that are going to

change in dentistry, unfortunately. Do you personally have a lot of concern over the coronavirus? I do. I mean, you know, there are many different ways of thinking about it. I'm healthy. I don't think it's going to kill me. But you know, there are a lot of reports, it's a pretty virulent virus, it can affect heart tissue permanently, or maybe for 10 years. Lung tissue is very fragile. I like my lungs. They work great. You know, they get me through the day. So I do worry about it. You know, you can supplement and exercise and be healthy and all that. But I think it's still an issue because it is novel. And if you look at the structure of the virus, it's actually fascinating. And how, I mean, whether it was created or whether it morphed into that. I mean,

I don't know, but I'm not going to get into that, but it's a, it's a pretty interesting virus in terms of keeping the host alive, although it overdoes a little bit and then infecting and, and, and cross infection. It's really it's, it's an impressive virus. And I think it's going to mutate. And I think the vaccine's going to take some time. I don't think we're going to see, I don't think we're going to see a good vaccine in one year. It may take longer. And that's why I think dentists are going to have a tough time. I mean, when do you open? How can you protect your patients? And are people willing to come? And on our website, I mean, we're getting all these questions like, what do I do? I've got a toothache. My crown came off. I mean,

people across the, as you said, we see our dentists a lot and we need them, but we're not able to see them. So we haven't seen the worst of it yet. I got to commend you because you've had a Q&A online for a long time that has been helping people self-educate and kind of, you know, go back and forth with the dentist without having to always come in and see the dentist, right? Right. And teledentistry is, we've got a little kit for dentists that we created. We created a functional provider list of dentists for people looking for that kind of dentist and someone that can get on the phone. I mean, I tweeted that, I think, yesterday, a perfect example of a dentist. He wrote a blog about what he did for a patient online. And teledentistry is very important, as it is for

telemedicine. It's a great way. There's a lot I can tell on the phone, believe it or not, especially with good cameras and all that. um, online dentistry as possible. Of course I can't do a filling yet online. We're working on that. We're working on that. You know, you, you kind of touched on this a little bit. Um, what was it? What was it? Shoot. Dang. Oh, well I'm i'm i've had a long was it i've had a long yeah it was okay it was um you touched on it at the very beginning it was about uh nasal breathing and covet and i don't think if you really explained um how much that kind of affects you know if if you do get in contact with it whether when you're breathing through your nose. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, I have the study here somewhere. I can give it to you for show notes and all that, but nose breathing increases nitric oxide production. Nitric oxide is a signaling

molecule, but it's also antiviral, antibacterial. It also helps build muscle mass, as you guys probably know, although that's controversial. And as we get older, around age 40, 45, our nitric oxide production goes down. And that's from the source from the cells and the endothelial cells in our blood vessels. That's where it's being made. But you can increase or keep your nitric oxide production up if you breathe through your nose. That's the other area where we make it but you have to have the right bacteria oral oral microbiota uh in your mouth from the back of your tongue and in your nose to produce that because you can eat as much nitric oxide rich foods as you want but if you don't have the bacteria in your mouth that that convert it

to nitric oxide you won't get this wonderful benefit of it has, there is some indication that it is effective against preventing the buildup or the virulency of a COVID-like SARS virus in your nasal passages. And that's where it hangs out. I mean, it's hanging out in, I mean, that's why they do the swabs way up the nose. That's where it's hanging out. So breathing through your nose, keeping that part of the nose healthy, keeping the oral microbiome, the nasal biome healthy. Those are all important things because we're all going to come into contact with this virus eventually, along with a host of other viruses and bacteria. So if you can keep that part of your nose moist and healthy and all the bacteria in there are functioning well, you're going to have some, some, some, not immunity, but you're going to have some, you're going to have a great defense

system in place. And that just, you know, it decreases the odds of that infection. We've got bugs in us all the time and we've got commensal bacteria. We've got bacteria that are bad, but they're already there. already there, like the one that causes ulcers. It's in our mouth right now, the heliobacter. But it only becomes a problem if we let it colonize and become dominant in that organism, that ecology of bacteria, so in the mouth. And that's why the oral microbiome is so important. And we abuse it. We abuse it all the time. We use mouthwash with alcohol in it. I mean, that literally gives you bad breath. It causes a dysbiosis of the oral microbiome. That's just one example. Foods, of course. Mouth breathing, you know,

