Ben Greenfield

27:46Before I got the chair, I was kind accustomed to this idea because of this little device. You may have seen it's called the Apollo. It's a little vibrating wristband or ankleband that you can wear. A mild sensation that you can barely feel. But you can set it in focus, energy, calm, you know, love if you do it with a partner, or whatever state that you want to be in. But this chair is like that for your whole body. So that's the first thing that I do. The purpose of the Apollo would be the subliminal activation when you were in a state that you want to be in. You want to train for, let's say, your body would learn unconsciously how to get into those states.

28:29Well, it's less marketed as training wheels like you described to get into a certain state. And more a shortcut to get into that state just by putting the thing on. Right. So, shifting your body more rapidly into a state of relaxation, you get an airplane, you're stressed out, but you're tired and you want to take a nap and you can't because you don't sleep well on airplanes. You put something like this on and helps to shift your body into a more calm, less stressed state without using drugs or supplements or something like that. And it's a fantastic sensation. It also is you at the desired place to signal your body to go there.

29:05Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, there's another device that's called a sensei. It's like a cat purring on your chest. And this one is purely designed for relaxation or meditation. It cues to special audio tracks and vibrates in conjunction to the audio. And it's kind of a cool little machine. They update the app every month with new audio so you can play around with different settings and never get used to a certain one. But this idea of vibration is interesting because if you look at an animal after it's been chased by a predator, I think they even talk about this in Robert Zipolsky's book Zebra's Don't Get Oldsers.

29:44It'll shake to shake off stress. It'll tremor to shake off stress. All sometimes do this if I'm speaking on stage. I have the audience stand up and just shake their bodies and take a breath and hold on. It's kind of bounce up and down. And it's a good way to really stress and just shaking things off, tremoring. And this is similar. You're instead you're wearing something or sitting in something that's vibrating you and shifting into a similar state. This is also interesting because if you think back to somebody like Nikola Tesla, he said if you want to understand the universe, think in terms of energy frequency and vibration.

30:18So I began to sit in this chair and then this is all considered an example of biohacking. Cool ways that you can combine some of these hacks. I thought, well, what else could I do?

30:35That would be my hands on one of these light sound machines. You lay underneath almost like an LED blinking light. The one that I have is called a Roxiva. And the lights flash in conjunction to a set of headsets that are playing sounds. And it uses light frequencies to again shift your body via your eyes into whatever state that you want. This one could be used for getting more excited, meditating, relaxing, whatever. But I took the AV cable from that and plugged into the chair. So now I've got light, sound, and vibration. And then the only last thing is electrical frequencies. So I mentioned earlier the idea of PEMF, pulse to electromagnetic field therapy.

31:22This is like when you're standing outside on the ground, you know, every time lightning strikes the surface of the planet or solar radiation, bombards the surface of the planet, it collects negative ions. And you're soaking those up when you're outside, which is why it feels so good if you've been flying on an airplane or wearing big built up rubber -sold shoes to go outside and feel the ground. But the ground also emits a mild -hurt frequency, like one to 100 hertz. And some people say it's just 7 .8, which is the so -called human frequency. But it's more than that. It's all sorts of different frequencies.

31:56And pulse to electromagnetic field therapy concentrates those frequencies. So it's almost like everything in grounding, but more powerfully. You know, similar hertz, but at a higher amplitude, higher power. So there are mats that you can lay on. There are coils. There's one that's like just like a ring -shaped object. It's called a halo. And you can set it for digestion, inflammation, meditation, jet lag, whatever. So I put that in my lap. And so now I've got electricity, sound, vibration, and light. And I do this at about 4 .30 in the morning, for anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes. And it's incredible.

32:37It's incredible. There's even one that is called rebirth. And you can hear the fetal heartbeat, the whooshing sound in the mother's womb. It's dark with the occasional flashes of light. And as it crescendos towards the end, you have the entire birthing experience, bright lights, the music crescendos. It's almost like a heroic like experience. And I've not done that session ever without sitting out from the chair crying. I mean, it's that emotional and it's not profound how you can actually hack yourself into these states. And I think some people who are pure meditators, you know, I know that you've been doing trans and mental meditation for a long time.

33:18It almost seems like a little bit of abacurization or a hack or a shortcut. And that's kind of like the bad route that biohackers get sometimes. As you get dropped off by a helicopter on the top of Mount Everest instead of climbing your way up. But it actually is a pretty cool experience. That's incredible. You mentioned heart rate variability. What are the different things you can do to train heart rate variability? So heart rate variability, most people or a lot of people now know what it is, but in brief, because it is sometimes confused with heart rate, your heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute, your heart rate variability is the delta, the amount of time in between each of those beats.

33:58If the variability is consistent and even, so your heart beats and there is 0 .8 milliseconds and your heart beats again and there's 0 .8 milliseconds and another 0 .8. That's actually indicative of poor nervous system regulation. Basically your vagus nerve, part of what it does is it stimulates the pacemaker cells of the heart. And if there is poor balance of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, then what you get is an inability to be able to do mild fine tuning between each beat of the heart. In somebody who is well recovered, well slept, not underneath a lot of stress, etc.

