What Experts Use to Master Energy, Focus, and Resilience? Feat. Charles Poliquin

People, body fat and stuff, some of the things I've worked, 'cause I've been through several of your workshops, you know, like multi-day trainings and stuff, is people's ability to, 'cause so many people it's a vanity thing. They just want to lose weight, they want to look good, you know, and it's almost like secondary or circulatory system or how your heart's gonna be or how your brain's gonna function. I mean, it's like we live in a culture that is so much about how they look. And what I've learned so much from you is hormone levels. And so that people can really have, you know, maybe good workout rituals and stuff, but their hormones are all jacked up. So what, if people are really putting forth a lot of effort and they still feel lethargic or they cannot lose weight or they don't feel strong or they're mentally foggy, what should they do to discover how to fix it and what is causing that? I mean, other than obvious things like the environment, if you're working your ass off and you're giving your no time to rejuvenate, I think, You know, what you've talked about a lot is stress. Human stress can cause so much of— So what should someone do if they're either in a state of, like, I want to work out, this sounds good, I've always wanted to, but I can't stick with it, I can't stop carb cravings, I can't stop sugar, or I'm like tired, I have no motivation. I mean, just being in a place where they're stuck. How do you get unstuck?

Okay, the first thing is, I always tell people to do this. The best day to change a habit in North America is Saturday. So you don't have to rush to go to work. So you say, okay, I'm gonna commit. But I think people overcommit. So I say just go to the gym 10 minutes. So it's better to undersell, right? And then after that they could work it out. But the thing where people should where they would have the most impact is actually sleep. Do you really need to send that extra email? Do you really need to watch the news? Do you really need to watch that TV show? Okay, you could tape it, you could buy a Netflix subscription. There's a lot of research out of Germany that shows that the earlier you can go to bed, the actually the better it's gonna be for your hormones. So, and one of the problems we have with our lifestyle is actually lights. So the more we can offset lights, and there's a lot of technology out there for controlling the effect of light on your brain. But also gradually diminishing the amount of lighting in your house as you prepare to go to bed makes a huge difference. There's stuff you could put on your computer screen so that there's less stress on the brain and your eyes. So managing the electronics in your life will do a lot for your sleep. And simple things like don't watch CNN before you go to bed. I mean, if you're seeing great news on CNN, it's usually 99% tragedy. So, and the thing that the—

Yeah, TVs in bedrooms I think are incredibly unproductive sort of devices, especially for entrepreneurs. If you have nothing going on in your life and TV's your biggest highlight, then maybe, but you know.

Yes.

And then, you know, simple reading and book reading and journaling will do a lot for your sleep. Because one of the things with sleep is that people can't shut off their brain. One of the most common disorders I see in executives is the inability to shut off the brain. So journaling is one of the best ways to get it out of your system. And I like people to journal before they go to bed. But having a grateful log, in my opinion, is probably the biggest step for sound sleep. And then, and you have to have what we call a sleep routine. So you have to have a countdown of what you're gonna do and the activities you choose before going to bed. And if you go to my website, StrengthsUSA.com, I've got lots of sleep strategies. But for example, there's a botanical called reishi mushroom. And one of the names in Chinese means the mushroom for the professor who lived too much inside his head. So reishi mushroom is actually an anxiety lower, it's an anti-anxiolytic. And then if you consume reishi mushroom extract before you go to bed, you actually have better sleep. There's a lot of different amino acids that can make a huge difference on the quality of your sleep, like theanine, okay? That comes originally from green tea. How much magnesium you take before going to bed makes a difference. A lot of people have inflammation because of stress. So for example, taking a probiotic would glutamine an hour before they go to bed, lowers inflammation, they sleep better. I mean, the amount of sleep strategies that are possible for anybody are limitless.

Okay, so I have a person who is in this room that I've been trying to— I'm not going to say it is— that I've been trying to encourage them to quit drinking sodas because sodas are pretty much like liquid Satan. And I don't consume hardly any sugar. Unless they sneak it in the foods. And I don't eat dairy, and I try not to eat processed foods. I like eating foods that have a single name, like broccoli, you know, not Doritos, because that's not the same thing. So let's take soda. A lot of people just consume a ton, and there's a ton of sugar waters, juices and stuff.

Good or bad?

I mean, horrendous.

Horrendous.

Okay, so this is the best word. The thing is, is that Americans consume 50% of their calories through liquids. Okay? So I think that one thing we should do is tax the hell out of—

Tax the hell out of liquids?

Of sugared liquids. Yeah. So if it costs $97 to buy a bottle of Coke, the consumption will go down pretty quick.

Well, and that's where many of the healthcare costs are going, to people that are consuming.

Exactly. Exactly.

And then, So basically water, teas, I'm really big on coffee, but it's the timing of your coffee that makes a big difference, right?

When you said first thing you eat in the morning, I was gonna ask you, what about coffee?

From what the research shows with MRIs, you can see which areas of the brain lit up when you consume certain foods. I recommend that you eat solid food before you take your first sip of coffee.

Okay, yeah, 'cause I know many people that the first thing they do is they drink coffee in the morning, then they get to the other stuff, if they get to it. And if they're too busy, the coffee becomes the way that tides them over. And these are the same people that are usually stressed out of their fucking minds.

Exactly.

Yeah, okay, so going back to soda, what does it actually do to the body?

Well, one of the things it does is changes the alkaline balance in your body. One thing that, for example, a very good orthopedic surgeon from the Valley showed is that the more the kids drank soda, the weaker the bones are, okay? Because it contains a lot of phosphates, and if you consume too many phosphates, you actually leak calcium. Calcium of your tissues. So when I was a kid, I never heard of a guy playing football who broke his patella, right? But nowadays, since the 2000s, kids who break their patella playing American football is an epidemic. And the main factor associated with broken bones in teenagers is actually soda consumption. So besides— and then the thing is, there's all sorts of artificial sweeteners and additives that we're not even sure if they're healthy. I mean, I would like to see the science behind it, but there's no such thing as a— well, one of the things we know is that one of the most common additives in soda is sodium benzoate, and it is the chemical most associated with prostate cancer. So if you consume a lot of sodas, you're more likely to get prostate cancer. So That's enough of a reason not to drink them for males, you know. So they're quite evil, to be fair.

Right, yeah, that's good. Now, by the way, so Tim Ferriss has written about you in his latest book, which is Tools of Titans, and he basically considers you like the guy. So there's a bunch of pages of stuff, which is kind of funny, and he has a quote from you. What you put in your mouth is a stressor, and what you say, what comes out of your mouth, is also a stressor. And so, yeah, so—

It's a very good book, 600 pages, and you got, basically it's a top 30 of his most downloaded podcast.

Yeah, so listen to the episodes with Charles Schulz.

They've downloaded already over a million copies of that podcast. It's the 10th most downloaded podcast of the Tim Ferriss series. And I still get emails every day about that first podcast. I just did another one, and I think it already downloaded 700,000 copies. So it's a very good medium to deliver the information.

Totally.

If you were to get in a physical fight with Tim, you think you could take him?

Yeah.

I'm going to say— someone could tag Tim Ferriss so he could watch whatever, however far— is that still going? Yeah. Is it? Okay, good, good. Awesome, awesome. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna take a couple of questions from the audience. Just talk really loud if you could so that people can hear it.

So what is your drink? You said you take a shake after your workout. What is it?