letting the mouth dry out, not being able to breathe through your nose. You dry out the nose, you lose your sense of smell, and you lose all that filtering capability and that that defense mechanism and the ability to make nitric oxide so it's it's all tied to good oral health that's the whole point of our website and as a meathead you kind of just mentioned the controversial idea of nasal breathing being good for muscle building so what were you talking about there well i mean um before this interview i remember just way there are a few things I remember, you guys are all, you know, lifting and all that. And I totally dig that I just started with my physical trainer. About four or five months ago, I gained two pounds of muscle lost some weight. And my blood, my resting blood sugar levels went down. I mean, it was just it's it's

definitely the way to go, especially I'm 61. Now, As you get older, that's the one thing you got to focus on. You got to focus on muscle mass. I'm convinced of that. But, you know, there was one study that I grew up with and learned about in dental school where wearing a night guard makes those anaerobic moments, you're stronger. So if you're bench pressing or lifting for a short, just that one moment, wearing this night guard that repositions your jaw, prevents you from clenching down, actually makes you stronger.

That was one thing that I thought was interesting. I couldn't find the study, but they did that on Olympic athletes, that study in the 60s. They would do the long jump. It was a famous guy who broke the record. Bean was his name? Anyway, but and then they put the mouth guard in him. And they got a few, you know, greater distance for that one anaerobic moment for a pole vault, shot put, whatever. So I thought that was interesting. And again, but the the other

topic of nitric oxide uh there are some people taking nitric oxide because they feel it increases muscle mass and the mechanism perhaps is more vasodilation when the muscle is rebuilding itself um but then there were some i think there were some cons to that as well um i've i remember reading that it didn't work or it was bad for you, but nitric oxide does allow more vasodilation. When you've ripped your muscles during the day and you're resting at night and you go into deep sleep, what do you want? You want your muscles to rebuild themselves. That's how they get bigger, right?

So nitric oxide may have a place there as well. Yeah, and when you're weight training, it's really not that bad to utilize a lot of nasal breathing. It just might be uncommon for somebody because we're used to kind of like really blowing out a lot of air. I would say like if you're doing a more explosive lift, if you're doing maybe some heavy one rep just kill yourself, then you just, again, breathe whatever way you need to. But I think otherwise, especially through your warm-ups and stuff like that, there's not a lot of reasons on why you would need to breathe in other ways. I always found this to be really fascinating with humans. We lose our teeth at such a young age. I think we lose our teeth at like seven, eight years old, something like that. And then, you know, then we have the teeth that we're going to have, you know, all the way through the rest of our lives.

Has there been any, has anybody tried to like regrow teeth? Like we just had a stem cell doctor on recently, like will there be a phase in time where, because people are trying to live longer, right? People are trying to live to be 100, 120. And maybe we do have the potential to do that. But I would imagine that our teeth would perhaps give out at some point. Like, do you see that like in our future to be able to like regrow teeth or something like that? Yeah. Well, you know, like Dave Asprey, he's going to live to 180 and I, I want to be there with him. So, although he's younger than I am. So, you know, living longer, you mentioned something and I'll get back to your question. Living longer

doesn't mean you're more likely to lose teeth. I mean, yes, in today's world, but people that live on a paleolithic diet and are healthy. And I mean, yes, in today's world, but people that live on a paleolithic diet and are healthy, and I mean, I've seen teeth in 100, 105-year-olds, and they can be fantastic. Yes, there's a little attrition. There's a little wear from using the teeth and grinding and chewing foods and all that, but gum health is good. I mean, and typically, these people have very wide arches. They have good airways. There's no crowding of the teeth. And then you get crowding of the teeth.

