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29:52So despite the fact they're invasive, have side effects, and are expensive, they work half the time. They may not work, yeah. So what's the point of all this? The point is, yes, some people are benefited, they don't need anything, and that's wonderful. But a lot of people want other options. And what this vagus nerve stimulation, which by the time this airs, may be approved by the FDA in the United States. If not, hopefully it will be approved in the coming months after this airs. What that will allow is patients who have tried these other therapies, but as you said, are not getting better in their body or their mind, that they now will have an option of having an implant.

30:40The implant will be put in, it's about the size of a fish oil pill. It'll be put in through about a one inch or one and a half inch incision in the neck by a neurosurgeon, right about the level of your Adam's apple, down deep where you feel the pulse in your neck. You won't be able to see it, and it will operate for about one minute a day. And many of the patients, I've met many of them, many of the patients sleep through the therapy at 4.30 in the morning or something like that. Other patients told me that it's like a little alarm clock for them, but when it goes off, they smile because they realize immediately their hands don't hurt anymore.

31:20Really? Yeah. So it's a little chip that they implant. Other side. Left side, right? Left side. This is where the pulse is, right? Yeah. You feel it here on the left side. Next to the pulse. And you've had over 200 and some people already go through this in the last year. Exactly. So the company is called Setpoint Medical. it's not far from here in Valencia and they completed a clinical trial last year. They reported the results. These are people that were having extreme pains like for years. All of these people were out of options. They had had. They tried the drugs. They've meditated for years.

31:57They've prayed. They've done everything they can and they're just feeling pain. Yep. Pain, stiffness, swelling. And many of them had symptoms in their mind of either anxiety, depression, sleep disorder, cognitive abnormalities. And what the results showed is not only did a significant percentage, a statistically significant percentage of the patients with the implant have improved pain and swelling in their joints, many of them also had improved quality of life. Less anxiety, less pain, better sleep, less depression. And it doesn't require taking any drugs or invasive therapies, except for one invasion, I guess, of putting something in your neck.

32:43So that's going to remain to be seen. Many of the patients were able, after the chip was implanted, to reduce the drugs they were taking, but many of the patients continued to stay on some of the drugs. It's been 242 patients. There are millions of patients that will be eligible for this worldwide. It will take years to have a clear, simple answer to what you said. What patients will be able to take fewer drugs? What patients will have to continue taking drugs? What patients will have no response to this? and what patients will live their life not taking any drugs anymore. How those numbers shake out has to be studied in much larger populations.

33:31But I've met some patients who were taking several drugs and are now taking none. Really? Yes, and having no symptoms. What has been the biggest thing you've seen over the last three-plus decades of research, uh, hands-on experience and the science that you've been studying, what's been the biggest breakthrough you've seen in the last three plus decades of just healing the body or body optimization? I think the, the, the, the biggest breakthroughs I'm seeing today are actually coming from understanding the linkages between the, the brain, the nervous system and the immune system. We, you know, the vagus nerve insight, which we started 25, 30 years ago, was just the tip of the iceberg.

34:19Right now, the field, which is called neuroimmunology, is probably one of the fastest growing, if not the most exciting fields in all of science. Young people, young people want to want to study this because the tools are so powerful. And just again, in the vagus nerve story, we can go in a laboratory mouse and we can put tags in the neurons of the brains of those mice and we can shine a laser beam on a discrete part of the mouse's brain and activate a few hundred neurons in the brain and follow the signals down into the spleen. And we can look at the molecules all along the way, we can look at the electrical signals, we can look at the individual steps.

35:05Those kinds of experiments are now being applied to all kinds of conditions, ranging from not only autoimmune disease, but diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and obesity. We're seeing studies looking at understanding how things like GLP-1, ozempics, how these things work. These things are now all being broken down to signals traveling in individual neurons, not only in the vagus nerve, but in the sympathetic nervous system and in the neurons in the brain itself. We're living in an era where we can map the starting point, the origin and the destination, the origin and insertion of all the nerves in the body, first in mice, then in larger animals, and ultimately in humans.

35:54And with those maps, we will be able to design devices and someday even drugs and perhaps nanobots that can target the individual fibers in an individual patient to give the treatment that that patient needs. Specific without side effects probably just to that thing. Wow. That's where the world is headed. Is it going to get there tomorrow? No. Is this some pie in the sky? Everyone's going to have a flying car a hundred years from now? No, this is happening. Some of the things I said are already in clinical development. Wow. Now, even though you're not a psychiatrist, have you seen any research on how trauma impacts the brain, whether it be psychological or emotional or sexual trauma, how it impacts the brain, the body, and the nervous system, and how we could stimulate the vagus nerve to actually start healing that trauma?

36:50So it's complicated. Again, at the simplest level, we have seen now if there's trauma in the vagus nerve or damage or injury, that you can have problems in the body because signals traveling in the vagus nerve are not getting where they need to go. It's blocked somewhere. Yeah, it's like imagine going down a mountain and the brakes in your car, someone cuts the brake line in your car. That's happened to me before. I mean it didn't cut like someone didn't cut them but I was in an old Cadillac a 1997 Cadillac going up a mountain to Big Bear in California and on the way down the brakes came out and this is like an old car where it's like pumping the brakes and I was there was a guy next to me I was driving and I was like we're gonna die we're gonna I was like it's not breaking and I just shifted it down into like first gear whatever it slowed it down and it came back a little bit around these curves going down and luckily got to the bottom of the hill but it was it was scary you're lucky to be here it was scary but it was like this was probably 12 years ago but it was terrifying so imagine that in your body all day long like the brakes not working and your your vagus nerve is experiencing that it's probably what these people with rheumatoid arthritis felt like interesting the brakes have failed they have a excessive inflammation in their body the inflammation in their body is changing the way their mind is working and how they feel and their level of anxiety all day long, day after day, year after year.