What do you—

Well, what you consume post-workout will affect how fast you recover from the workout. But what is in the drink is a function of how lean you are, right? So if you take your shirt off and your shape is like a melted candle, well, you gotta stick to proteins and some amino acids. And if you're very lean and you have a lot of muscle mass, then it would be a combination of carbohydrates, maybe 5 different types of carbohydrates like Pentacarb from ATP Labs, and a protein. But one of the things we see clinically is a lot of people are actually intolerant to whey protein. So I prefer to use straight amino acids. Or some people are allergic to dairy from cow but not from goat. So you could have Gold Protein. I'm not big on plant proteins because about as nutritious as the cardboard box. So I prefer to use straight amino acids if I'm not gonna use dairy-based protein.

Have you ever had a shake or anything like, it's not a green shake, it's literally you're just taking mixed proteins. It's more of a manufactured shake is what you're saying.

Correct.

I mean, there's also now the technology for beef protein. Shakes, and they've actually worked on the taste and they're very good.

And yeah, like, that's, that's what JJ Virgin's latest shakes are, is it's organic beef protein.

Yeah, making a steak, basically. It's a steak shake.

The steak shake. Yep.

Okay, awesome. Uh, Jennifer, and then we'll go to Paris.

So when it comes to even some of your, like, the athletes that you've worked with, and, um, I'll show, I'll show Facebook Live through the beautiful audiences. You talked a lot about like the yin and some of the mindset, and so how have you been able to get the people to be more consistent with their workouts and some of these things as far as like stopping drinking pop when for the most part it's probably like an emotional thing for them that's stopping them from working out, or emotional thing, a trigger that gets them to drink that pop?

I don't give much credence to that because if people don't control their food intake, then it's easier for them to make bad choices. So the emotional part somewhat, but I think that a lot of it is solvable by managing your brain nutrition to a T, right? For example, a lot of ADD is malnutrition, right? So you fix the kid's diet, then suddenly he can concentrate.

As are— is it addiction?

Yeah, yeah, and addictions and so on. So I think that if you— there's a lot of papers that have been published, mainly out of Toronto and Boston, where they look at the composition of the breakfast and how it impacts cognition, but also food choices throughout the whole day. So it does really set you up as far as discipline. If you eat, have a proper breakfast. I think that, you know, one of the best ways to solve a lot of America's health issues would be to have a federal breakfast program, right? And then you don't have to feed your kids at home. You bring them in half an hour earlier and they have the right nutrition, right? So if I was emperor of all the galaxies, I would standardize the breakfast because that would be a way to fight things like obesity. And, you know, kids don't pay attention in class And ask any school teacher, he can tell if kids eat breakfast, a proper breakfast, by the attention span in class. Because it sets you up for the whole day.

Yeah, awesome.

And we'll go to Paris. I want to clarify the point on the post-workout shake. A lot of people say you have a shake with grape juice in it. Causes you to get insulin which builds muscle. Am I to understand that you're not a proponent of that?

I'm a proponent of it if you deserve it. Write this down, you need to deserve your carbohydrates, okay? So if you're not lean, like, you know, I tell men, if you don't have penis skin on your arms, you're too fat, okay? So you pinch, it has to be really lean. If it's not, fuck, stay away from carbohydrates. They're not your friend, right? No, but I think that's really good to be vulgar because it raises dopamine levels and people actually pay attention, right? But yeah, but the thing is, is that we— I'm for spiking some post-workout if you deserve it, okay? So you have to be sub-10% body fat for a male and sub-16 for a female.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new free book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Cool.

All right, so if you could say it real loud, Ed, too.

Sure.

Uh, I wonder if, Charles, if you talk about the difference, especially on a guy's hormones, with respect to doing isolated workouts versus compound workouts, you know, full body movements versus isolation. Is there a difference?

Yeah, if you look at the research, the larger the muscle mass you recruit, the more hormones— I mean, beneficial hormones—

you produce.

So if all your exercise are single joint, you're not going to build a lot of muscle mass, you're not going to lose a lot of fat. So if you center your first 70% of your workout around big compound exercises, you're on the right way. I have a friend who's set 76 world records in powerlifting. He says, work on the Christmas tree, not the ornaments. So, and that's Ed Coan. So I think it's really important that you— what, it's what I call most bang for your buck exercises. So squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, and bench presses. I really like a lot of dumbbell work because it keeps you balanced, and I really like fat handle type of dumbbells. Joe has done a video on that.

Yeah, Watson's Gym in the UK. Yeah, make the best dumbbells in the world, for sure, designed by Charles.

Yes.

So, you know, nothing beats the basics. And the thing is, is that basics are hard work, and people like to avoid hard work. I mean, they do tricep kickbacks and they don't forget to purse the lips. Okay, well, that's not gonna do much for you, right? But if you vomit a lung because you did a set of 20 in a squat, you're gonna make progress, right?

It's real great advice.

Just—

yeah, yep.

The goal of workout is that your spleen should come out through the left eye. If it does come out through— not the right eye, but the left eye— then the workout was hard enough.

So we'll take 2 more. So Summer and then Dan, and then we're done.

What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting?

Yeah, thoughts on intermittent fasting for people watching the video.

Okay. If you look at the research, you'll find that intermittent fasting is beneficial in the very obese. But what a lot of the research on intermittent fasting is looking at the world through a straw. Okay, they don't look at other things. But in the labs where they look at things like cognition, they found, and muscle performance, they found that intermittent fasting was harmful. So, I think that you should take care of your brain, right? So, I'm not big on intermittent fasting. There's different conditions where it depends how you do it, there's a lot of— But one thing they found in women is that it does really mess up the endocrine system. And one of the things I find when people do intermittent fasting, they become food-obsessed, okay? It's like, "Oh no, another 52 minutes, another 48," right? And then, they compensate by drinking more coffee. So, I think that because I'm a big believer in a breakfast, I'm not so keen on intermittent fasting. Some people are very— but I think a lot of it with intermittent fasting, if it works for you or not, is actually genetics. Some people— for example, if I did intermittent fasting, I would be for the first time in my life on CNN, because I've killed 76 persons in a parking lot, okay, on my way to work, because I get extremely irritable if I don't manage my protein intake in the morning. Some people don't have an appetite at all. So I'm not 100% against intermittent fasting. It's conditional, but I'm not a big fan of it either.

Okay, Dan. So, uh, you brought up breakfast being the most important, I guess, meal of the day.

I have 11 and 9-year-old that are important to me.

And also for me, I'm curious, what are the foods that you recommend at breakfast that are the best that we could look at either for ourselves or our kids?

I think what you have to look at is a very high-quality protein. Now, I prefer to eat only wild meat, so, you know, I live in Colorado, so I can get elk or yak or bison.

Possum, gerbil.

That's the feeling in Kentucky. But the quality of the protein is very important. So, and then I would like to have a type of nut. The reason why I like to have different types of nuts for breakfast is that they provide choline, which is a precursor to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. So it helps you with paying attention and brain speed, which is important in our lives. And then if you can afford it, berries. Is a good source of carbohydrate. A very simple rule is the thinner the skin is of the fruit naturally, the more phytonutrients it has. Because, for example, a raspberry doesn't want to be sunburnt. So how do you protect yourself from the sun, which is an oxidant? You make antioxidants. So if you look at, for example, grapes, the grapes that have the highest amount of phytonutrients are the ones harvested in hills, like in Sardinia and in Spain, as compared to, let's say, German wines, which are in valleys and they don't have that angle of the sun. So berries are a very good choice, and any thin peel fruit is good. Do you advocate green shakes? Green shakes are very good. One of the problems though in the industry is a lot of them are loaded with heavy metals. So there's some companies that are good and some, you know, might as well drink a liquefied bumper, okay? So the quality of the product really matters.

Like if you make it yourself, like spinach?