34:43You tend to see mild beat to variations in terms of the amount of time in between each heartbeat. And this, if you're using a watch or wearable or a ring or something like that to monitor your HRV or heart rate variability, would usually be reflected as a high HRV or a high readiness score or a low strain score or something like that. It's just basically a really good way to measure not invasively the balance of your nervous system, the balance of the fight or flight and your rest and digest branches of the nervous system. So it can be trained specifically to increase it because a lot of people under a lot of stress who are poorly slept or not recovered or exceeding that Goldilocks zone of exercise or whatever, they do have low HRV.

35:29Some of the less technical biohacky ways to increase it would be yoga, meditation, chanting, singing, humming, gargling, which is interesting. So those are all vibratory sensations and it turns out that this type of alming or toning helps the tone the vegas nerve. And so again, we're back to the idea of haptic sensations kind of shifting the nervous system into a certain state. Thermal regulation, particularly around the face to head the neck, like dunking the face in cold water or doing a cold water bath. This is also one of the reasons that I like cold water immersion instead of crowd therapy because cold water immersion, if a specialist head goes under, I do it with my sons and I always put your head under, you do five or ten face dunks because you're activating the mammalian dive reflex and that helps the tone the vegas nerve.

36:17And being a robically fit can keep it increased, exercising, but not too much can increase it. But there are also back to the idea of biohacking. Some other ways that you can address heart rate variability via the vegas nerve. For example, electrical nerve stimulators and there's several of these, in the past, I would say two years, really hitting the markets, like small direct to consumer vegas nerve stimulators. There's different branches of the vegas nerve. One is called the auricular branch and it's right underneath the ear. You can hold one of these, it's a very small amount of electricity, but it feels like a little bit of a buzz, just a little bit of a shock.

36:55You can hold it up to one side under the ear for about a minute or two. And then the other side and see a near instant decrease in feelings of stress and an increase in heart rate variability. There's another one that you wear, that kind of hits a little bit more of the cervical branch, but it's behind the carotid. And that one you can wear as almost like a wearable around your neck and same thing, it stems the vegas nerve. Examples would be there's one called the true vega and another one called V -relief that hit the auricular branch. There's no one called the pulsetto that kind of hits a little bit more of the cervical branch.

37:31There's another one made by the same company that makes the veer relief that's a pair of headphones. And you can play meditative sounds, relaxing sounds, etc. But there's too little electrodes that come off the bottom of the headphones that trigger the auricular branch right there. So you can literally listen to some kind of head space or calm or one of these meditation tracks and simultaneously stimulate your vegas nerve so you get an increase in heart rate variability. And then probably like the top of the totem pole for a nervous system reset is there's a few doctors and you want to make sure it's a doctor that does a lot of these because as you can imagine this is going to be right by the carotid artery.

38:10They will literally put a needle in and inject like a prolo therapy solution or stem cells or PRP or something like that on one side of the neck. And then typically you got to wait one or two days because you get a little bit of throat swelling. It can be hard to swallow, hard to eat. And then you come back into the other side and it's called a stellate gangly and nerve block or a vagus nerve block. And that injection just resets everything. And I've done it a couple of times and it's crazy. It's like you've smoked a joint and had a glass of wine all at once and you you set up from the table and you feel this low level of stress and it lasts for a couple of weeks.

38:51I've done it just out of sheer curiosity. But you normally do this in someone who's had PTSD or trauma and nothing else is working to kind of reset the nervous system. Those are some of the ways you can increase HIV. I wouldn't start with the needles. It's interesting that HIV is more variability. I'd say it's called variability. But it seems like most things if they're running consistently would seem to be the preferred state. So it's interesting that the better heart rate variability means higher numbers meaning it's more variable. Yeah. Kind of. But in biology. And then this is interesting.

39:34I don't glycemic variability. The constant up and down fluctuation of blood sugar is something that could be indicative of poor insulin sensitivity or poor blood glucose management or a bad diet too high in sugar and carbs. But if you didn't see any variability at all, that could also indicate poor function of the liver, poor pancreatic production of insulin, the low glucagon production. It was something else going on from an endocrine or a pancreatic standpoint. So even with something like glucose, you'd kind of want to see variability, just not extreme variability. So how well you adapt to the new situation if you adapt better, you're healthier.

40:24Right. So I'm wearing this blood glucose monitor right now. It's not that I wear it because I don't know anymore what spikes my blood glucose or what lowers it is because what gets measured gets managed. I'm just less likely to eat sugary food on an airplane if I know I got to look at that score later on. But if you look at some of these things that we do to get healthier, particularly to get healthier to increase insulin sensitivity or to stabilize blood glucose, while we're doing them, we can get a huge increase in blood glucose. And then this is something that's confusing to a lot of people when they first start to use a blood glucose monitor or track their blood sugar, he had a sauna and it goes through the exercise with a lot of intensity and you get the cortisol release and it goes up.