38:18It's exhausting. It's exhausting. So that's that effect. We, we, we understand you asked about similar things in the brain that, that gets complicated and as an area of active research, but it has come together very recently in studies of post-traumatic stress disorder. So post-traumatic stress is an example. Um, A warfighter sees a horrible, or experiences, sees or feels some horrible scene and continues to relive it and relive that horrible event day after day after day, even in the safety of their home, you know, here in California or somewhere else. A very recent study, they implanted vagus nerve stimulators in those subjects and timed the activation of the nerve, now focused on sending signals up into the brain, not down to the immune system.

39:10They timed the signals so that the therapy being given either by an app or by a human therapist, which is reasonably successful, reasonably successful therapy. I'm sorry, I forget what it's called. Again, I'm not a psychiatrist. But this therapeutic modality has been reasonably successful and maybe helps half or two-thirds of the subjects with post-traumatic stress, which is pretty good, but not 100%. When they added the vagus nerve stimulation to the clinical trial, they had 100 % response rate. What does that mean? Well, what happens when you stimulate the vagus nerve, and we're back to the mind-body connection again, signals presumably going up into the brain increase neuroplasticity.

39:56What is neuroplasticity? Neuroplasticity is the ability for those connections that we talked about in the very first minutes of the podcast, which are called synapses. Neuroplasticity means that the brain can form new synapses. When you learn something, you form new synapses. When you unlearn something, you form new synapses. By driving these signals up the vagus nerve, increasing neuroplasticity, these post-traumatic stress patients, many of them, had significant benefit from their therapy, and it was lasting, is lasting. It's almost like they have to unlearn the memory. Absolutely. That's what the point of the therapy is.

40:36Because the memory, if you're reliving it five times a day, it's almost like your body's in that trauma now. It's a new experience when you live a memory again. Isn't that interesting? This is, I mean, trial lawyers have known this for decades. So you could be living in a war that you went through 10 years ago, but your brain is reliving it, rethinking it. Fresh. Fresh. Fresh. And so you're in that heightened state. It's going to be chronic illness, right? Absolutely. And so it's really more about, is it about eliminating the memory, changing the memory um reinterpreting the memory and creating meaning behind that memory so there's a benefit to it like what even though you're not a psychiatrist what is that process so we can actually heal the mind the thinking of the mind that's causing the stress in the body yeah i think psychiatrists psychologists and philosophers are talking about this now and trying to figure out the answer to that.

41:34You know, how much is unlearning? How much is relearning? How much is adapting? But at the level of the synapse, which Charles Sherrington taught us, if you understand the synapse, you can assemble an entire nervous system with 100 billion neurons. At the level of the synapse, vagus nerve stimulation enhances neuroplasticity. I mean, this has been known for decades. Years ago, there was a fascinating study. Subjects, patients who had had a implant for the their epilepsy. So in these cases, these are people with serious disorders with seizures, epileptic seizures that are not well controlled by medications.

42:14And some of these subjects were having 10, 20, 30 seizures a day. Oh my gosh. You can't go out of their house. That's exhausting. So as a attempt to treat that, vagus nerve stimulators were implanted in some of these, and about half of them had significant benefit. Now you say at first, well, half's not a lot. Well, it's a lot if you're one of the people having 30 seizures a day and you go down to having two or none or three. It's life-changing. Life-changing. So during the course of those experiments, those clinical trials, some subjects didn't get significant benefits. So they had their device turned off, but they left it in.

42:56so researchers called them in for a clinical experiment and they gave them a cognitive test and they wrote down the answers and then they turned the device on they gave the test again and their scores went up interesting that was the one of the early signs of the fact that vagus nerve stimulation can improve cognitive function through enhancing neuroplasticity it's very interesting. Wow. That's now been FDA approved for the treatment of rehabilitation, increasing rehabilitation from in patients who've had a stroke affecting the arm. Wow. So what what's done is the therapist does their therapy, but the delivery of the therapy is timed with giving vagus nerve stimulation through the left neck through a surgical implant.

43:47And for patients who've had paralysis of the hands and arms, the disabling thing is not being able to use the hands to feed themselves, hold a newspaper, hold a book. And the results from adding vagus nerve stimulation to that are absolutely remarkable. Really? Where people are paralyzed in an arm or a hand? And are significantly better with their rehabilitation combined with the vagus nerve stimulation. Maybe it's not full range and function, but it's improved. Exactly. It's not necessarily full range of function, but it's significantly improved enough that the FDA has approved it. Wow. Yeah, it's coming in.

44:31I mean, for me, I'm all about trying to find holistic solutions to heal the mind and the body. That's what I want for myself, the people in my life, the people watching or listening around the world, is there are people that have so many different either conditions, pains, stresses, overwhelms. And I think a lot of these things stem from the way people think and how they respond to their environment that impacts the fight or flight tension tightness in the body, which causes inflammation, pain, things like that, which then could cause into irritable bowel syndrome or eczema or whatever it might be.