Okay, that's even better. If you make your own green drinks, but I thought you were asking about powdered greens. Powdered greens are— there's a lot of good companies out there, but usually if you can buy them at a regular store, you're drinking a green liquefied bumper because it's full of heavy metals.

What about juicing versus like blending like greens in smoothies?

The problem with juicing is that you cut away the fiber, and the fiber is very important to stabilize your blood sugar. So I prefer to use a powdered green versus juicing. Okay, cool.

Anything that I should have asked you that I did not that you would like to say?

Well, I'll take an extra question on that. I don't know. I mean, there's so many things we could talk about.

Is this the most important book you've ever read, the pre-release of Joe Polish's marketing book?

But your check didn't clear my bank account. Until it does, I— No, but this is a very good book. I've actually read it. I had one of the first advance copies. And we do marketing every day anyway, right? So it is a valuable tool.

Yeah, I just needed to fit that in just for no other reason than it's— you're right here and my self-esteem requires constant edification. OK, so where do people find more information about you?

On my website, which is strengthsensei.com. So strength and— S-E-N-S-E-I.

Yep, StrengthSensei.com. And what I'm going to do in the future, because of what we're doing with Artists for Addicts and the platform with addiction— Charles can speak to a variety of different subjects on health and exercise and fitness and supplementation, but he also knows a ton about the brain and about human behavior. And so I want to do a whole episode with you in the future when we launch the platform to help people with addictions about— because like, for instance, For instance, the supplements if someone has an alcohol problem and they want their body to kind of reject alcohol, what is it?

The best two are the combination of two amino acids, which is tyrosine and D-α-phenylalanine. And if you take 3 grams of each on empty stomach in the morning, people will find that they don't find alcohol tasty anymore. So they naturally take it out of their regimen. You will find that pretty much anything that has to do with the brain is fixable with a certain combination of the omega-3s and certain amino acids. Because with fish oil, if the fish is big and comes from warm water, it tends to contain more EPA. And of the omega-3s, EPA downregulates inflammation. So if you have arthritis, high blood pressure, and so on, you want to use a fish oil with a lot of EPA. But if you have attention deficit disorder or bipolar disorder, There's at least 16 brain disorders that we know are manageable with the right type of fish oil, but that fish oil has to have a high DHA content. And where do you get a high DHA content in the fish oil? They tend to be small fish in very cold water, like sardines and herrings and so on. But when you go to the store, if you go see your doctor or your nutritionist, you could look at the ratio between EPA and DHA, and that will decide actually which tissues are affected with it. If you don't have anything particularly with your health, I would say every time you go through a bottle of fish oil, pick another brand with a different ratio, and that will lower the odds that you have any sort of disorder. One thing you should know about omega-3s is that there's not a single disease known to man, and I've known this since 1994, that is not helped by omega-3s. So if you don't believe me, you could go to PubMed, which is the biggest library of scientific papers, and put in any weird disease you know and put omega-3 as a second keyword, and you will find at least one study, if not minimum of 14, that show that that fish oil is beneficial for any ailment known to man.

Is there any way to know if fish oil is good?

I've heard that a lot of the fish oil you buy in stores is rancid and you should just never eat it.

It's actually worse than not eating it.

I used to do it until I heard that. And you know, you hear so much bullshit advice.

You know, worst advice is, you know, bad advice is the worst thing you can take.

So how do you know whether fish oil is good or bad? The best way to find out is available through a health practitioner only. So basically means that you can't buy on the internet. The only company— there's an exception to the rule, and I don't get paid by this company. It's called Nordic Naturals, okay? And they have very high quality. They really standardized the way they make fish oil. But, and in Canada the rules are very different, so in Canada you can actually buy a store-bought fish oil, and probably the best company to buy is called ATP Labs, but they make a fish oil that already has carnitine in it, it's called Omega-Carn, and I think that's the best product for your brain. One thing we know from research is that any brain disorder is actually an electrical problem in your brain, and research backs up the combination of carnitines and omega-3s is probably the best healing agent for any brain disorder, ranging from dyspraxia to dyslexia. And you're saying 6 grams per day? That would be a minimum. I mean, it depends on your percentage of body fat, right? So at higher body fats, I've used as much as 45 grams, but that means your body fat's 45%. As you get leaner, you will use less and less fish oil. Okay, it's relative. If you got 10%, do 10. Yeah, typically when you start off, but you could be at 10%, you've been on fish oil for 6 months, if I measure your fatty acids in your blood, you may be down to 3 grams. But usually, um, one of the guys— if I was recommending 30 to 45 grams for at least, uh, 2 decades, and then I remember Mark Houston is probably one of the best vascular health specialist in the world, said, man, that's 3 to 8 times more what the literature recommends. But the problem, the literature never tried high dosages. And one of the best compliments I ever had is that in 2008, there was a Canadian study that showed that in the average person, 60 grams of fish oil was the best dose.

Okay, so he sent me an email, he says, in a bottle a day, huh?

Now, if you use liquid, it's not so bad. But the thing, the interesting point that Mark Joe Polish put in his email was clinicians always ahead of the research, okay? But when we were cavemen or cavewomen, we consumed 300 to 400 grams of omega-3s a week. But where would it come from? It came from animal brains. Because if you're in South Africa, in the middle of the savanna, you're not going to have access to a lot of fish. So what would happen is that the caveman would wait for the lion— lions eat eat the entrails of the antelope and leave the rest alone. So what the caveman would do is he would split the skull of the antelope and eat the brain. And 60% of the brain is actually omega-3s, and 80% of that is DHA. So that's why what you find in research is that where humans, early humans, consumed the most omega-3s, the faster their brains developed. Okay, there's a strong correlation between omega-3 content in a native diet and IQs. Okay, so for example, uh, the bow and arrow concept was developed where there was more, uh, better developed brains.

I am going to take you through a million years of human evolution and show you why we are the worst breathers on the animal planet. Before we get to all of the goodies about why humans are so messed up, what you can do about it, I want to tell you very quickly about my journey into this world, why me, a science journalist, got so interested in this seemingly inconsequential act of breathing. My jumping off point was really about 8 or 9 years ago when I went to write for Outside magazine about the World Freediving Championship, which is this insane competition in which these divers challenge one another to see how deep they can dive on a single breath and come back to the surface conscious. So I watched people hold their breath 7, 8, or 9 minutes at a time and dive down to 300 or 400 feet with a single breath of air. But I was lucky enough to meet some other divers who weren't so into the competition side of this freediving, who used it to explore their own limits, to explore their connection with the body, and to explore oceanic animals. Here's one of them. This is Hanley Prinsloo. She's down about 200 feet diving with sharks. They showed me you could do other things. You could dive with dolphins. And if you were lucky enough, you could dive with giant sperm whales. So these freedivers, as I got to know them a little better, said that this art of breathing that they've mastered to hold their breath for so long and dive for so deep extended far beyond just freediving. You could use breathing to heal your body. You could use breathing to heat your body. They told me about someone who breathed in this rhythmic way and was able to fight off E. coli when he was injected with it. They told me about an 80-year-old who learned how to superheat his body by breathing and could sit in the snow for hours. And of course, all of this is BS, right?

Impossible.