41:10You get out of bed, you have a cup of coffee, you get a big dump of glycogen from the liver and the glucose goes up. But then you look at cold therapy, sauna therapy, exercise, even coffee to some extent. And you see that all of those things help to in long term stabilize blood glucose. So it's a short -term stress resulting in an adaptive response that allows for better control of the variable that you're trying to control for a longer -term basis. So it would be like people saying, you know, that there's same as exercise. Same as exercise. Some people will theorize that the heart is like a battery and it has a certain number of beats and then you're just out.

41:51And so you shouldn't exercise because you're just using up those beats more quickly. But even if that were true, and I don't know if it is, the extent to which an exercise session within moderation lowers the heart rate, the other 23 hours of the day outpaces the actual extent to which you increased it during that, you know, 30 to 16 minutes you were exercising.

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43:50Considering you've done the needles behind the ears to turn off the vagus nerve, have you had any mishaps in your biohacking adventures? Oh my gosh, nothing too extreme, because I'm not much of a daredevil. I've got mild skin burns from electrical muscle stimulation and gotten close to hypothermia by spending too much time in the ice bath. I've overdosed with certain injectables and taken too much of them. One example would be there was a growth hormone precursor. I think it was the peptide Ipermerellen. A lot of these peptides, they precisely target different variables. In this case, there's a couple, one called Ipermerellen, and one called Tessemerellen, that can increase growth hormone.

44:41I was off by a digit and used, you know, basically 10 times too much Ipermerellen. You know, I got the skin flush and was up to 1am. I would say the only time, and I wouldn't really call this biohacking per se, but I got into microdosing with plant medicines for a little while using this so -called Fatemann protocol, by James Fatemann, where you take a little bit of, well, it was a little bit of variant on that protocol, but it was a little bit of a cactus extract called Watumah on one day, a little bit of psilocybin the next day, and a microdose of LSD on the third day. And I was getting these in little packets that I bought and that were sent to me.

45:21And the LSD one was a little white capsule that you were supposed to dissolve in 10 ounces of water, and one ounce of water, if you were to drink that, was 10 micrograms of LSD, which is considered a microdose that, you know, I've done a microdose of that before, and it increases focus, and it's kind of like a cup of coffee, and then some, it's a real good creative focus. But I just happen to have all these capsules on the Watumah one, one of the things that it does is it just kind of makes you relax. So I was getting a massage one night, and I had the massage therapist come to my house about once a month and work on me.

45:57So this was like 7 p .m. and I took my capsule and I got on the table to get the massage, and I got like 20 minutes in, I could not relax. And I got 30 minutes in, and the music was getting really interesting, and producing almost like a kineshedesian, I could see colors correlated to the sounds that I was hearing, and then it started to get really mathematical and fractal, and you know, all I could see was geometric patterns. So I made it through the massage, not really knowing what was going on, but I remember finishing it and standing up, and the entire wall was geometric patterns that I went up, and I opened the refrigerator, and the whole refrigerator was just fractal patterns, and then I went to bed, and I closed my eyes, and all I could see was cartoons.

46:41Like old Tom and Jerry cartoons and the dude pounding the dude with the sledgehammer on the head, and I remember rolling over and saying to my wife, I think my brain is broken. I don't know what's going on, babe. And it took me until about midnight to realize that I'd taken the LSD capsule, the 100 micrograms of LSD instead of the tiny microgram of cactus extract. So that's probably about the worst mistake I've ever made as far as being up all night, listening to really interesting music until about 5 a .m. Tell me more about peptides. So it's a relevant question, because right now, they're under a lot of scrutiny.

47:19By the FDA, I suspect it's probably because of some kind of pharmaceutical lobbying, because they're very precise and relatively safe, unless you're a decimal point off, really medication. They're small chains of amino acids, and they're natural, and they can't be patented, at least not yet by anyone, and they're relatively accessible and affordable, and they can target different organs or different systems in the body with a lot of precision and relative safety. So many people might have heard of some common ones like DPC157, which is normally a gastric peptide that you produce in your stomach, body protection compound 157 is what it stands for, but it's also used for joints, for inflammation, for healing up an injury more quickly.

48:08Another similar one is called TB500, thymusin beta 500, and this is one that can be used in tendons, in the case of both of those, you can literally inject it with a subcutaneous injection, very similar to how a diabetic would inject insulin, like just to the left to right of the belly button, and you get a systemic healing effect. You don't even have to necessarily inject near the joints to get the effect. And then, oh my goodness, like you've got peptides for brain function, like C -lank and C -max, which can be administered as an intranasal spray, or as an injection, you've got deep sleep inducing peptide, which people will take a few hours before sleep to increase their deep sleep levels.

48:46Another similar one is semorelline, which is also peptide that can increase sleep. There are peptides like the Ipramorelline and the Tessamorelline that I talked about for growth hormones, which you're looking for anabolism or muscle gain. There are even very small peptide chains called peptide bio -regulators. And there's years and years of research in Russia on these peptide bio -regulators to decrease all cause risk of mortality. And then like crazy studies, and both human and rodent model on lifespan increases with these peptide bio -regulators. And they are typically things that target specific organs, like pinne Allen for your pinnacle gland, and they have one testalon or something like that for the gonads, and there's one for the liver, and there's one for the thyroid, and the theory is that by stacking these throughout the year and taking different doses of them throughout the year, you're maintaining rejuvenation of all your organs with these peptide strategies.