45:12and my whole vision is to bring harmony and healing to humanity so they have the tools to do this for themselves and the people that they love because I think when people heal themselves and they heal their families the world is healed it's like there's so much more harmony in the world there's less anger resentment wars fighting competition it's more collaboration and more community. And that's my entire mission is to bring people like you who have the decades of research, the knowledge, the literal hands-on surgical knowledge and the research and the data. And so I'm curious, how can we, going back to the soul, how can we learn how to heal the soul with the different therapy strategies and techniques that you've learned as a neurosurgeon?

46:05I think you said it best, one person at a time. So everybody's different. And I think we can approach this with realistic optimism. Okay. Again, a first principle approach. The vagus nerve is transmitting reflexes. when those reflexes are functioning optimally, you have a harmonious function of the organs in your body in a healthy state with your brain in a healthy state. And we want brain-heart-organ coherence, is what I'm hearing you say. 100%. So we need the coherence of just a smooth, flowing machine, right, throughout all three systems, I guess. What emerges from that coherence in all three systems is an emergent property.

46:57You can't predict plucking one string on a violin what the whole symphony will sound like. But the one string on a violin gone bad can make the whole orchestra sound terrible. Right. That's what the vagus nerve is like. Interesting. It's like one of the 200 ,000 vagus nerves. Yes, yes. It's like 200 ,000 violin strings. It's the difference between playing the piano, if the piano had 200 ,000 keys, and sitting on it. Right. So that's the role of the vagus nerve. Now, that's a fact. But let's not get carried away. Let's not say that the vagus nerve is the answer to solving all those things. It's a violin string.

47:43It has a part. If it goes bad, it can affect all those things. So what do we want to do with our interventions is we want to do our best to help keep the violin in tune. In tune, yeah, yeah. Now you can do that. It gets complicated quick, right? It gets complicated quick. You can do that by making sure you have the best conductor. Uh-huh. Yourself, your mind, I guess. Well, way up there, your mind. Your mind. Your mind. And you can do that by making sure you keep the instrument in tune, Yes. Which would be the level between your mind and the violin strings. It would be the middle of your brain where you want to, your emotional brain, okay?

48:27Which if it gets all fired up, it's going to put everything out of tune. So once again, I just don't want to rush into any answer. Yes. And say, well, you know, if the conductor has a heart attack, the orchestra's gonna go out of tune. Exactly. If anxiety or some other emotional fear, anxiety, fatigue, hunger dominates, cranks the key too hard on the top of the violin, you're out of tune. Yeah. If you've got damage in the vagus nerve from an infection or an injury, you've broken violin string you're out of tune yeah and at the other end don't forget the body if you got that inflamed finger again which is now pulling on the other end of the violin string you're out of tune yes so which one do you want to talk about first it's all going to work in unison it has to all work in unison and i i get the reason i i spend so much time on this in this book is because there's so many quick fixes on the internet and they're all not all many of them are are rooted in one of those things but you need all of them all those things to be working together yeah maybe maybe in you and me three out of four are working right now we only need to worry about one of them but we don't know which one so how do you self well i become self-aware on which which one is off how do you know what's out of tune well i i don't um i mean obviously if if If you're feeling stressed and anxious, you can start with that first.

50:06Yes. What would you say then is the, if someone is living in fear throughout their mind constantly, they just have fearful thoughts at work or in their relationship or their home or whatever it might be, or they're watching too much chaotic news and they're just living in fear and stress, or they're overwhelmed constantly, or they're just feeling like these heightened stressful thoughts and emotions how much is that impacting the vagus nerve and the nervous system and blocking us from feeling in harmony with our total body health a lot really a lot yeah no the evidence for that is clear so first of all i'm not a psychiatrist i'm not a therapist i'm not recommending any sort of therapy for someone who has that much fear and anxiety and that should be talking to someone.

50:55Second... Because it impacts the body in a big way, the nervous system, the vagus nerve. Absolutely. What we know is patients who experience that kind of emotional or mental anxiety, fear, and stress tend to have increased heart rates and decreased heart rate variability. Now those are functions of... those patients tend to have increased heart rate and increased heart rate variability. Heart rate and heart rate variability are the product, are under the control of the autonomic nervous system. Heart rate is slowed when the vagus nerve is active, and it's sped up when the sympathetic nervous system is relatively more active.

51:36That variability in speeding up and slowing down is measured by heart rate variability, which many people now, millions of people, are looking at all the time on their wearables. Heart rate variability is very complicated. Where do we want our heart rate to be at most of the time? In general, we know from the Framingham study, which looked at thousands of people and an even much larger study out of France, in general, you want a lower heart rate at rest rather than a faster heart rate. At rest. At rest. At rest, what we know from these huge population studies is that populations with a slower heart rate tend to live longer than populations with a faster heart rate.

52:21Now, before all your listeners run and check their pulse and say, oh, my pulse is 80, it doesn't mean that they're going to have a short lifespan. Because you can't take a population statistic and apply it to an individual. If you could do that, you would buy the right lottery ticket. Okay, statistically, statistics from a population cannot be reduced to a single individual. But it's still very interesting that at a population level, slower heart rates, meaning more vagus nerve activity relative to fight or flight, tend to live longer than those with faster heart rates. Why is that? Well, no one knows.

52:56One possibility, it's because if you have a slower heart rate, you tend to have a healthier vagus nerve function that may also be slowing inflammation. We don't know. There's 200 ,000 fibers. It could be that the fibers to your heart are working fine and the fibers working to your immune system or not. But that kind of logic leads people to hope that if they can slow their heart rate through healthy habits, like regular aerobic exercise, eating a balanced diet, getting enough sleep, all the things your grandmother and your doctor tell you to do, avoid too much anxiety and stress, meditate if you have a lot of anxiety and stress.