But I went and spent several years in this field and found that these stories were absolutely true. So each of us takes in about 30 pounds of air in and out of our bodies every single day. So this is far more than we eat and drink. And the new science is showing us that how we take in all that air determines so much of our health, our lifespan, and our human potential. So how we breathe really matters. And I learned from these researchers something else, that humans are breathing terribly, and this is having grave consequences. You can take a quick look at the data here. These are chronic breathing problems. And if you don't do anything about it, these chronic breathing problems and others can lead to so many other problems. There are direct links between how we breathe and allergies, chronic sinusitis, ADHD, metabolic problems, diabetes. Who knew? So these researchers told me if I really wanted to understand why humans had become such poor breathers, I needed to look at human skulls. So I went here to the University of Pennsylvania Archaeology and Anthropology Museum where they have hundreds and hundreds of ancient human skulls, and it was totally creepy to be standing in these labs surrounded by skulls from 300 years old to a few thousand years old, and all of them had perfectly straight teeth. So you cannot find a hunter-gatherer that has crooked teeth. So this is true for skulls 500 years old, 5,000 years old, 50,000 years old, 5 million years old, whatever. So here is the jaw of one of the oldest Homo sapiens. It's about 300,000 years old. No Invisalign for this fellow, no braces, perfectly straight teeth. This guy's even older. This is a million years old. Look at this very powerful forward-growing face. Perfectly straight teeth, they all had them. Let's go forward in time here. This skull is about 8,000 years old, still very wide, very healthy, broad jaw, straight teeth. As we go forward in time, look what happens to the human skull. So it gets more narrow. There is less room for teeth to grow in straight. So eventually they grow in crooked. And this is what we end up having. So there's another chronic problem with having a mouth that's too small for your face. It changes your profile. So 90%, I think over that, 95% of our ancestors, about 300 years old and back, were above that perpendicular line. So their chins grew forward above that line. And now 90% of us are behind this line. So it changes how we look, and that's a bummer, but it also does something else. It changes how we breathe. So when the jaw is not big enough, when it doesn't develop properly, look at what happens to the airways. And this is the primary reason so many of us suffer from sleep apnea and snoring.— and it's linked to allergies and asthma and on and on and on. So when I first heard this, I had a hard time believing it because I had understood evolution means progress, right? We're getting better. We're getting stronger. Totally false. Evolution means change, and life forms can change for the better or the worse. And humans, especially as far as our breathing is concerned, is changing much more for the worse. And the researchers I was working with told me, If I didn't believe it, I could go look at any animal in the wild, check out their teeth. So I did. You can look at chimps, perfect teeth. Look at this handsome guy, perfect teeth. Go into the water, the ocean, animals, dolphins, whales, whatever. They all have perfect teeth. My mutt of a dog, perfect teeth. And yet we can have teeth like this when we're growing up if we don't do anything. We can look like this. So the big problem with having crooked teeth like this— I'm going to turn on the next picture here. I was going to talk while you had to look at that, but that seems improper. So the problem is, is when our upper jaws and our upper palates don't develop properly, they can develop this V-shape where if you have a clean thumb, you can put your thumb on the roof of your mouth and there's a good chance the roof of your mouth is gonna be jutting upwards. And if it juts upwards, it can block the sinus cavities and make it harder to breathe through your nose. So you become a habitual mouth breather. But who cares, right? We have this channel, breathe through our mouth, that's just fine. It turns out mouth breathing is so injurious to our bodies, and about 25 to 50% of the population now chronically breathes through our mouths, and it affects the way we think, it affects the way our bodies function, it affects our metabolism, and it affects the way we look. So this is the typical modern profile of modern humans for someone who has spent much of his or her youth mouth breathing. So this is a profile I know very well because I had spent a lot of my youth mouth breathing. I thought it was perfectly normal. So as I got deeper into the research, I met this fellow, Dr. Jack, or Jack Nayak. He's the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. He said, yes, mouth breathing is terrible for us. No one knows this. He's a rhinologist. He's a nose guy. He knows all the wonders of the nose. But what he didn't know was how quickly the damage from mouth breathing, the neurological problems, metabolic problems, all that— no one knew how quickly that came on because nobody had tested it. Nyack said that doing so would be unethical because he knew it would be so injurious to the body. So I volunteered for a study and I got another friend, Anders Ohlsson, breathing therapist from Sweden, to volunteer. For 10 days, we had silicone plugs up our noses so we could only breathe through our mouths. I know this seems like a Supersize Me stunt, but it really wasn't. We were just lulling ourselves into the position that so much of the population already knew. But we were measuring it. And then for another 10 days, we would be breathing almost entirely through our noses. We would collect datasets and see what happened. Here I am getting plugged up on the first day. If that looks painful, it's because it was awful. First night of mouth breathing, you can see on the right, uh, snoring about an hour and a half. So that was frightening. Uh, here's what happened a few days later. Uh, I was snoring for about 4 hours just by switching the pathway through which I was breathing air. This is Anders Ohlsson. This guy was completely wrecked, went from zero snoring to snoring the entire night. We got sleep apnea, we started choking on ourselves. I don't know if you can hear that. We were recording data every night. My dog got so worried, she would run into my room thinking I was dying, which I really was, but just very, very slowly from sleep apnea. So, This wasn't too much of a shock to a lot of people who study this stuff. So they know that when the nose gets plugged from allergies or from injuries, snoring and sleep apnea really comes online. But what really shocked me was how quickly that damage happened, what it did to us. The good news here is that we got to go back down to Stanford, do about 4 different blood draws, and then breathe through our noses. Here's what happened. That was the first night on the left, about half an hour of snoring compared to 4 hours. Pretty good. A few days later, no snoring at all. So that was my worst, the left. Right is afterwards. Here's Anders Ohlsen when he was mouth breathing. Here is him nasal breathing. Same exact thing happened with sleep apnea. So we, both suffering from sleep apnea to zero. And I don't think a lot of people really realize that snoring and sleep apnea, this is going to crush you. If you continue to snore and have sleep apnea, it is going to affect your body in so many ways. You're going to die sooner. You're going to be so much more apt to get so many chronic diseases. And it seems like that science is just sort of coming online now. So here's what happened with my hypertension, my blood pressure. On the left was mouth breathing, on the right is within a day of nasal breathing. Blood pressure fluctuates throughout the day. So it wasn't consistent, but over about the course of a week, my blood pressure kept going down. This is a day after nasal breathing when I continued to nasal breathe. So my blood pressure dropped about 40 points and it stayed about 15 points lower than it had been when I was mouth breathing overall. The point of me telling you all this isn't to bum you out. It's to acknowledge that there are several problems happening with our breathing. And what I set out to do is to find ways of fixing those problems and find out ways of how we can breathe better to help heal our bodies, make us healthier, happier, live longer lives. So breathe through your nose, everyone. If that's not obvious from the Stanford experiment, uh, the nose is the primary pathway through which we should be taking in air. And I'll explain very quickly why. Because when we breathe through the nose, we are moistening air, we're filtering it, we're heating it, we're pressurizing it, we're conditioning it so that by the time it enters our lungs, our lungs can much more better absorb that oxygen. Here is what your nasal passages are covered in. The cilia, millions and millions of these little hair-like structures. What these things do is they remove particulate, and they also help remove viruses and bacteria. And our noses also release nitric oxide, which interacts directly with viruses. They're doing 11 clinical trials right now of giving, guess what, to people with chronic problems, associated with COVID they're giving them nitric oxide. We produce our own nitric oxide in our noses. So you get 20% more oxygen breathing through the nose than you do through equivalent breaths through the mouth. And if you think that's not gonna make a difference throughout the day, you're nuts. So breathe through the nose. So you wanna breathe slow and steady. About 20 years ago, some Italian researchers began studying prayer. So they looked at the Ave Maria, the Catholic prayer of the rosary, and they looked at the Buddhist mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, and they noticed something interesting— that to recite both of these prayers, it requires you to take about 5 to 6 seconds inhale to 5 to 6 seconds exhalation. So when you're exhaling, you're talking, you're reciting. And they found that several other prayers also had this respiratory rate attached to them. Here's the study right here. What was more miraculous is they took people and they put sensors all over their bodies, and they noticed that when people recited these prayers, their heart rates lowered, their baroreceptivity increased significantly, blood pressure decreased, oxygen to the brain increased— all these good things. Here's some of the data here. They noticed something else. It seemed like the systems of the body entered something called coherence, where everything was working at peak efficiency just by reciting these prayers. But the good news was you didn't need to recite these prayers. Reciting them is fine, but all you needed to do was to breathe in this pattern, about 5 to 6 seconds in, 5 to 6 seconds out, and your waves in your body, from, from heart rate to EEG waves, would look something like the above before when we're frustrated, when we're talking right now, scattered, and they would look something more like below. So they turn to this, to this, just by breathing in this rhythmic pattern of about 5 to 6 seconds in, 5 to 6 seconds out. Richard Brown here at Columbia has been studying this breathing pattern for about 20 years. He uses it for his patients with anxiety, depression, even 9/11 survivors. So it's pretty amazing stuff. You can do it right here. You can follow along with this animation. You can do this for the rest of the talk. I'll be speaking for a few more minutes, and you can feel this real change happening in your body. Some researchers at Northwestern University found that just breathing in this rhythmic pattern coordinates electrical activity across the brain in areas associated with memory and emotion. So how we breathe affects how we think as well. The last thing here is breathe less. So we know that we are overeating. So in 1960, the average weight of someone who was 6 feet tall was about 160 lbs. That person is now 214 lbs. So we know we are overeating. We are also overbreathing. That seems impossible, right? You wanna get more oxygen in, you huff and puff, but what you're doing when you're breathing too much is you're actually inhibiting oxygen from entering into your healthy cells. You are doing the opposite. My friend Patrick McEwen, breathing therapist, who's been working on this stuff for 20 years, shared with me this chart. When we breathe at a rate of about 20 breaths a minute, we can use half that air that enters into our lungs. So look at what happens when we breathe at a rate of about 6 times a minute. That's about 5 to 6 seconds in, 5 to 6 seconds out. We use about 85% of that air. So we increase our efficiency by 35% by slowing down our breathing. We get more oxygen. There's been studies into this. This is by Alicia Moret, where they've used just slow breathing for asthmatics. The effects weren't subtle. They use it for panic sufferers. 96% marked much improved or very much improved after a year of just breathing slowly. There's the asthma study as well. So the science is very clear. How we breathe can really impact our health. The final, final thing here is awareness. So we may not be able to control our liver function, the way our stomachs function, our heart rate, but when we control our breathing, we can influence all these functions. We can influence our nervous system. We can influence our immune function. There's many people who have done this over the past century. Carl Stau here used breathing for emphysemics. Nothing else worked for these people. When you breathe dysfunctionally, that's an emphysemic's neck. So he's not engaging his diaphragm. He can't. The next shot you're gonna see here is a, is of an emphysemic stomach. You can see other people breathing like this when they're not breathing fluidly and slowly. And now I'm gonna show you a little before and after here. This is that same patient by using nothing but breathing. So this is a couple of weeks later. He's able to walk around, cruise around. There's some before and afters here. You're gonna see him one more time. That is him after. This is him before, few weeks after learning how to breathe, that's him, totally different person, able to leave the hospital. So breathing can also allow us to heat our bodies up. We've known this for a long time. A lot of people didn't believe it until Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School went out and found these tummo monks who could heat themselves up, increase the temperature in their extremities by 17 degrees and do this for hours. Wim Hof, a new practitioner of this TuMo, there he is sitting in an ice bath for 2 hours, no frostbite, no hypothermia, just by using the breath. Breathing can also directly influence our immune function. That's what's so exciting. People with autoimmune problems, with asthma, with even type 1 diabetes have found ways of breathing and ways to really improve their health. So this stuff is not— new. It's been around for thousands and thousands of years. Ancient Hindu texts, ancient Chinese texts. One quote from the Tao reads, therefore, the scholar who nourishes his life reforms— refines the form and nourishes his breath. Isn't this evident? Well, I think nowadays it's becoming a little more evident if you look at the amount of studies being done, the effects of healthy breathing. I only hope that this time around we won't soon forget it.