49:42And interestingly, the peptide bio -regulators, even though those can be injectable, they're also available orally. The problem is that just about every week that goes by some new peptide is no longer allowed or is banned or is more difficult to get, or if you try to get it, you're getting some cheap knockoff version that has lipopolysaccharized and other damaging compounds in it. And so it's getting riskier and more difficult to find peptides. And there's still some physicians who go through compounding pharmacists who get decent versions, but even doctors are getting access to fewer and fewer peptides.

50:17So I think they're incredible compounds, just because you can kind of like pick and choose and take off the shelf, whatever it is that you want to choose for a specific function, but they're also increasingly difficult to get. How long have they been available for? I would say I started hearing about them a lot more maybe eight or nine years ago, but I mean, like I said, the Russian research, and I know in Russia, particularly, they've been using them for a long time. Dr. Kovinson, actually, he's a doctor who just recently passed away several months ago, but he was a guy who headed up a lot of that research on peptide bio -regulators, and they're incredible.

50:56The other thing that I failed to mention is mitochondrial rejuvenation. Peptides like epitelon and motsy, you know, there's all sorts of ways to rejuvenate the mitochondria or build the mitochondria. Not just doing the 32nd effort with the long rest period, but you know, methylene blue and carbon 60 and red light and hyperbaric oxygen, but there are peptides that are, again, like some of the most powerful compounds you can use for the mitochondria. And when you look at the idea that one of the prime causes of aging is mitochondrial degeneration, they're actually really powerful for that too. It sounds great.

51:31Yeah. Yeah. Where do you get them? It's tough. I remember the old day, I used to have a CBD company, and this was back when CBD was heavily regulated, and you'd constantly be having to change your credit card processors and your website URL and your company name, and it seems like it's the same thing with peptides. Like I'll find a good source, and it'll disappear until recently, a few of the sources that were good, as far as like lab certificate of analysis and good sources of peptides, without necessarily going through a doctor, limitless life peptides, peptide sciences, one in Canada called CAN labs, but I don't think they're around anymore.

52:09Another company called anti -aging systems, they still have the oral peptide bio -regulators. Do they work as well orally or no? No. Injectibles better, unless you're talking about something that you're using for gut function. There's a company out of Australia called Level Up Health, and they have something called gut repair formula. It's got four or five different peptides in it, including BPC 157. It's developed for leaky gut inflammation, and I've interviewed the formula to that company a couple of times, and he does a good job making orally bioavailable peptides, but they're only going to be as powerful if they're specifically peptides for the gut.

52:47If you're going for something more systemic, usually you'd want to inject. And would most doctors prescribe them or no? I think the type of doctor is going to prescribe them as like a functional medicine doctor or a regenerative medicine physician or someone like that. As far as names, I know that Dr. Matt Cook still uses them. Dr. Craig Conover still uses them as a cook on the West Coast and Conover on the East Coast. Those are a couple of guys that I know are doing it, but they're becoming less and less available. What are the other keys to recovery? I like the idea of gradated compression. Have you seen the norm attack or the hyperice or the the therabody boots?

53:31We're like squeezing one part in the next part in the next three or body. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, if you look at cardiac rehab, they have these machines that are counter pulsation machines that do something like that for your whole body, but these boots, especially the gradated ones, they just pump blood almost like an extra heart that starts in your feet that pumps the blood up towards your heart. They're amazing. You set up in your legs for lives of feather and I didn't want to get two into the weeds, but when I was talking about that shift wave, Ruxiva halo protocol that I do, I have to wear the recovery boots when I'm doing that, just sitting there for 45 minutes.

54:04Anyways, so recovery boots, hyperbaric oxygen, a big fan of that, or exercise with oxygen therapy, which involves breathing, a combination of high oxygen and low oxygen. And you can do this when you're doing something like the mitochondrial workout that I was talking about or the VO2 max workout. So I've got a machine in my gym called a live O2 and it's a giant bag and I go out there an hour before I'm going to exercise and flip it on, it fills the bag with air and then there's a little switch. And while I'm exercising, what I do is when I go hard, I flip it to full oxygen and then when I'm going easy and recovering, I recover in hypoxia and you get tissue saturation of oxygen that's kind of similar to what you'd get if you were under pressurized oxygen like in a hyperbaric chamber, but you can do it while exercising and it feels fantastic, especially when you get the fresh breath of new oxygen while you're exercising.

55:02There's another machine called a cell gym and that falls under a different category. These are all acronyms, but you've got hyperbaric oxygen, H -B -O -T, you have exercise with oxygen therapy. So hyperbaric oxygen is where you get into a cylinder and it fills with either air or oxygen. Exactly. And usually breathing from an oxygen mask and the idea is that the only situation in which the tissues are going to become more saturated with oxygen than they would under normal conditions is A, if you're under pressure and B, if the tissue is in a hypoxic state and then gets a flush into oxygen. Those are the only two ways that you can actually do it.