The teeth don't do well. They start getting cavities. You start getting bone loss, the little girdle of bone. As the teeth crowd like this, they kind of don't do very well. The anatomy just isn't conducive to self-cleansing and preventing gum disease from occurring. But, but to answer your question, um, um, I think, um, a lot of it is, is about our diet. I mean, we are really, yes, the loss of teeth. And we see that in our anthropology, the anthropological histories, we see that starting when we started eating grains and we stopped becoming hunter hunter and gatherer

so so i think um uh what was your question originally i think i was just asking if they have the ability to like regrow teeth oh yes that's right um so that has been talked about ever since i was a dentist back in 83 when i entered dental school they were talking about it there was an english company that was doing it. There were studies. You know, it's still talked about. They were talking about a vaccine for gum disease back then. In all that time, nothing really has come to market. So is it possible?

I do think it's possible. They can do it in a test tube. Putting it in the mouth, I mean, you would have to extract a tooth, put a little, like a little embryo in there and then let the tooth grow. And would it take to the bone? I mean, I think what's holding it back is financially, is it feasible? You know, stem cell is great for joints and, you know, preventing knee surgeries and hip surgeries and things like that. I mean, there are a lot of other areas that it's, I think we're going to see it eventually. There are a lot of Asian dentists, because it's allowed, it's not allowed here, where you can take a wisdom tooth out and transplant it into a first molar

socket. That historically has not done so well. So I don't, again, I'm at the end of my career, right? And it's been talked about for my entire career. Have I seen anything like it? Not yet. Is it coming? Yes, but it's been delayed. So the best method is just to hang on to what you got, that second set of teeth. Make sure you know that they're your last and hang on to them. Implants are not perfect. Yeah. I want to ask you this because I know quite a few people and including myself who haven't gotten their wisdom teeth pulled. And in the past, my dentist was trying to convince me of it, but I was like, I don't feel pain back there. Everything feels fine. And I know some other like, and these guys are athletes and they're like, yeah, like I never got my wisdom teeth pulled either. Now you were mentioning development, building a big, you know, jawline, like whatever. But I'd assume that one of the reasons why people have to get their wisdom teeth pulled here so much in the U.S. is because of lack of development, or is that just the genetic thing?

Like some people do, some people don't. Right. It's a great question, and you answered it. It's due to the lack of development of the jaw. So our teeth kind of come in like conveyor belts, right? I mean, they come in, and the last tooth to erupt and develop is the wisdom tooth. And the jaw is fully formed at that point. If there's no room, you've got all the other teeth in place.

Maybe there's some crowding, maybe there isn't. But when these teeth come in and there's no room for them to erupt vertically, you know, then you've got a problem. Then they go sideways. It's a myth that they cause the other teeth to crowd. There's no clinical evidence for that. Then they go sideways. It's a myth that they cause the other teeth to crowd. There's no clinical evidence for that. But, I mean, it's essentially your teething. When you're 18 and this wisdom tooth comes in, you're teething.

That tooth comes in. If there's room for it, leave it in there. That means your jaw has the capacity to hold all the teeth that we were born with, right? But most of us don't. I would say 80% of us don't have room, maybe more, don't have room for those wisdom teeth because we still are born with the same number of teeth. That's not true for everyone. But in general, we're still born with the same number of teeth. When they come in and they come in in a staggered way, and when the last ones come in and there's no room for them because our jaw just didn't grow to its full potential, it's going to cause a lot of problems.

So it's almost a prophylactic procedure. Most people in this country think, oh, by age 14 to 18, I'm going to have to go through that rite of passage of having my wisdom teeth taken out. But if you can clean around them, you have no deep pockets around them, they are fully erupted, then you've got the job for it. Keep them. Absolutely. Yeah. But that's not the majority of us unfortunately are there other countries that like do better with that there are um i mean dr price a dentist in the 40s traveled all over the world and that was really one of his biggest observations is that all these uh other societies like in papua new guinea and you know indigenous

perhaps uh they they had room for wisdom teeth they didn't have rural surgeons taking out impacted that all these other societies like in Papua New Guinea and indigenous perhaps, they had room for wisdom teeth. They didn't have rural surgeons taking on impacted wisdom teeth. They didn't need it. But everyone in America did. So his conclusion was diet. It was diet. And then he had something he referred to as a missing factor,