We—

when we use breathing, when we acknowledge it, when we appreciate it, we can really help blunt so many of these chronic problems we have and improve our health.

What does it mean?

Why does it matter?

And then we'll get into a whole discussion about it.

Technically, scientifically, the official definition is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best, which doesn't help anybody, but that's the definition. It refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You're so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, that everything else starts to melt away and disappear. Sense of self diminishes. Voice in your head, the inner critic, gets really quiet. Time passes strangely. Usually you get so sucked into what you're doing that 5 hours go by in what feels like 5 seconds. Sometimes time will slow down. And you get that freeze frame effect, maybe you've been in a car crash or what they call bullet time in The Matrix. And throughout all aspects of performance, mental, physical, and emotional go through the roof. So that's flow quickly. Psychologists have a different, a slightly expanded definition. And then the work I do, which is on neurobiology, we have a much more technical definition, but we can stop there.

Well, let me say this, 'cause you, You have done so much scientific research. You've written a bunch of stuff. One of my favorite pieces of work that you have done is Mapping Cloud 9, which I don't think was ever in a book format, just audio, right?

No, but I did get the rights back recently, so I'm gonna put it out as a book.

Oh, okay, it's fascinating. It's totally fascinating. So, and what I think is kind of funny and useful about you is that you think so much of the stuff being promoted as personal development and how to become better is just based on complete bullshit and opinions that people are just spewing, not based on any, like, you know, real—

So there's, there's a fundamental problem in psychology and coaching, um, which essentially my career has been in revolt against, which is what happens in psychology, what happens in coaching, is people figure out what works for them and they try to teach other people. And the problem is so much of that is personality-based, and it's very, very individual. And usually, if you figure out what works for you, if you're trying to train other people, it's a disaster. Because unless they're exactly like you, they, they exist on the same introversion to extroversion, they're right there with you, the similar tolerances. But if those things don't set up exactly perfectly, you're gonna make a disaster out of somebody's life. Personality psychology doesn't scale. Biology scales. So I took it down to the neurobiology because that's mechanism, right? Evolution shaped all our brains in the same way. And so what works for me will work for you because it's based on the actual kind of core mechanism. And the problem with psychology is most psychologists, well, they won't— they don't figure out what works for them exactly. They find a model that they like very much, and that's the model that they coach from or work from or heal from. And again, it's very, very personality-based, and as a general rule, they make much more of a mess of people's lives than they actually help.

Yeah, yeah.

And I absolutely can see that. And there's a lot of people that the world follows because they have such a force of personality that— and they say it with this in such an authoritative state that it just sounds like the absolute truth, and this is a person I should follow. And if they, you know, if you do that— and there's a lot of leaders that are sending people down paths that they're, they're not built for.

Look, I, I learned this the hard way, right? I did what everybody else does. I started to learn a little bit about flow in my late 20s, my early 30s, and I tried to coach my friends, right? I really was just telling them how to live their lives because of course I knew better. I was a fucking disaster. I put one person in the hospital. I nearly got a couple divorced that are, by the way, still married today, like 22 years later. I wrecked people's lives trying to like, "Oh, this is the stuff that worked for me.

It's going to totally work for you." This was post-Lyme disease?

Yeah, it was post-Lyme disease, right at the front end of my actual career. I did what everybody does. I got a little bit of knowledge and I tried to teach to other people and I fucked up lives right and left.