55:46So hyperbaric is one H -B -O -T, then you have E -W -O -T where you're inducing a state of hypoxia while exercising and hitting your body with oxygen and doing that over and over again to saturate the tissues with more oxygen than they would normally get. And then the last version would be I -H -H -T, intermittent hypoxic training. There's a machine called a cell gym and you just sit there and a lot of people will combine this with meditation, relaxation, and it cycles the oxygen up and down. It'll go high oxygen, low oxygen, but instead of exercising, you're just sitting there as you do it. So anytime you're flushing the body with oxygen, it's a good recovery modality.

56:25That's interesting because that'll go as far as cancer therapy modality because there's two ways to make chemotherapy more cytotoxic or to increase overall cytotoxicity to cancer cells. That's oxygen and heat. So in many cases, you'll see a combination of chemo with oxygen and hypothermia or some people even using things like ozone and cancer hypothermic units, even in the absence of chemo for something like cancer because oxygen and heat can produce that toxicity to cancer cells. How does ozone work differently than hyperbaric? Ozone is O3 and that is creating free radicals in the body or reactive oxygen species that can act as antiviral compounds, antibacterial compounds.

57:10They can serve as signaling molecules. It can also be done in excess. You can get excessive reactive oxygen species. This is why you wouldn't want to do not that anyone thinks about doing this too much, but you're like daily wreck the ozone or a hyperbaric session and then an intermittent hypoxic session on the same day. So you don't want too much oxygen. There's a Goldilocks zone that's a little bit more difficult to define than something like the well -researched exercise Goldilocks zone. But ozone is more like a creation and reactive oxygen species that people would use for immune system and antibacterial and viral, etc.

57:44Usually, you know, rectal ozone, ozone water, people will do like, you know, vaginal insufflations for yeast over growth. You know, you can get ozoneated olive oil capsules for gut issues like a fungal overgrowth in the gut. So not used for recovery as much as for medicine. So you've got oxygen, you've got compression, red light therapy would be another. The idea behind red light therapies, you're not only bombarding the skin with photons of light that are in a spectrum that allow for absorption of that light through the skin that will then heat the tissue and increase blood flow. But there is an endorphin producing pain -killing effect that you give with the red light.

58:24And then this is what I think is most interesting. If you look at a plant, water molecules are split in a plant and chlorophyll in the plant facilitates this process to create electrons. Right? Now that's basically how photosynthesis is occurring. In a human, you can get a similar water splitting effect when sunlight hits the body if you have a high amount of melanin in the blood. And so there's actually a book I read last year, it's called something like human photosynthesis. And I think it was like a Russian translation. It's little difficult to read. But it goes in this idea of having dark melanin -rich compounds in the blood and then hitting the body with sunlight or red light to produce electrons in the absence of calories.

59:15Right? Normally we'd burn carbs, fats, proteins, etc. to generate electrons. And this is instead splitting water molecules to produce H2O2 and four free electrons per two water molecules that are split. So this is kind of cool, but you can use any of the dark greens or the dark blues or the dark black pigmented compounds of the plant kingdom in combination with red light to generate ATP. So that's why methyl or blue, that's sunlight or red light or methylene blue would be one cheligite, the dark black tari compound, that's another. And then any of the photoscianins that you from like to algae, like a spirulina or a clorella or a blue -green algae, not a ton of actual research on this.

1:00:06It's pretty theoretical. So this is anecdotal, but if you were to try, cheligite, methylene blue, spirulina clorella, or even make yourself a little cocktail of all three and then go out in the sunlight or do infrared light therapy, it's incredible. You get this, you know, non -jittery feeling of energy. And I think it's because of the increased shuttling of electrons because they're in a greater amount on the electron transport chain. So you're increasing the production of ATP. And so this is something for both energy and for recovery. Aren't blood and chlorophyll very similar? Yeah. Yeah, I forget what the actual, the structural composition of it is, but I believe it's that hemoglobin is somewhat similar to the chlorophyll molecule in terms of its carrying capacity.

1:00:57So it would make sense that if chlorophyll works for photosynthesis and plants, if blood is extremely close to it, I think one electron different. Right. It would make sense that it would have some effect with it. But I'm still not a breatherian. Let's talk about breathwork. Breathwork is interesting because it is a free and easy tool that's built into all of us that we can use to tweak our nervous system or our physiology pretty rapidly. When we go back to the nervous system and the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system balance, the longer exhale triggers an increase in parasympathetic nervous system activity.

1:01:39So you see an increase in the vagal nerve and increase in HRV with the longer exhales. But breathwork goes beyond just the nervous system. We could look at the immune system. Right. When you breathe through your nose, you're going to produce more nitric oxide. You're not only humidifying and filtering and warming there better, but you're producing nitric oxide and you'll produce even more if you harm. You know, there's another of the ideas behind alming or humming as you do breathwork. And that increase in nitric oxide can have antiviral and antibacterial properties in addition to vasodilating your vessels.