something that they had in their diet that we didn't have in our in our diet at the time um and it probably was vitamin k2 he didn't really wasn't able to identify it but that vitamin that allows us to mineralize and develop properly but it's a host of other things as well so yeah absolutely what are you uh able to do for exercise You know, you mentioned you got a little bit into weight training, but it sounds like that might have been pushed off a little bit because the gyms have been shut down. Yeah. So skiing was cut short just as it started snowing. We had a little bit of a drought there and then it started snowing. Six feet was on my deck and that was the day they said, nope, ski areas are closed. So I i've been mountain biking i mountain bike every other day i'm out for two three hours it's a good full body workout a lot

of climbing i do push-ups planks um i'm doing stretching for hip flexors uh i took apart my grandfather clock over here um they're big heavy weights that help you know uh run the clock so my clock's not running and those are my they're about nine pounds each. And, you know, I do all my exercises with my pine cone weights. It's a pine cone weight, looks like a pine cone. It's an old German clock. So I've been eating well, been going to bed early. That's really nice. I mean, you know, there's there's not less to do, but you're a little bit more grounded when you're home. And, you know, there's always something you can do and go out and come home late and that kind of thing. But I've been going to bed at 10, 10 30 every night. And that really has been helping a lot. So.

We've been doing what we're, what we're calling quarantine doubles. And we've been, we've invited, you know, all of our, all of our fans, all the listeners to join in with us to work out twice a day. So we're, we're giving you a free invitation to work out twice a day as well. So it might be something you want to stay up with, you know? Yeah. Yeah. My local, you're right. And I'm, I, unfortunately I'm the person, I mean, I love mountain biking. I love, I love doing all these things because of the joy of it.

But when it comes to going to the gym and lifting, I got to have an appointment and a cancellation fee to get me in there. Right. So, um, that's lacking, unfortunately, but yeah, I'll definitely take you up on that. And our, our gym is doing the same. Uh, they're there, you know, if you have weights at home, great, but they're telling you just fill up a pillowcase with some books and let's start lifting. So I think, I mean, that's kind of a glimpse into our future. I mean, you're hands-on like I'm hands-on healthcare providers and you got to touch the person. You got to know that they're flexing the right muscles and their posture's right and you're a behavioralist. You got to modify their behavior and help them and coax them and all of that.

That's important. That's what we healthcare providers have to do. It's hard to do online. It really is. Any good Netflix shows you're keeping up with or Amazon watching now that you have a little extra downtime? Yeah, I try not to watch too much TV. I've been catching up some books, a lot of research. I did re-watch Mad Men.

I watched it a long time ago, and I really enjoyed it. And it was funny because I went through the whole series. It's one of the best written series on TV. Again, that was kind of my era. I was 12 years old in the 70s, and I could pick up on some of the shoes and the clothing and all that. But just a great show, real tragic hero, Don Draper. But I remember watching it the first time, really enjoying it, and really loving the end. This time I watched it again, and I hate re-watching stuff because I know what's going to happen.

But there's so much detail in it that i enjoyed watching it and then so i i i enjoyed the middle part of it the body of it even more the development even though i knew it was going to happen and i didn't like the ending i mean bizarre yeah anyway i mean lots of good shows on tv that's a great show they're always drinking a lot of hard alcohol on that show. I just remember like smoking. Yeah, nonstop. Right, right. Having a lot of unprotected sex.

It's amazing. Yeah, crazy. Doctor, thank you so much for your time. We really, really appreciate it. This was super insightful. I was taking notes as we were going because I was like, I need to get better at my sleep as well. So thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. Where can people find you? And where can they pick up your book? Yeah, thank you, Mark. And thank you, all of you. So it was a blast. I would just go to our website, go to askthedentist.com, askthedentist.com. And, you know, we've got lots of people looking every month. And we've got e products, we've got

lots of people looking every month and we've got e-products we've got uh free stuff uh and uh i think it's um it's a easily digestible format where you can learn a lot about your mouth and and next time he goes to your dentist you can quiz him and make sure he's up to speed thank you so much have a good rest of your day you too guys thank you very much thank you stay safe thank you Thank you. Stay safe. Thank you. He's out of there. Dude, that was awesome. That was so good. Yeah, man, that answered a lot of our questions.