53:41Prayer, yeah, meditation. Prayer, cognitive behavioral therapy, all of these things slow your heart rate. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. It's good tools. If you use them. If your doctor says it's okay, those are all safe, good tools in most patients. And if you use them and if it slows your heart rate, you're probably doing a good thing for your body. You ask me what I do, I do those things. Yeah. Interesting. So what's the difference between the vagus nerves system and the nervous system? the the vagus the vagus nerve is part of the nervous system okay so one way to think of the nervous system is that you have a brain and a spinal cord the spinal cord of course runs down from the base of the brain in the back through your spine and it's principally involved in coordinating all the muscles that you can put under voluntary control when you want to throw a basketball, hit a golf ball, sign your name, button your shirt.

54:44These are all, this is the voluntary nervous system. Because when you think something, it's connecting, I guess, the wiring throughout your body to move. Like my hand movements right now, it's like, it's just automatically connecting it, correct? When you think, nerves in your brain generate the thought and the intention and, because that's what a thought is, it originates in nerves, and those nerves are connected to the voluntary nervous system, which sends signals down your spinal cord to control your muscles under voluntary control. But if something is not being transmuted smoothly, you're saying it's not necessarily the cable or the nerve, it's the network.

55:26It could be either or both. And that goes back to your first question. So if you think for a minute about one example would be what happened with COVID. We know from COVID that many of the patients that died, and this is work out of Spain, towards the end of the pandemic, pathologists and researchers looked at the vagus nerves of people who died from COVID, and they found two things. They found inflammation and damage to the vagus nerve, and they found virus in the vagus nerve. Now, knowing what we know today, that signals in the vagus nerve are like the brakes on your car that suppress inflammation.

56:09And knowing that the signals that travel up and down the vagus nerve are critically important in controlling heart rate and blood pressure and breathing, part of the autonomic nervous system, which we haven't gotten to yet. Those are two of the major complications that occur in long COVID or in post-COVID syndromes. So we don't have the answers yet. These are real interesting scientific questions that did damage or does damage to the vagus nerve, contribute to or even cause long COVID, which is characterized by excessive inflammation and malfunction or dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system.

56:52And what is the autonomic nervous system? Okay, so we talked about the voluntary nervous system. The autonomic as an autonomy is the involuntary nervous system. And it's the part of your nervous system that, first of all, you never think about it, but it's controlling your kidneys and your intestines and your heart and your lungs and your pancreas right now, all day long, every second, every day of your life. The signals from say glucose levels in your liver are going up the vagus nerve, the sensory vagus nerve, into your brain. The autonomic part of your brain, the autonomic nervous system, receives that input and says, oh, this guy needs a little squirt of insulin now or a little squirt of glucagon if your glucose levels are low.

57:44Those signals come back down, some of them in the vagus nerve, which is the parasympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system. And some of the signals come down your sympathetic nerves, which is the other part of the autonomic. So the autonomic as sympathetic and parasympathetic, but they work together. Got it. Okay. I need to go back to science class, you know, biology and science. It's not that bad. I know. If you put it in the context of this stuff you're interested in. Exactly. It's fascinating to me. Now, as someone who's done over a thousand brain and spinal surgeries, I guess of the ones that weren't through some type of force or impact, where you had to repair something like a car crash or some type of injury in that way, more of just, oh, there's a tumor or there's something off at the spine.

58:37How much of those in your either scientific research or personal opinion, how much of that is caused by someone's lifestyle someone's thinking someone's mindset of those tumors spinal issues occurring there's no evidence that brain tumors or cancer are caused by mindset there's there's no evidence of that um but in your personal opinion do you feel like there could be i don't think so no i don't think it's just like oh there's something off in the system and it's Well, I think there's a lot of evidence that cancer originates from genetic mutations in DNA of replicating cells. Okay. That now just keep growing when they're not supposed to grow.

59:25But where does that come from? Well, it can come from a beam of ionizing radiation from outer space that hits you in the head. Really? Absolutely. It can come from some exposure to something in the environment when you were two years old. They can come, there's, there's a, there's a, it's a whole, it's a, it's a whole field of its own. And I'm not an expert in that field. However, it's, it's pretty clear that the origin of cancer has a basis in, in, in genetic changes. Interesting. And that doesn't mean inherited. It can be, but it doesn't mean it is. So it's not, there's no evidence it's from the activity of the nervous system.

1:00:05And what's really interesting is that there are some new therapies that are used to now treat brain cancer that are treating the cancer by putting in modulating electric fields that actually slow the replication of the cancer cells. And so there you have another example of a bioelectronic medicine, which is what we call putting the chip on the vagus nerve in the neck because we're using electronics to treat the nervous system. Here you see this is possible in some patients with brain cancer. Interesting. How influential is the nervous system versus the immune system within the body? They're the same thing.

1:00:50It's the same thing. The nervous system and the immune system is the same thing. They talk to each other. They use the same molecules. So for years, I joke about this a lot, but, you know, back when I went to medical school and in several decades since, when the immunology professor was giving a lecture, she would tell the neuroscience students they could take the day off. And when the neuroscience professor was giving a lecture, vice versa, he would tell the immunology students they could go home. Why is that? Because there's a blood-brain barrier which separates and filters things that can travel through the bloodstream to get into the brain.