1:02:14So it's almost like you're producing an increase in blood flow with the nitric oxide that you produce with doing something like nasal breathing and long exhale through your nose and a fork out, inhale through your nose. Another example would be playing with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide therapy is now a thing. You can actually breathe carbon dioxide and they're using this to induce stress resilience. Increase stress resilience because as you get exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide, back to the example we were using with glucose or with your heart rate, there is a short -term increase in stress that results in a long -term stress adaptation response.

1:02:57So for example, there's a machine I've tried it's called a carvaging and you'll breathe about 7 % carbon dioxide for 5 to 7 minutes and you get a little bit stressed out. When you first start using it and by the time the session ends, you're a little bit more zen. Anders Olson, who was written the book The Power of Breath, he has a machine that you connect to a carbon dioxide tank that does it. So just a mask coming out of the machine and the other end goes into the carbon dioxide tank. But you don't need fancy machinery per se because if you are doing, let's say you're doing like the Wim Hof protocol, big breath in, and in, and in, and out, and in, and out.

1:03:43The big breath in is giving you a whole bunch of oxygen. The relaxed exhale is breathing off less carbon dioxide than you'd normally breathe off with a full exhale. So you're getting oxygen and carbon dioxide retention simultaneously. So that would increase the amount of oxygen that you could deliver to tissues. So it's almost a way of hyper -oxygenating your tissue when you're playing with oxygen and CO2 like that. Other forms of breath work are doing big exhales, so you're blowing off CO2.

1:04:23And this is one of the body's triggers to take a breath when you're low on oxygen. So when done correctly, and this is something you have to be very careful with, but I've taken free diving courses, for example, where you're blowing off a little bit of CO2 with a certain breath cycle before you dive, so you're able to hold oxygen for a longer period of time, which again, like if you're not doing this under supervision, it could be dangerous, but it would be a way to hold your breath for a longer period of time. So it's pretty cool how many different things that you can do with breathwork all the way down to Wim Hof is probably one of the more popular breathwork instructor.

1:04:57He's showcased, he and his students' ability to do things like fight off E. coli and enhance the immune system through their former breathwork. And I don't know if that's the carbon dioxide. If it's the nitric oxide, if it's some other type of endocrine or immune response, but considering that there's apps now like other ship, breath source, there's a lot of them now. I don't know that. Probably the coolest one, I think, is other ship. It's almost like a DJ for breathwork. It's a bunch of different instructors all times to music, and it's everything from a quick five minute session designed to be done in a cold bath to help you get through a cold plunge to like 75 minute hallotropic -ish breathwork sessions, not to kick the LSD horse to death, but Stanislav Groff, one of the developers of hallotropic breathwork, developed it as a way to shift the body into a near psychedelic state using breathwork.

1:05:55And that's obviously more intense, and it's quite a long haul to get through that, but other ship has musically guided breathwork sessions that are pretty cool. Other ship has a couple's breathwork sessions too, which are kind of cool. They're like 20 to 40 minute routines that you would use for making love, for romance, and in your little like breathing in and out of your partner's mouth and moving your body and correlation to them. And so it's a cool app.

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1:07:54Let's talk about EMF, dirty electricity and other toxins. Oh boy. Yeah. You know, when I built the house that I'm in right now, I was lucky enough to be a little bit aware of a lot of these issues with non -native, electromagnetic fields and their impact on the body. So I'm lucky that my house is really clean. The sound system is all hardwired. All the internet is cat7 metal -shilded, ethernet cable. There's no Wi -Fi. All the lighting is low EMF, low flicker, circadian -friendly lighting. There's dirty electricity filters in every room. The solar panels have a switch on them that reduces the amount of dirty electricity that gets kicked off when it does the DCs to the AC or the AC to DC conversion.

1:08:43I forget. There's kill switches in every bedroom. And so I live in a pretty clean environment. I'm building a home in Idaho now where I've taken that to the next level, to how the floor is grounded. And we've amped up the air quality, the water quality, the lighting quality, everything. But the reason for that is because when you look at the body and specifically the cells, there's a specific electrochemical gradient that is across the cell membrane, a slightly negative charge on the inside, slightly positive charge on the outside. So when the body is subjected to high amounts of non -native signals that go way beyond the hertz frequency of the one outside that I was talking about, like the planet Earth makes.

1:09:37And when we get up into the megahertz and gigahertz frequencies, you see a calcium influx into the cell that results in the cell being in a constantly almost like depolarized state. I mean, if you look at the cortisol release that occurs, let's say, I bow hunt a little bit, and if an animal gets shot poorly or is very stressed out when it dies, you get a big release of cortisol. That sympathetic nervous system response can cause calcium influx into the muscles. And that's one of the things that not only causes rigor mortis, but a tougher cut of meat from the animal. So the idea with your body is that if your cells are not electrochemically tuned because they're constantly exposed to the bombarded by all these non -native EMS, then you feel as though you're almost in a state of like baby rigor mortis, like you're stressed out a little bit, you're tights, people when they get that combined with the flickering from overhead lights will get a little bit of low level brain fog and fatigue during the day.