He answered them very directly, which is helpful. Sometimes we have people on the show that are super smart and they got to answer it with a lot of other information, but he answered the questions pretty directly. I thought I need to get myself an, well, an ordering. What I like is, you know, how, um, a bunch of people have said, like, once they start

learning about a certain subject, they realize how much they don't know about this certain subject and the more questions they have. I think that's us when it comes to sleep, you know, the more we learn certain subject and the more questions they have i think that's us when it comes to sleep you know the more we learn about it the more questions we have and it's like damn who who can we talk to that's going to know all these questions and it was cool because exactly like you said mark he he answered everything very directly like everybody was able to understand everything he was saying i'm also pretty sure i'm sure you can find some sort of conflicting evidence there's probably some mutant thing out there but i think everything needs sleep i think every living thing

like has to like rest you know in some in some fashion and i think for us it's important that we you know take our sleep seriously you know i know stan efforting has been preaching it for a long time that you try to treat it like training and that you try to, you know, just like training, you try to get, you try to get better at it. There's times where maybe, uh, you know, maybe you go to bed later than normal. There's times where maybe you had a couple of drinks. There's going to be, there's going to be some error, you know, and that's totally fine. I think it's totally acceptable, but you want to try to limit that the best that you can. Yeah, no, it's like, even whenever I start working with anybody, it's the sleep portion of it is like, I think one of the biggest things,

because if they're only getting four or five hours of sleep at night, the chance that they're going to be adhering to their diet, the chance that they're going to be able to stick to the right foods that they need to be eating on a day to day basis. It's, it's's, it's like, literally I don't have success with someone that doesn't get enough sleep often because they can't keep their habits, you know? So it falls into, there's so much more it, you know, affects than working out, but sleep is so huge. Yeah. Do you guys think it's, it's, it's fair to make the statement that like, all right, if you can't sleep,

let's let me wake your ass up at 4 a.m two days in a row and by that third night you're going to be begging to go to bed some people actually do that that like do a lot of um flying you know from coast to coast or whatever they'll uh they will not sleep or whatever on certain nights so that they can be able to actually fall asleep when they need to but yeah no i think that's that's not a bad idea of someone's having real issues falling asleep but it just has to be something that they can maintain after doing it i'd assume so my ring you know gives me sleep you know uh it gives me a sleep score each day um and it tells you like your readiness and your sleep score.

Like Wednesday of last week, I got a 73. I got six hours and 20 minutes. And then I got like, I got a sleep score of 68. I got six hours and 30 minutes. That one's messed up. I don't know what happened on that one, but I got a sleep score of 49, five hours and 46 minutes, a sleep score of 56, five hours and 20 minutes.

It's just, it's shitty. And then every once in a while I'll sneak in a decent score, but it should be more like 90 from stuff that I'm seeing from some friends and stuff. Six hours and 54 minutes um and i think this was last night four hours and a sleep score of 53 so i am i am piss poor at sleep and it's just something that uh i just need to keep trying to work on but i you know i

have i have a schedule i have routine, I go to bed at similar times, I get away from my phone, I, you know, don't have blue light, I, you know, I try to do all the different things. But I think I just have sleep apnea, I've tried to adapt to wearing a sleep apnea machine in the past and just was unable to do it. And so I think maybe I just need to try to revisit it. But, I mean, when I talk about like I tried, like I tried for months. It wasn't like I was like, oh, you know, I don't really like this. You know, it's bothering me.

I tried different masks. I've tried different pieces. I've tried the mouth. I've tried through the nose. Like mouth guards. Uh, I have not tried a mouth guard. No, I've not tried a mouth guard, but like in terms of a sleep apnea machine, I had one that blew air through your mouth. I had one that blew air through your nose. I tried many different things with that, but it could also be something that just takes a long time to adapt to. But I also, I never, some people that have slept with a sleep apnea machine, they have told me like they had a day where they slept with it and they were like, they actually had a regular night of sleep.