I'll tell you, that's similar to the conversation, like I was just, you know, earlier today interviewing Kimberly Shannon Murphy about psychedelics. And there's some people that have like a profound experience with psychedelics, then all of a sudden they're masters at leading psychedelic retreats or guiding people through it, and they can ruin someone's life. I mean, I've seen that happen too. So, and it doesn't mean that flow's bad or psychedelics, It's how it's done. So let's step back then.

Let me say one more thing before we step back. So if you want to see what happens when you try to coach flow from psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with a woman named Susan Jackson. She's a brilliant sports psychologist, and they wrote a book called Flow in Sports back in the '90s where they tried to train Australian college athletes, like top athletes, using the The psychology of flow to train athletes. You can read the book. Their hit rate was terrible, like terrible results. Like the end of the book, they were like, yeah, this is maybe, maybe not. And when you go from that to the neurobiology— so we're data geeks at the Flow Research Collective. We measure everything and have over, you know, tens of thousands of customers at this point. We get a reliable 70 to 80% boost in flow. And that's not like our kung fu who is really good and I, I could be really proud of that. It's our biology. Everybody is wired for that. That's what's available to all of us if you follow the biology. But if you try to go from the psychology, you try to go from like a coaching-based methodology, it's not gonna work.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I wanna let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So I talk about like easy, lucrative, and fun, and hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. I use these as these metaphors and these ways of framing projects, people, things in your life that could be easy, lucrative, and fun, or easy, liberating, and fun, which is kind of how I think of flow, right? And then you have hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating, or oftentimes hard, annoying, going lucrative and frustrating, right? So I also believe that in order to get to ELF or create an ELF business, it ain't going to be easy. You're going to have to actually figure out and set up a lot of stuff in order for the conditions of ELF to exist. Well, the same thing with the condition of flow. What is the setup? What, what needs to— what are the things that must exist in order to get there?

Um, That's a tricky question. The interesting thing about the neurobiology, and that's really what Art of Impossible is about, is there's an actual blueprint. Like, we know there's a way to follow the biology. And we've known if you— the place to is always— you always got to start, and this isn't really a problem for anybody in this group, but if you can't— if you're rent insecure, if there's too much fear in your system because you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you can't pay your bills, you can't do any of that, that's where you got to start. Like, period. There's too much fear in your system, and until your sort of like income is settled, there's nothing else I can do. From that, you need to move into motivation, right? You have to get into the game. And so intrinsic motivation is what comes next. There are 5 major intrinsic motivators: curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And they're designed biologically to work in order. Curiosity is designed to build into passion. Passion is designed to be coupled to something outside yourself. That's purpose. Once an organism has their purpose, what do they want next? Autonomy. The freedom to pursue that purpose. Once you have that freedom to pursue the purpose, you want mastery. The skills to pursue that purpose well. So that's, that's where this always sort of starts. That's the motivation. Get you into the game, then you can start working with flow, right? Those things usually come first. You can start working with flow easier, and flow is really— it's odd, but it's really actually fairly simple to train. There are 28 flow triggers. These are your toolkits. Flow triggers are preconditions that lead to more flow. Flow comes in two varieties: individual or group. Me in a flow state, that's individual flow. Joe Polish at the individual flow. Joe and me together in a flow state, that's group flow. Group flow happens across a lot of different scales. When it's two people talking and you get so sucked in the conversation, an hour goes by and you didn't notice, that's interpersonal flow. And there's group flow, team flow. And if you want to go all the way up to like when you're at a rock concert and everybody's sort of clapping along in sync and you've merged with the band, every sort of like one with the music, that's communitas. It's group flow at scale. And by the way, I, I have to say That's the most interesting thing to me in the world today is group flow at scale. I'm going to deviate from this just to make this point. Peter and I wrote Abundance 15 years ago, and the point in Abundance was we now have the technology to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, child on the planet, right? And it's a question of bringing it up to scale. And I always say to Peter, we have a last mile problem on the road to abundance. Abundance. The technology is still the same. And if you look at basic standards of living, since we wrote Abundance, they've increased across the boards. All those metrics have gone up. But we have a last mile problem. We don't know how to cooperate at scale. The only time people on this planet have ever cooperated at scale is if there's a global war or there's a pandemic. And you're fighting an enemy. So to me, group flow and the science behind group group flow is literally how we— what we need to learn so we can cooperate at scale and get these technologies that can solve all our problems to scale. So I think I look at the world today and I think we're having a group flow problem. We need to figure out, okay, we've got communitas. How do we do that at a global scale? And we actually have these answers. We know how to do that. It's just a question of how do we pull it together and roll it out?

And by the way, because I almost have to mention this just for not for my own interpretation. So you said a pandemic, like, I, I don't know if we collaborated.

Well, you can— you might not like the results, but the world came together to produce vaccines.

Yeah, and I don't like the results.

We don't like the results, but the world definitely came together to produce those vaccines, and we saw cooperation at scale, at least in the beginning, before it became all before the corrupt tyrants were exposed as the evil people that they are. Yeah, uh, so yeah, Joe Polish, ladies and gentlemen.

I endorse my opinion only, of course. There— no, so yeah, so I hear you though, like, and there is, um, there was this book I had read, um, uh, when it came out, I don't know how many years ago, but over a decade ago, uh, called War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and how we are culturally addicted to And when there is a war, people will come together. They will become patriotic. They will fight for, you know, obviously on both sides, 'cause that whole saying, you know, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist, right? So it's like depending on kind of where you're at, but there is a lot to be said with what brings people together. And so is where I was saying, let's step back. You started seeing studying and learning all about flow because you nearly died and you were sick as hell, or you were suicidal at least.

So, well, the story doesn't— everybody starts— the Lyme disease story is sexy, so everybody wants to start the story there, but it's not where it starts. It starts two different places. The first place it starts is I grew up in Cleveland, and I'm an old punk rocker. And I, you know, if you were a punk rocker in Ohio in the '70s and '80s, there weren't a lot of us. Right? And so there was like one little street. It was like 6 blocks long. And if you were a weirdo in Ohio, and I mean like if you were gay, if you were a lesbian, if you were a transsexual, if you were a communist, if you were a magician, if you were a musician, if you were a punk, whatever, this is where you went to go.

And every weekend you were one of those different things.