1:01:31And it's like a firewall. Now, the immune system for centuries was thought of as white blood cells, which float around and are not attached to nerves. And the nervous system, of course, is about nerves. So, okay, two separate things, nothing to do with it. Well, it turns out that white blood cells in the spleen, in the liver, and many other organs come in contact on a regular basis with nerve endings. Right. What happens there? Well, white blood cells, it turns out, have receptors, meaning they can respond to neurotransmitters, which are made by nerves. Okay. Oh, by the way, it turns out nerves can make molecules like cytokines, like cytokine storm from COVID, things like TNF and IL-1 and IL-6, those were thought to be only made by immune cells.

1:02:21So they're using the same molecules to send signals back and forth, nerve to nerve, nerve to white blood cell, white blood cell to white blood cell, white blood cell to nerve. You tell me where to draw the line in two separate systems. By the way, the nervous system makes memories. So does the immune system. You talk about muscle memory when you train and train and train and train, and you can do something without thinking about it. That's actually in your nervous system. The nervous system makes memories. You get exposed to a virus or an infection the first time, and chaos breaks loose in the defense.

1:03:03You have massive amounts of inflammation. The second time, the immune system, not so much because it's made a memory of that attack. So that's the hottest area of science, I think. In all your years, Kevin, of science, of surgery, of research, you know, you're an inventor, you have all these patents, you're one of the most cited scientists in the world right now. With all your success, what would you say has been the key to your success? From a researcher, a doctor, an entrepreneur, an author, what has helped you create abundance in your life? What would you say are those factors? Having a strong personal philosophy.

1:03:49What's that philosophy? That I wanted from a very young age to spend my life working on things through science, making discoveries that would help people. And you're right, I've had the good fortune, the privilege of working on lots of different things. But as you know, when you do that, sometimes things get hard. Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes it takes 100 experiments to have one that works. Sometimes you have to write 20 drafts of a book to get one that's published. in those times if you don't have a powerful personal philosophy a guidepost a mission an objective and a plan to get there no matter what then I don't know how people do it without a strong personal philosophy and I talk about this with sincerity with you because I worry that that young people today you talk about how much anxiety there is I think a lot of that stems from the fact that young people today are not spending enough time developing a strong personal philosophy.

1:04:58What does life mean to them? What do they want to accomplish in the time that we have here on this earth? Who do they want to help and benefit and why? And without that, it's just, I can't imagine getting through it. With that, you can do anything.

1:05:19without a purpose or a vision or a mission or a game plan even for the next six months you're kind of asking yourself what am i doing every day why is this happening to me why am i not getting what i want when you're not clear what you want it's hard to go create what you want what would you say then is one of the hardest things you've ever personally been through in life

1:05:41two deaths really yeah i mean the death of my mother what you talk about in the book yeah yeah when i was five um she died unexpectedly very suddenly of a brain tumor and she was 29 i think or in her late 20s or eight 20s and uh my father had me and my brother and sister uh tim uh was three and a half. My sister Sharon was an infant. Wow. And you were five. When I was five. Wow. My grandfather, my mother's father, was a professor of pediatrics at Yale Medical School. And I remember sitting on his lap and saying, you know, why didn't the surgeon take the tumor out? And he said, well, because it was growing in her brain and it had almost had like legs that were stuck in different parts of the brain.

1:06:32And if, if I had pulled the tumor out, it would have damaged multiple areas. I said, well, grandpa, somebody should do something about that. And he said, maybe you will. Wow. And I remember that like it was, like it was yesterday. And then the second death that influenced my career, uh, was a little girl named Janice when I was training to be a a neurosurgeon at the New York Hospital in the Upper East Side of New York. And Janice had been crawling across the kitchen floor when her grandmother was cooking dinner. And just as Grandma turned to drain a pot of boiling water in the sink, she tripped and spilled all the boiling water on Janice.

1:07:14And it was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. Her face wasn't burned. She had this angelic, beautiful face. Well, the rest of her body, her back was burned. Her whole body, 90%. 11 months old. 11 months. So her chances statistically of surviving, we knew when we met her, were almost zero. But we started calling her our miracle baby because after almost a month in the hospital, she kept battling back. She was incredibly resilient. And I won't go into all the details, but we got to thinking about sending her. Maybe we'll get to send her home. It would be a miracle. I was standing in the doorway to her room, and she was rocking in the arms of a nurse who was giving her a baby bottle at lunchtime, and Janice's eyes rolled up in her head.

1:08:01I ran in the room. I put her in the crook of my arm. Her heart had stopped. I gave CPR. I gave her mouth to mouth. And called a cardiac arrest. The whole hospital was there in minutes, and the code went on for what felt like hours. but but everything everything was perfect in the code and she was gone so I had to tell her mother and and it was horrible it was absolutely horrible I didn't know why she died did not know why she died couldn't explain it she we all thought she there was no reason she should have died she was improving it looked like right or she was improving and there was no evidence of infection but the you You know, I had to write on the death certificate cause of death septic shock, which means some unseen infection had caused her heart to stop.

1:08:55And so pretty much then and there I decided I'd go in the laboratory and try to understand the inflammation that led to Janice's shock. And that's what I've been doing since 1985. Wow. Still working on it. Still working on it. Really? Because there's no, I mean, if someone's getting better from something like that, But I guess septic shock can still kill someone, like in a moment? Septic shock can kill very quickly. Really? Septic shock can kill very quickly. It's less lethal now than it was in 1985. We have better ways of treating it. But there's still no clear understanding of who it will affect and when.