And I never experienced that. And they said that was the kind of the turning point. They were like, Oh, okay. That's what's that's what sleep is supposed to feel like. So I still have never gotten to the point to be able to experience that. And then even just in all the time I've been tracking my sleep, it's, it's consistently always the same, you know, it's always, It's always off. It's never – but I also have been like this for a really long time, so I don't know.

I wake up and pee multiple times a night. I could try to drink more liquid during the day and drink less at night. That's something I really haven't practiced much. I actually just am typically more thirsty later in the day and drink less at night. That's something I really haven't practiced much. I actually just am typically more thirsty later in the day because of the way that my schedule is. I, you know, I, I do a lot of like, I do everything in the, during the day. And then my downtime is, is at night and I tend to drink water at that time, like more, more often. I just think about it more.

But I still don't think that that has anything to do with anything really. I think that I don't, I don't actually go to sleep enough for my bladder to shut off, you know, which is what he's talking about in like hypoxia and things like that. You know, dude, like, I mean, I'm curious to be as like, he was mentioning he had mild sleep apnea and he got that special mouth guard and that's something that opened up his airways all night long and he was able to do that i feel like that that might just be your thing right yeah i'm gonna i'm just gonna continue to keep to keep trying and i'll i'll get it uh i'll get it figured out at some point i've had this aura ring for a while and I even stopped

wearing it for a bit just because I was like, oh, it just gives me such disappointing news. But now I've been okay with it. I don't, at first it actually kind of, to be honest, it kind of gave me a little anxiety. I was like, ah, that sucks. Like I'm not able to, like I am made aware of this situation. I'm having a hard time fixing it. Um, I've tried magnesium and zinc and, uh, I just think there's more things for me to try. I just got to keep, keep trying and I'll,

I'll, uh, come to the right thing. Anyway, we got Hap Thor Bjornsson on the podcast for Thursday. Oh, wow. What time is that going to be since he's in Iceland,

right? Or is he somewhere else? Yeah, he's there. He's Iceland. He be since he's in iceland right or is he somewhere else yeah he's there he's he's he's in iceland and i think we said i gave him a bunch of different times to pick and he said uh 4 p.m so before p.m our time 4 p.m our time cool okay awesome hell yeah wow yeah get the low get the low down from him yeah did you guys see his 470 i didn't was it fast i mean dude now what was it it was uh 1036 yeah 1034 yeah yeah before i you know it's not like i was doubting him but like i was just like man i don't know like that's a shit ton of weight no one else has been able to do it you see that 470 you're like oh okay well that makes a lot of sense why he's gonna go for 501 because it was easy

super easy yeah i i think uh you know he's he's i think he's gone for 1100 before um or at least he pulled like 1070 or something so he's a monster but yeah here he is doing it right here see if i can yeah that looks good put that up oh my god that's so quick i want to say i maybe seen him fail with like a thousand 60 or maybe it was 1100. I think, I think he tried 1100 to Arnold two years ago and, um, he did get it off the ground, but he just didn't get to that. He didn't get to that spot. You know, like once, once somebody kind of gets it to a certain spot, they're usually going to lock it out. And he just, he wasn't able,

I've seen a lot of guys to really struggle with a clean lockout and that's uh that's going to be the hardest part you know because if you if you lose your back positioning with that kind of weight it's it's like you can stand up with it all the way kind of but your back will be hunched and your knees will be bent and so that's the one thing that um you know i'm hoping that he if he he is able to make it, I hope it's a good clean lift. I actually think that he can do more than that, too. I think he can do more. Like, he's going to, I think, like, chip the record a little bit.

But I think he can do even more than that. That's what I was thinking. I'm like, man, it would be so dope if he just was, you know, blew right, but not right past it, but did more than 501. However, that would be amazing. And then on the, the one that he missed at the Arnold, that was on a different bar though. Right.