1:10:41You combine that with things like metal overload, which almost can turn your body into a little bit of an antenna. You look at poor detoxification, people not having as many methylated compounds in their diet, and you create this storm of issues that primarily are related to electrical abnormalities in the body. You can talk to your blue in the face about all the scary things that do this. You know, Wi -Fi routers and VR headsets and smart homes and not to mention flying, in which you're completely disconnected from the surface of the planets, even more than people who are just wearing big built up rubber -sold shoes all day.

1:11:28But basically, you're creating an environment in which the body is just fatigued, tired, and fighting an uphill battle against levels of electricity that we really haven't been exposed to until the past 100 years or so. So even though, you know, again, you can talk about all this scary stuff for a long time and the effects that it has in the body, I think it's more important to focus on what you can do to feel better, because most people are not going to move to a pristine Himalayan mountain top, and in many cases, even unplugged their Wi -Fi routers or get away from dirty electricity in the office, etc.

1:12:04So the number one most important thing to understand is that there's arguably one third of your life during which your nervous system has a chance to repair and recover from all of the electromagnetic stress. And that is your bedroom. If there's one place where you can focus on low amounts of electricity and a low EMF environment and preferably a low blue light environment, it would be your bedroom. So this would mean getting some dirty electricity filters and plugging them into one or two outlets in the bedroom, getting a Wi -Fi timer or figuring out a way to turn off your Wi -Fi just during the night when you're sleeping, which you can time to go off between 10 PM and 6 AM, making sure that there's not a lot of things that are turned on in the bedroom when you're asleep.

1:12:48Even me when I walk into a hotel or my unplug as much as possible, because I just don't need the TV and the coffee maker and the microwave or whatever else is in there on while I'm sleeping. And then you can also during the daytime do things that allow your body to get grounded and to kick off some of that electricity. This would be like a grounding mat or an earthing mat at your desk or doing some of that morning stretching on a PMF mat or getting outside barefoot or they even earthing and grounding shoes now with a little bit of metal in the bottom that will keep you grounded understanding that you can you can kick off a lot of that charge if you're getting in touch with the surface of the planet or something that's bringing a grounding or an earthing environment into you.

1:13:31When you look at the calcium influx, you can also address some of that with magnesium, like a good amount of magnesium intake, low inflammation diets, even the use of things like ketones for example to help address some of the issues that occur particularly when you're doing airline travel. But I think really that the number one place to focus on is the bedroom. Is there any technology that overrides the bad waves? There are, as you probably aware, a host of wearables that claim to harmonize the EMF or block the EMF or alter the body's response to it or transform the signal. You'll find very little research that's good clinical research showing that these things work.

1:14:23The only one that I've seen really good research behind is called a wave guard. It's a pretty large cylindrical object. It's filled with some kind of a conductive liquid. I have a couple of those in my home, not because I've got a ton of electricity in my home, but people send me these things to try. What does that do? Explain what that thing does. It somehow blocks the signal using this liquid conductive technology. I don't fully understand how it works, but they shared some good data showing a lower amount of EMF and devices that were around wave guard things when it was being used. The rest of them is purely subjective.

1:15:05At least I would have said this until a couple of weeks ago. I'll tell you what happened a couple of weeks ago. But this necklace that I'm wearing, this Aris -type necklace, it claims to have a semi -conductor in it that somehow transforms the signal. I don't know if it does, but I feel better when I'm wearing it. The question is if somewhere to hand me one without a semi -conductor that looks exactly the same, could they placebo me? I'd feel just as good thinking that I'm wearing an EMF walking or transforming necklace. But I did something about the tree growth around my house, or something changed the ability for me to get a cell signal in my house about a month and a half ago, which got pretty frustrating because I had to walk up the farm road and up the hill behind my house to make phone calls.

1:15:48It called Verizon and I got a cell booster, which is like boost the signal from the tower. So you're able to actually make phone calls. I put it in my house and I suspected that it probably had pretty high EMF. I'd actually just recently published this video to Instagram and I walked through the house with an EMF meter that measures magnetic field and electric fields. And I forget the units for the electric field, but the number that you preferably want things below is about 60. And when I walked past the refrigerator, it went up to 100 and when I walked up to the cell phone booster, it went up to 200.

1:16:32So I thought, well, hey, the cell phone booster is going to go up on the roof or somewhere farther away from a living area or a sleeping area in the house. This company has sponsored the podcast before. So I had some of these eras text stickers and I put one on the refrigerator and one on the cell phone booster and then I walked through again with the signal meter and it dropped on both. The refrigerator went down to about 80 and the cell phone booster went down to about 100. I didn't change anything else. The difficult part is whether it's, you know, me sleeping better having higher HRV when I wear one of these or seeing my refrigerator or cell phone booster drop is explaining why because I don't quite understand how something as small as a tiny semiconductor inside a sticker could actually decrease the EMF signal that much, but it's doing something.