1:09:38What we know today are the molecules that some of the same molecules actually that cause inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis are the molecules that in large amounts, massive amounts, cause septic shock. But it can come on so quickly, we can't always prevent it. In Janice's case, I'm not sure even today we could prevent it. Really? Pretty sure that the molecule that killed Janus is called TNF, and that's the molecule, one of the molecules now, that is the target of the biologic drugs that are used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, which is also stopped by vagus nerve stimulation. Wow. Dr. Tracy, I want to acknowledge you for your personal philosophy and your mission and your purpose over the last three, four decades of getting into the field of medicine, neuroscience, and trying to understand how to heal the body and the mind and all these things, how they're all connected, which is a symphony of nerves and cells that we still don't really understand, a lot of it sounds like.

1:10:47but you've committed your personal philosophy and your mission and your purpose to figuring these things out and bringing healing, hope, inspiration, and tools to provide better lives for people. So I want to acknowledge you for everything that you've created up until now, your new book, The Great Nerve, the new science of the vagus nerve and how to harness its healing reflexes is out. People can pick up a copy. I'm curious, what is your personal philosophy now after all the success you've had, the impact you've had, what is your personal philosophy now after this book in the next decade or two that you're working on?

1:11:28Collaborate, don't compete. That's number one. I counted recently, I have more than 1 ,100 co-authors. Wow. And co-inventors. That's pretty cool. It's a blessing to be able to work with brilliant people and collaborate with brilliant people around the world. There's no, this is not I and me in this story that you just summarized. This is us. It's huge numbers of people who, like me, have committed their lives to science and to medicine and to helping other people. And when you work with people like that, you can do anything. And the second group that has to be acknowledged are the thousands of patients, millions who are suffering, and the thousands who step up to participate in clinical trials and in clinical research.

1:12:23because, first of all, you acknowledge my colleagues and me with this praise and these kind words and thank you. However, they're the ones that need the help, and they're the ones that need the acknowledgement, and they're the ones that take the risk. I get to try to do things with my brain and my colleagues and my lab and clinical trials. I enjoy it. Yeah. It's it's it's my passion. It's my life's work. I love it. They suffer and they they participate and they volunteer and they step up anyway. So if anyone deserves credit in this, it's the teams that do the work and the patients that step up and participate.

1:13:09It's a big risk for them. Yeah, it's a big risk for them. They don't know what's going to happen. We don't know, and they don't know. I mean, Albert Einstein said it best. If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? Yeah. So patients step into this, into a research trial, and we honestly say, this is what we think, this is what we hope, this is what we want, but we don't know. And they say, I'm in. Wow, that's scary. but you have to come from a desperate place essentially to say I'm in because the pain is so great that you're like anything that could potentially help this is worth the risk.

1:13:45And some people who are arguably not quote unquote suffering that much, they step in because they want to help other people. Wow, man, that's powerful. What would you say is the biggest personal challenge you're faced with at this season of life? I think we're entering an era of, of anti-science, which is um which is is going to be a challenge um the idea somehow that you can do science quickly and for free is um is on the rise uh there's an idea of um cutting this and cutting that because we've solved all the problems i just think you can look back for a minute at the 1920s. The world was coming out of a pandemic that killed tens of millions of people.

1:14:40Really? Wow. Tens of millions. Look at the numbers versus the last pandemic. It's orders of magnitude, more deaths worldwide. We were on the heels of a massive disinformation campaign in the media because during World War I, news of the pandemic was suppressed by the countries that were fighting in the war because they didn't want the enemy to know that the young, healthy men were dying and cutting into troop supplies. They didn't want the troop numbers known. There was a rise in the United States of eugenics and the sterilization of tens of thousands of women and some children, mostly because of either low IQ, poverty or the color of their skin, disproportionately women.

1:15:22This was sanctioned by the Supreme Court. And this all culminated in a trial which became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial in which a teacher in Tennessee was arrested for teaching evolution. The judge at that trial testified that scientists could not testify because it wasn't a scientific question. Interesting. Dozens of other states adopted those laws banning the teaching of evolution in school. This lasted for 10 years. This anti-science, anti-intellectual period lasted for 10 years on the heels of the pandemic. What brought us out of it? Why am I realistically optimistic that we'll come out?

1:16:061932, the discovery of sulfanilamide, the first antibiotic that was widely available, was given to Winston Churchill, who was critically ill, perhaps dying of pneumonia. He survived, obviously, and led Great Britain through World War II. Soon after that, penicillin. Blood banking came on board in the 1930s. And during the Coconut Grove fire, a disaster in Boston, the availability of a blood bank saved dozens of lives. This spawned the regionalization of blood banks eventually worldwide. That enabled transplant surgery. So why did we come out of it? because everybody is going to need a new cure someday.

1:16:50Everybody. You know, the person who's healthy has 10 ,000 problems. And the person who's sick has one problem. You have a politician's son or daughter or spouse or grandparent or best friend gets a critical illness and we don't have a therapy, all of a sudden science and research are going to look pretty darn important again. Yeah. We're in a cultural period now where all the forces seem to be aligned against that. There's a major pushback against doing science that takes years to make the cures that we're using today. Never mind the ones that we're going to use in a couple of years. The cures we're using today were invented 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.