Um, I don't know what bar they're using, you know, in this, in this particular situation, the bar that Eddie Hall used, um, I think it was kind of like an elephant bar,

but I don't think it was exactly the same. Okay. You know, I just, that stuff doesn't, the unfortunate part is that stuff just doesn't matter to the fans. You know, they don't, they don't care. They don't care. And Eddie Hall, I don't think, I don't think you should care either, but it's also a lot. it's also a body of work.

It's a lifelong thing of work. And to have somebody come along and kind of say, hey, I did it better, but they did it under different circumstances is probably very frustrating to him. But it's also going to be like on ESPN and like, I mean, I don't know, like if they weigh out the weights and they – Eddie Hall's competition was like – how do I say it the right way? It was like a setup for him to break the world record. Like not, not like, not he, he didn't set it up. And that's the difference here is I think Thor and his team kind of set this one up.

But I think Eddie Hall had planned that out for a long time that he was going to go to this particular meet and this is where he was going to do it. And my understanding from what I recall, and I don't even know if i have all the facts is i i don't think that that was a strongman event i think it was just dead lifting so a lot of the circumstances are uh similar enough and i think i think as in sema uh pointed out we were texting back and forth about it a little bit we we think that he'll you know he'll probably break the record and at some other point he'll break it in a competition and make it you know more official yeah probably dude like when if you see that video of him doing that 470 this is totally beside the

strength aspect of things but i think thor is one of the most like aesthetic strong men they're like he has like a like his shoulders are wide, his waist for a strong man kind of goes in. And then he has these like wide bodybuilders. It's like, Thor looks like a big bodybuilder, like a massive bodybuilder. It's crazy.

Yeah. I noticed that too. I was like, holy shit. Like I didn't like, I mean, I don't pay too much attention to strong man, but yeah,

I was like, damn, he's fucking jacked. I think the world hasn't really seen anything like him before. was like damn he's fucking jacked i think the the world hasn't really seen anything like him before and i think he's um i think he's still kind of just scratching the surface with like what he's what he's he's a machine i mean he's like um yeah he's he's just out of this world like how big and strong he is and how athletic he is he's he's kind of i guess like almost like a lebron james like where lebron james is the biggest fastest strongest like he he's as big and as

strong and as fast and athletic as you could possibly get like you can't you can't really do it like if he was if he was 6 11 he would be like fucked up you know lebr it. Like if he was 6'11", he would be like fucked up, you know, LeBron James. If he was 7' tall, he would be like all gangly and weird and like something would be off and he wouldn't be the same athlete that he is, you know. And I think that Thor is a combination like that as well where he is, I think, 6'10 or something like that. He has that body mass, that thickness to go along with that height and uh yeah he's athletic strong he's quick he's fast he's explosive he's a beast would you guys think it's the biggest event in strongman history this this deadlift event coming up no i mean i i wouldn't i wouldn't say maybe most popular then

because it's live strongman's never live unfortunately which would change that whole scene you have a point i think it could do a ton for the sport so i think it's amazing that espn jumped on yeah is it just on regular espn or is it like some two type thing or. Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I wish I knew I can research it and figure it out. Hopefully it's going to tell us on Thursday. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. That is a, that is a really, really cool thing, you know, and I, I would say biggest event in strongman history,

strongman, you know, it used to be on abc um used to be on abc wild world of sports you know in the in the 80s for a while and then uh world's strongest man has been on espn for many many years sponsored by uh metrics and it was on for at least a decade and those were always always big events, but this is, this one is different. This one is live. This one has all of the fans of, you know, the top strong men guys, they're all going to watch this, you know, and there's a, at this point,

there's millions and millions of fans. I think the sport has more notoriety than ever. So I would assume that this will be the most watched you know i'm assuming that this is going to be the most watched i think when eddie hall hit his deadlift i think they might have had it like live streaming or something like that but that's the big difference between you know being live streaming versus uh being on espn so i i you know it's it's a matter of like will thor if thor makes it if he makes the lift being live streaming versus being on ESPN. So I, I, you know,

it's, it's a matter of like, we'll thought if Thor makes it, if he makes the lift, then maybe it will kind of turn into like the biggest event. Yeah. And I, I don't, I don't think there's ever been a time where just sports fans in general will

be tuning in, you know, there's a lot of NFL dudes that have never watched a strongman competition and, or maybe there has, but you know what I mean? Like there's nothing else on NFL dudes that have never watched a strongman competition and, or maybe there has, but you know what I mean? Like there's nothing else on. So what are they going to watch? They're going to watch this.