I was. I do a little cross-dressing on the weekends. As you know. So, and if you would have polled the entire state of Ohio, Ohio and said, who's least likely to succeed, you would have pointed at our little group of like two— and it was a mess. I mean, everybody was a mess. And a lot of people died, right? A lot of people didn't make it out of that community. But that tiny little community of like maybe 1,000 people, I came out of there, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Howard Schack came out of there, the band Sepultura, the band Filter, Nine Inch Nails, the comic book artist Harvey Pekar. I can I could go on and on and on. Like 50 culture-shifting badasses came out of this tiny group of losers. Why did it happen? Because we found a way to bond together, have group flow experiences, and we lifted each other up. I didn't know what I was looking at the time. I just realized that, holy crap, we should have all been dead. And it's funny, like, all the— everybody knew each other back then. First thing, you know, when we get on the phone together, The first thing anybody says is, "You know, we were supposed to be dead before we were 30." And yeah, we were all supposed to be. None of us were supposed to live past that. And so much culture shifting came out of this. So that caught my attention, but I didn't know what was going on. 7 years later, I was at the birth— you know, I'd already started to learn neuroscience. I was a journalist and I was covering action sports. And I was in— I was living in what was then Squaw Valley. It's now Palisades Tahoe. And Squaw Valley was the nexus, like action sports was birthed in a couple of communities, that was one of the communities that birthed the entire action sport industry. And if you know anything about action sports in the 1990s, it's called the era of impossible. 'Cause more things that were impossible, never been done before, they're never gonna be done, not humanly possible, got done than ever before. In fact, you would see something that was impossible for all of recorded history get done on a Monday, and by like Wednesday, Wednesday, people were innovating on it already. Like 3 days later, the impossible became possible, and now people were adding on to it. And in that community, if you knew anything about peak performance in the '90s, it was really clear. You better have the right coaches. You better have the right parents. You better have gone to the right schools. It was a money game, essentially, right? It was a breeding and money game. If you didn't have the right genetics, you didn't win that lottery, you were screwed. And yet, I'm in Squaw Valley, I'm in the I was in the nexus of this stuff, and everybody I knew, they came from broken homes. They had shitty childhoods. They had no money. They had almost no education. There was a tremendous amount of substance abuse and a tremendous amount of risk-taking. And you know, put that in a community, what happens? People die young or go to jail. What they don't do is reinvent what's possible for the species. And that's what was happening over and over and over again. And if you talk to all these people, the only commonality in their stories was flow, which was the same thing I saw in Cleveland. But I still didn't quite know what was going on. And then I got, like, Lyme disease. And as I was sort of using flow to heal myself of Lyme disease— we could talk about what happened and why that works in a second— but the point was I realized that the very same thing that helped me go from, like, seriously subpar back to normal was taking normal people all the way up to Superman and Superwoman. And that was— it was those 3 things together because it wasn't— I saw it 3 times in a row, right? First I saw it, you know, the last time I saw it myself, but I saw it in 2 different communities where like you would have bet against both of these communities. Everybody in this room would have bet against us. You would have looked at us and been like, you're all going to be dead by the time you're 30 and there's no way you're going to contribute anything to culture. And yet this group of people at Squawk, we were the birth of the action sports industry. Like this trillion-dollar industry came out of this. A small group of fuck-ups. In fact, we were just together at an event and I was looking around the room and I was like, oh my God, it's all the people who built the action sport industry. We were all like the biggest fuck-ups you could possibly imagine. And we flow bonded together, same thing I saw in Cleveland, and the result was this giant industry that has—

right.

I would like to change the, the topic a little bit.

You mentioned a little bit about big Bold Health, which is your company that focuses on a different way of thinking about, you know, changing longevity. So the two things I want to touch on is you mentioned a little bit about stress. And I think stress is a big word because people think about stress as a bad thing. But I think stress can be looked at as a way to adapt. And the word adaptation and resiliency that you discuss, And I think it ties in very well to the concept of immune health and how you're changing— I think you mentioned yesterday of a really huge study that you found out recently about how we can change longevity and what is really impacting the way our body is able to adapt to stress and create some really amazing ways of balance. So maybe you can really talk a little bit about that.

Oh boy, that's a fun one. That, yeah, that's got a lot of stuff to unpack on that. So if we really look at stress, as Hans Selye brought it over from physics to physiology as a term, it was defined as a series of variables that influence the physiology of an animal in such a way as it modified the function of its neuroendocrine system, right? So it changed its hormones, it changed how the animal was responding to its environment, and we call it flight or fright. And so you get into this situation where the body is on an either on orange or red light, it's on alarm, it's poised for defense. Now, the concept of stress in that process But the process is a graded thing because you can go from an impending mortal injury that is terminal, that would really be stressful, or it may be just kind of like, I'm gonna have to give a talk and I don't like standing up in front of an audience, but once I get up there and I get going, that stress actually made me better because it cleared my mind. So there's a gradation of how stress or those hormones that are associated with stress influence your physiology. And this is the case with almost all hormones. They have a curvilinear effect. At a low level, they may be agonistic and produce positive, and at a high level, they're antagonistic, they may produce an adverse effect. So stress as a phenomenon is actually a positive thing until it moves into distress. And so this really relates to— I notice many of us are wearing devices. An Oura Ring. And so our Oura Ring, one of the things it measures is what's called heart rate variability. Now heart rate variability is a surrogate marker for looking at the balance between the activation, um, to the sympathetic nervous system to stress versus the deactivation, because life is a two-way street. For every activation, you got a deactivation. So the deactivation is to the parasympathetic nervous system. And when those are balanced, you have high resilience, You take on the excitement of giving the talk, you give the better talk, and then you come off the stage and you feel really good about yourself and you're relaxed. That's really good resilience and parasympathetic-sympathetic balance versus working yourself up all night with a sympathetic overload. You can't sleep, you get into the talk and you're just wired, and then you come out and you're exhausted. That's a different type of stress. It's the same hormones but played out under a different set of circumstances. So when we use the Oura Ring or other devices, we're measuring HRV, heart rate variability, which is a surrogate marker for measuring the balance between that sympathetic activity and the parasympathetic other road on the highway. And when it's really in balance, we have a high HRV, and when it's imbalanced, we have a low HRV. So it's, it's like a guidepost. It's not a definitive, like you We're taking blood samples and measuring hormones all day long, but it gives you some guideposts about where you're living your life. Are you living your life in the fast lane all the time and you don't have a slow lane? Or are you capable of balancing those? Now that HRV, as a measure from the Oura Ring, coupled with other things like pulse rate and oxygen levels and so forth, are tied, believe it or not, to your immunological function. We were the first people to actually do a little clinical, I would say, observational study with Oura Ring, looking at the effect. This was in early stages of COVID of what happens when a person starts having an immunological challenge. And I think I put the first video on social media using myself as an example, showing what happens when you get into immunological challenge to your HRV and your other variables that we would say, well, this is a fitness ring. Yes, it's an immune fitness ring because your immune system is regulating all those functions. I often ask the question, what organ in your body is in every other organ? And it's only the immune system. Well, actually the nervous system as well, those two. And they are communicating, the nervous and immune systems. So the heart is not in the lungs, and the kidney's not in the pancreas, but the immune system is everywhere. It's in the muscles, it's in the brain. And why? Because the immune system is the principal sentinel system that's assessing what's going on outside the body and communicating inside the body in direct communication with the nervous system. And it's gonna tell the body how it should respond to the situation you find yourself, bliss or non-bliss. So the immune system is a guide, is an, gateway into understanding how your whole body is going to respond to the environment you find yourself. And so when we look now, I'm kind of departing a little bit from the theme, but when we look at the Americans' response to SARS-CoV-2 virus, we had the worst outcome of any developed country in the world going into COVID-19 and into intubation and even death. Why? When we are the medically most sophisticated country, because we had the poorest immune system. And that was an aha. Only now are the medical experts saying, well, you know, there was something about our culture that it wasn't just that we were older. Well, no, we were not older than other countries in terms of mean average life age. It was that our immune systems, particularly the first line of defense, which is our innate immune system, was just not up to snuff. And why is innate immune system so important? Because it's on all of our barrier tissues. It's on the lungs, it's on the respiratory tract, it's on our gut. The microbiome is direct communication with it all the time. So if you have a disturbed diet, the disturbed microbiome, you have a disturbed innate immune system, and now you're less able to have your immune system doing the work. It has no headspace to manage and accommodate these other things. All these fit together in a different model. And that's the model that we've been working on because it's not like, well, you seem to be fine. "we did a blood test and we don't see anything." Well, no, you weren't asking the right questions about the function of your immune system. So, yeah. That's great.

Let's talk about that study.

The study that you recently found for Big Both Health.