1:17:25And so, you know, for me, it's kind of like photonic entanglement or quantum physics or things like that, you know, being able to pray over water and have the structure of it potentially change or being able to send positive energies from afar, you know, I'm a man of faith, you know, I pray, I believe in God and so it sounds a little ridiculous, but I think that there is an effect that these things can have on EMF, but I really can't explain exactly how they're working and I haven't seen a good explanation for a lot of them either.

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1:19:35Tell me about your experience with prayer. Well, I grew up Christian and go into a Protestant reform church. I wouldn't say that I had a deep connection to God in terms of my prayer life until about 10 years ago. What changed? I was getting pretty successful in business. It was traveling a lot. I was speaking on a lot of stages and getting more popular and I was neglecting my family life. And things got pretty dicey between my wife and I and I was not an at present father or husband. I was galovanting around the globe justifying to myself that the money that I was making with the business was something that was going to support the family and eventually I get to the point where I'd be able to spend more time with them.

1:20:36And my wife and I nearly broke up because we had just grown so distant. And that got me on my knees every morning. And I prayed a lot and her and I prayed a lot together. Did she grow up in the same community as we grew up in the same community? We've known each other since second grade Sunday school. We've been married 21 years. Amazing. But it's one thing to grow up as a Christian. And it's another thing to be deeply connected to God because you've been through strife or turmoil or some type of trial that has dropped you to your knees. In this case, it was me knowing that if things didn't change, I could lose my family.

1:21:17I started praying every morning. I started reading my Bible every morning. I kind of reversed the order as far as the priority of life. I went from business being number one to first God in my own spiritual health. Then my spouse, my wife, checking in on her, taking care of her in the morning. Then my kids, and now we all gather at 7 a .m. for meditation, prayer, and reading the Bible and talking about our day and our blockers and how everything's going to go in our morning family huddle. And then my health. And then when all of that is done, business. And I bookend the day. Same thing. At the end of the day, 7 p .m.

1:21:56the whole family meets at the dinner table and we sing a song and we pray. And there's a coming together and we play games. It's a beautiful, glorious family dinner party. None of that would have existed 10 years ago. But my prayer life since then has gotten to the point where it's more of a constancy of prayer. And I pray in the morning and I pray before meals. And I pray when I need answer from God about a decision that I'm going to make and my wife and I last thing we do before my mouth tape goes on at night and we fall asleep as we say a prayer together. We pray with the kids before we go to bed.

1:22:31And this idea of the hope that's derived from being able to speak to a greater power outside of yourself and to be able to know that you can lay your stresses and your worries as well as your requests for wisdom and discernment. The feet of that higher power is something that gives me so much hope and has been so meaningful for me. How do you say it's changed your life?

1:23:03It's brought me to realize that I don't have the power and the strength and the goodness inside myself to be the man that I really want to be, to be the father that I want to be, to be the husband that I want to be, to make impact in my business or my personal life or anywhere else. And that there is a greater power outside of me that I must rely upon and be humble enough to be able to ask for help from. It's also changed my gratefulness for life. I think there's a difference, at least I felt a difference between writing down or voicing or thinking about what it is you're grateful for and actually saying thanks to the source of that good thing.

1:23:55It's one thing to identify things that you're grateful for. It's another thing to give thanks to the source from which that blessing came. So a deeper sense of gratitude, a deeper sense of my own weakness and need for strength and support. And then also just feeling like when friends, when family members, when other people need help, when they're sick, when anything occurs that I want to help people with that I can actually not just help them physically but be able to bring them before God in prayer. How has it impacted the relationships within the family?

1:24:32When you pray together as a family, there is a certain amount of humility, a certain amount of weakness displayed. When we pray together as a family, we are praising God for who he is. We are confessing our sins. And that doesn't mean that we're all sitting on the living floor at 7 AM talking about all the bad things we did. It's an actual quiet time reserved for us to think upon and dwell upon things that we want to bring before God and ask for forgiveness for adoration and thankfulness. There's actually an acronym that we follow which is adoration confession, thanksgiving and supplication. So we give thanks and we pour out gratitude before God.

1:25:18And then we ask God to help out with an aunt who is sick or who a friend that we've told we would pray for. We have notes with the list of people who are going to pray for. So it's a way to bring the family together and also it's wonderful for my sons to be able to hear me pour out my heart to God and to be able to ask for forgiveness and for them to see that their father doesn't think that he's perfect and needs outside help. And it's also, you know, it builds faith. You know, in the Bible, there is a book called James and there's a chapter in James 5 and it says, it's an entire section called the prayer of faith and it says if anyone is suffering, let them pray.

1:25:57If anyone is cheerful, let them sing praises. If anyone is sick, let them bring that person before God and pray for them and lift them up. If you need healing, you know, confess your sins to one another and pray to God for healing. And so there's so many beautiful things that can happen when you weave prayer into your life. But for me, probably the biggest is just a sense of hope, just knowing that I can call out for help in a time of need and it's not out to an empty universe.

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