1:17:32We take them for granted. Yeah. We're going to have diseases that continue to injure and disable and kill people. and at some point the pendulum will swim back. And when that happens, hopefully the United States and the global medical science research infrastructure will have survived this period and come out even stronger. Yeah, that's powerful. As a neurosurgeon who's done over 1 ,000 brain and spinal surgeries, what is the number one skill you wish every human being could learn to master to help them improve the quality of their life?

1:18:16I think be in the present and listen to the person you're talking to. The person you're talking to will always tell you how you can help them if you listen carefully enough. You think a lot of people are not living in the present? I think most people are not living in the present. Do you? I think they're living in stress or overwhelm or like... But that's not the present. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I know. They're like living in like some type of fight or flight or stress or thinking about the future, what they need to do. Or remembering some terrible thing from the past. That's not the present. Yeah.

1:18:50I mean, yeah. No, it's not easy. You know, I don't think I don't think you can go on a on a website and get a quick fix. I think it requires once again a commitment to a personal philosophy to decide what it is you want to do and why you want to do it and pursue that. Are you someone that practices meditation or prayer or what are some of the therapies that you practice that are non-surgical or non-medical related, I guess, to support you staying in the present? I think the advice that grandma gave you and hopefully your primary care physician, you know, eat a balanced diet, get enough rest, exercise regularly, be engaged in your family, community, friend groups, have a hobby, read.

1:19:45These are all critical things, I think, to having balanced homeostasis in your life. I mean, if the vagus nerve is anything, it's a symbol of homeostasis and balance. In addition, I think you can supplement those things with meditation. I do try to meditate every day, once or twice, just five or ten minutes. I do. I do mindfulness meditation or breathing meditation. I try to take a cold immersion several times a week, not because it's relaxing, but because it's a massive stimulus to fight or flight, which is anti-inflammatory. I mean, when you fall in the cold water or switch the shower to full cold and you feel that I got to get out of here and this hurts and I don't want to do this, that's fight or flight.

1:20:36And that's a good thing. High levels of fight or flight, as long as your doctor says you don't have a heart condition, high levels of fight or flight are anti-inflammatory. and then I'm fascinated by the process because if you stay there, you've done this. Of course, I did it yesterday. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. What happens? It's like everything slows down and you feel almost like you're watching somebody else do it. It still hurts. Right? Painful. It is. It doesn't stop being painful but it's a weird place watching. That's parasympathetic. That's vagus nerve. That's when your heart rate slows down.

1:21:14That's anti-inflammatory. Yeah.

1:21:19And you told me before that you were one of the scientists that studied Wim Hof's. You drew his blood at some point when he was meditating or doing breath work. Is that right? Like 15 years ago? Yeah. Before he was Wim Hof, before anyone knew who he was. Back a long time ago, like 2010, he visited the lab. I had met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama up at Phoenicia, New York. He has a property there on top of a mountain. And it was a meeting that the Dalai Lama had hosted of scientists and researchers. And so through the Dalai Lama's network at Menla House in New York, They introduced me. They said, we really want you to meet this guy, Wim Hop.

1:22:07I said, fine, bring him to the lab. So he came, and the lab I run with my colleague, Sangeeta Shavan, Sangeeta and I run the lab together, and we said, well, what are we going to do? We had to get an IRB protocol, which is Institutional Review Board, a human subjects protocol. They did that for us on an emergency basis, and we decided we would study Wim Hof's immune response after he did his whatever Wim Hof does. Breathing techniques. Well, we didn't know. Yeah, you're like, all right. All we knew is like he says he can control his immune system. That's all we knew. This is 15 years ago. This is not now, not when everybody does.

1:22:50Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he went and we brought him into our clinical facility and we drew his blood and then we shut the door. He said, okay, do your thing. and we went and got a cup of coffee. And we came back like two or three hours later and drew his blood again. And he said, what happened? I said, we have to analyze your blood. Come back in a week. He's like, tell me now. Yeah, he's crazy. Tell me now. Yeah. So he comes back in a week and he goes, and we said, what did you do when we left you? He said, I breathe like a mother. Yeah, it sounds like him. He said, why? And I said, because you lowered your inflammatory response, which we measured through a very specialized assay in our lab.

1:23:41You lowered your inflammatory response by like 75%. He goes, are you going to publish me? I said, I'd love to, but I can't publish you. He said, why? I said, I can't publish urine N of 1. I have to do, St. Geedan, I have to do a proper study. with like 100 people at least or something or maybe you said 20 we said get get 20 people teach 10 of them your breathing method and then 10 of them not and then switch the groups and do all the tests and see what happens and um did you guys do that so i he said what would that cost and i said oh probably you know three quarters of a million dollars something like that it's expensive to do these things and he said well um i said can he was there with with a group of businessman i said you know and they said we'll get back to you well they didn't get back to me but that's okay because a couple years later i was reading the scientific journals and i saw an article from my colleague in um amsterdam peter pickers who runs a big research lab he did it he did the study after them there you go yeah not not amsterdam in uh in in holland but in a different city.

1:24:51I forget which city. And he did the exact study with 10 people. And the 10 people that breathed lowered their inflammatory response. What's that mean? They lowered their inflammatory response. So what we did was we took the white blood cells from, we took the whole tube of blood that has white blood cells. And we added an activator that makes the white blood cells inflamed to make lots of cytokines. Cytokine storm in a test tube. TNF, IL-1, IL-6. So you almost inject it with like... The tube, the blood tube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the tube. So we didn't have to inject him. Sure, sure, sure. We just injected his white blood cells.