Yeah, you're right there. There's nothing else to watch right now, but like, dude, I'm just thinking about the pressure. Like he better get this because there's so many people that are going to tune in.

So if he, if he doesn't get this man, that that's tough. But I feel like he will. I feel like he definitely will. And that's what made Jordan what he was, right? Like when you watch that documentary and he, even at a young age, he hits that shot for North Carolina and he was saying, he was like, the other team just had no idea. I was like, you're going to put that shot up, you know? But he, he drilled that rate right in their face. And then any other time just had no idea. I was like, you're going to put that shot up, you know? But he drilled that right in their face.

And then any other time he had an opportunity, I know that people talk about how he's missed shots at the end of the game, but I don't recall one of those times ever happening. I just remember, you know, all the times that he hit like these buzzer beaters. And I think that's fascinating, you know, to see how someone does on game day. You know, when the big moment comes, you know, I remember they used to talk about, you know, to see how someone does on game day. You know, when the big moment comes, you know, remember they used to talk about, you know, Peyton Manning not being able to get to the Super Bowl and all that kind of stuff. And then there's Brady's on the other side of things, who just seems like he always pulls something crazy out of his ass every time.

So it's an interesting thing to see how that all plays out. But Thor has enough experience, enough exposure. I mean, shit, he's on the, uh, he's on the biggest, uh, the biggest series in the history of television. Yeah. I mean, that's like, it'll be interesting to see if this will make him, you know, more famous than, uh, than like even more famous than even Game of Thrones. I imagine it's going to push him even further forward.

People probably don't always connect the dots between the two since he's all covered up in that show or whatever. But it's exciting, man. I'm fired up for it. I can't wait for it. It's going to be dope. Yep. All right. Well, I think we have to get to sleep. Yeah. Let's going to be dope. Yep. All right. Well,

I think we have to get to sleep. Yeah. I'm going to do so much research after we get off mattresses. There's so much to look up, man. Yeah. There's a lot of good info on that one. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode.

Again, thank you. Pete Montes for sponsoring this episode. If you guys want to follow up with that links will be in the YouTube description and iTunes show notes along with any information with uh today's guests uh please make sure you're following the podcast at mark wells power project on instagram at mb power project on tiktok and twitter if you want to hit me up it's at i am andrew z on instagram and sema where you be and sema any on instagram and youtube and sema yin yang on tiktok and twitter mark i've seen uh some a bunch of posts On Instagram and YouTube on TikTok and Twitter. Mark.

I've seen some, a bunch of posts from and SEMA with him lifting and the workout you did with the kettlebell the other day. I look brutal. Which one? I think you posted yesterday on IGTV. Oh, the jump roping and the kettlebell.

Yeah. Yeah. It felt good, but like it's man, kettlebells are great. And then jump roping is good too. I suck, but I want to get some double unders in. I can't do them well yet. I think you were doing good, man. It was kind of fun to watch you. Like I can kind of see you were like, Ooh, like this is which I don't usually see from you all that often. So I was like, Oh, that now I know he's like in it. I know he's in a good workout.

Yeah. But Andrew, dude, we gotta, we gotta see some posts of you, uh, out there hitting some, hitting some weights.

Yeah. I saw you do the Chris bell pose with the dumbbell the other day. Yeah, I know. Well, I just, I just been moving the weights around. Haven't been spending much time on the IG.

So I guess my workouts don't exist. Let's go, bro. I know. All right. Well well like this morning i did back so it was cool i deadlifted for the first time in a long time that felt amazing how's your neck everything's good it's still it's still there but it's yeah i'm over the hump and i can do whatever i i need to do now so yeah yeah, I got to start filming though. Otherwise it never happened, right? Exactly. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never a weakness. We just never strength. Catch y'all later.