1:25:30With like a... A toxin. A virus, a toxin. A bacterial toxin called endotoxin, lipopolysaccharide. And the results were remarkable. In the subjects that breathed, they lowered their cytokine release in the blood by 75%. Meaning they were more resistant to getting an infection or... They were more resistant to having a damaging amount of inflammation. So inflammation in small amounts for the right period of time is good for you. You sprain an ankle, you want to have a little inflammation. You need inflammation to heal the ankle sprain. You need inflammation to fight off the infection in your finger or your arm.

1:26:12You need some inflammation. People with no inflammation, because they're immunosuppressed, they can have serious complications. You want inflammation. Inflammation is not all bad. It's all bad when it's excessive. So the Wim Hof breathing gave a reduction of inflammation. Why? That's the next question. Well, it turns out in Peter Picker's study where they injected the endotoxin into the people, not into the... Oh my gosh. So the people that got injected got fairly sick. The people that breathed first got much less sick, much less headache, much less nausea, much less fever. And Peter measured hormones in the blood of those people and found that there was a massive fight or flight response.

1:27:02So breathing in the Wim Hof method, it's breath holding. It's like a, it's like a, is it called tantrotic yoga breathing? It's like you try to do it for like a minute or two, deep breaths in and out intensely. And then you breathe all the way out and you hold at the end. And I've done this many times where I've held for two, two and a half, three minutes a couple times with no breath in my lungs. So I guess you're oxygenating the blood and you're... What you're doing is, I've done it too, and I've gotten up to three and a half minutes also. But what's weird is the three and a half minutes, you're still not really sure you really need to breathe.

1:27:37Yeah, you're just sitting there, you're vibrating, your whole body's vibrating. You're just no air in your lungs. But what you do have at that point is you have very high carbon dioxide levels. And what does that do to the nervous system or to the vagus nerve? Well, the carbon dioxide, the rising carbon dioxide is what's screaming at your brain to breathe. It's not the fall in oxygen. It's the rising carbon dioxide. And as carbon dioxide rises, it also increases the ability of your hemoglobin to carry oxygen more efficiently. But that wasn't the main effect on the immune system. It was, in fact, the fight or flight response.

1:28:15So with the massive urge to breathe, with the accumulation of carbon dioxide, that horrible feeling you get, the shaking, that's catecholamines. That's epinephrine and norepinephrine from fight or flight. That massive amounts, we talked about it before, massive amounts of fight or flight turn off inflammation. That's one of, that experiment in Wim Hof breathing people was one of the proofs of it. Another one, my colleagues and I in New York years ago, we infused those hormones in volunteers, in sailors and marines on shore leave. And we infused them with those hormones, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and even cortisol.

1:29:00And? And then we injected them with endotoxin to make them sick. and the ones that got infused first were less sick. Interesting. Yeah. Wow. So I think Wim Hof breathing, which by the way, you did it on a couch. I saw your podcast or your YouTube. I did it. I do it not every week, but every few weeks I do it after a workout. I lie on my gym floor. You shouldn't do it in a pool. You shouldn't do it driving a car. You shouldn't do it doing anything dangerous. Yeah, don't do it in the ice. And if you have any condition, and you should check with your doctor or do it with a colleague. Or do it minimal.

1:29:35You know, you don't have to push yourself that far. So you still do it today every now and then. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and you see the benefits. You know the benefits. I don't know the benefits. I like the way it makes me feel. I mean, Mr. Hoff says it's a great time after you do that to do an extra 10 or 20 push-ups. Yeah, I've done it. I have too. It's weird. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. I have more push-up strikes. It's crazy. It is very... He had me do push-ups first and then do the breathing and then do push-ups after with no air in my lungs. And you could do more. Do more. Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

1:30:08Yeah, it's very interesting. So you could breathe and do as many as you can, then stop, then do the breath work for three minutes, and then blow all the air out of your lungs, hold it, and then do push-ups. You can do more. I mean, you talk about a personal philosophy and a guy who's compassionate and really wants the world to be better. That's it. He is. Yeah, he's great. I remember after I told him I couldn't publish them, he said, and I said, I did say, if you do this experiment with the 10 or 20 people and publish it, you'll make the world a better place. And he's repeated that story on several other podcasts around.

1:30:46And it makes me feel good. That's good. It is good. That's amazing. Dr. Tracy, I appreciate you being here. I have two final questions for you. This is called the three truths. so imagine it's your last day on earth many years away you get to live as long as you want but for whatever reason all of your written work your publication your scientific research for whatever reason we don't have access to it anymore but on your last day you get to leave behind three things you know to be true whether it's from your personal experience in life your personal philosophy or lessons, anything you can think of, what would be those three lessons you would share with the world?

1:31:33Yeah, find, uh, you find, you find love and, uh, true meaning and joy in your family every day. That would be number one. Wow. Number two is a single person working diligently for a lifetime can change the world. And we all have the opportunity to do that. That's the second truism. And number three is probably related to that. but humans human beings people don't have any problem accomplishing their goals they have problems but any goal can be accomplished the hardest thing for a person to do is to pick the goal if everybody knew that and spent more time picking their goals the world would be a better place Dr.

1:32:38Kevin Tracy, The Great Nerve. Make sure you guys get a copy of this book if you want to learn how to optimize your health and learn how to harness its healing reflexes of the vagus nerve. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

1:32:57Leaving the world better than you found it. Kevin, thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here. Amazing. I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward.

1:33:35I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward.

1:34:12And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.