Yeah, so what we did, and I wanna emphasize, it's a pilot study, it's only 50 individuals that were apparently healthy when we recruited them in the study. They were between ages of 32 and 76. Half women and half men. And we wanted to know what the age of their immune system was when they started off. And we knew their age and birthdays. That could be, even if they cheated, we could find it out. But we didn't know the age of their immune system. But we have tools that allow us to actually determine the age of a person's immune system. We use a special chip that was developed for us by the Illumina company that measures 850,000 different genes. Different gene sites in the immune system that relate to how the immune system has been epigenetically tagged to function in response to its environment. So we did a study of all those people to begin with, baseline. This is what is called an N-of-1 study, or the person is gonna compare themself to themself. And which, for doing studies on lifestyle, is a pretty good methodology, 'cause it's hard unless you put a person in a metabolic war afford to do controlled studies on people. And so it's better to do studies on a person against themself and then aggregate the data using machine learning to see what it tells you than doing controlled studies that everybody does the exact same thing. That's not real life. So this was an N-of-1 study. We didn't change a person's diet or lifestyle. Whatever they were doing, they should do it. No departure. Only thing is that we wanted to take 4 capsules a day of this high polyphenol containing supplement that came, comes from this ancient food called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. It's a 4,000-year-old food that we knew has a lot of positive impact on the immune system. So we wanted to see what impact that would have on their immune system aging over 90 days of consuming that product. Very simple. And so we knew exactly what the composition of the product was. We knew the food it came from, and we knew the starting point of that individual's immune system. So 3 months, they took that daily. We did pill counts, measured compliance, and all that kind of stuff. And 47 of the 50 people successfully completed the trial. And when we then did the machine learning interpret— we had over a terabyte of data, so it was a lot of data from this study. But when we analyzed the data, lo and behold, we found out that those people that started off with an immune system that was already aged, which was about a third of the group, relative to their age and birthdays, their immune system was older than their age and birthdays, that they had a 47% reduction in the rate of aging of their immune system after 90 days by sending different signals to their immune cells. Because what people don't understand is our immune system, the cells we have today will not be the cells we have in our body 90 or 120 days from now. Our immune system is constantly turning over. So the question is, when the immune system is turning over and being replaced by new cells, are they as good, better, or worse than the cells they're replacing? And most often, as people go through lives, their immune cells are worse. They're carrying bad messages. They're carrying bad experiences. There are things like zombie cells that we've heard about that are inflammatory-producing cells. So we wanna get rid of those. That's what we call immunorejuvenation. We want to replace them with these naive cells that are waiting for good new messages. And that is speaking into the bone marrow because the bone marrow is what produces those cells. And they go out in the body and they develop now this new young personality that can be more resilient and more capable of managing daily living.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Amazing. Thank you for that.

Can I mention something? This is bringing this up for me because you mentioned you know, replacing habits. And I, I'm really not a big fan of discipline. You know, I think it's a guilt in a lot of ways. I mean, obviously it's a contextual thing, but you know, someone says, well, I got really bad habits, you know, I just have a bad habit that I do this, I do that. And I think people that are really out of shape, people that really just their health is shot, I mean, they're just not in great shape, they have a lot of really good the habits that got them there. I mean, if you wake up every morning and you guzzle, you know, a couple of cups of coffee filled with sugar and cream, and you smoke a cigarette, and you yell at your wife, and you kick the dog, I mean, you just have really good habits of waking up, doing, you know, eating a doughnut. I mean, those are really— so you can replace these habits completely. And there's a friend that I had recommended read this really great book that was written by friend of mine named Steven Pressfield called The War of Art. Just love that book. I interviewed Steven 10 years ago when he first wrote that book. And you know, it's just a great book and I recommend it to, you know, it's about resistance. And I'd asked this person, did you read War of Art yet? And they're like, oh no, I haven't got around to it, I've been real busy. And I said, I just said this, this is a couple weeks ago, I said, do me a favor, it's a short book, just don't go on Facebook for 2 weeks.

You could read it in an hour.

Yeah, I said, I go, just don't go on Facebook for 2 weeks, the time you would typically, I know this is gonna be really hard because you're like a Facebook addict, but just try not to. I just said that as like kind of even joking. 4 days later, she calls me, she's like, that book was awesome, thank you. And that whole thing about just not going on Facebook and using that time, I still went on Facebook, but I did, I read the book. And so when you're talking about the 2-week period, if people are like, I don't have the time, I mean, you know what, there are whatever things you are doing, be it watching television or doing this or doing that, read JJ's book. Take the— I mean, so the whole thing, we're identifying a lot of the problem, but see, the great thing is you don't— you're not the person that just identifies the problem. You actually have here's what to do, here's how to do it, and you make it very simple.

Here's the thing. I mean, the biggest objections people will ever have are time and money. Really, I think that what's really holding them back is not time or money. I think it's that they they've failed so many times before, they've tried so hard, they've just given up. I think that's the bigger issue with it. Because in reality, it actually costs less to eat this way. And I, I've proven that now. I've gone to the grocery store, I've done it. I know that it costs more to eat the unhealthy way. It definitely costs more financially, physically, emotionally to do it. But time-wise, you can open up the book and go to the blueprints, take 5 minutes to study it, and then make the switches, it's maybe an hour to really do it. 'Cause once you get used to the shifts, it's normal food that you can eat anywhere. So that part of it's a non-issue too. It's really more about looking at this and going, well, what if she's right? And what could that mean to me? What's holding me back right now? 'Cause I look at it, and you know my story, you know, we never know when something is gonna happen either an amazing opportunity is gonna hit or a major crisis that you have to be all in is gonna hit. And when my son got hit by the car and left for dead in the street and I spent, you know, I launched the Virgin Diet out of the ICU with my son in a coma. And I had to be completely there for him because I am the sole financial support for my family. But I had everything invested in that book, and that book now had to be bigger than I had initially— I wanted it to be big, but now I had to have it be big for another reason. And if my health hadn't been there, that's what I tell people, they go, you must be superhuman. I go, no, I was just super healthy. I live 95%, you know, there's always— but I don't cheat on gluten or dairy or sugar, I just don't. But I was 100%. I got my sleep in, I did stress management stuff, I exercised by running the stairs at the hospital, I had Whole Foods delivering to the hospital, I did everything all in. And so I look at this and the thing is you don't know when something like that's gonna hit or someone gives you the opportunity of your life and you aren't there physically, emotionally, you don't have the focus, the energy to take advantage of it. In 2 weeks you could be there, in 2 weeks you could be there, that's it, you just take the 2 weeks, stop letting things hold you back that is as simple as changing what's at the end of your fork.

What have you learned out of all the years you've been doing this about where someone just, you know, if someone's watching this, listening to this, certainly there is the possibility that they're interested in it. It doesn't always mean they're going to read the book or take a certain action or change, but my belief is someone wouldn't even be paying attention if they didn't want it. I mean, there's something, you know, they're trying to get better, they're already in great shape, they're looking at someone like you as a way to just continually fine-tuning, continue to give them the edge. And then there's other people, they just feel completely lost, screwed, hopeless, they have no motivation, they're incredibly sick, and they just, they're lost, they don't know what to do. What have you learned how to just really help someone become willing, if that's even, you know, I mean, I have a hard time thinking, you know, you can't motivate unmotivated people, but, you know, I mean, if you paint a picture, sometimes you can.

Yeah, I don't think that it's that they're unmotivated. I think that they've given up hope. I think the biggest, the biggest thing that makes me sad out there, and I saw it, you know, again, I've got a son with a brain injury who's amazing, and so many people have written to me saying, thank you for giving us hope, showing us what's I think you get what you expect and that people start to give up because they've tried, and this is what drives me crazy, they tried these green smoothie cleanses that are loaded, or these crazy cleanses loaded with fruit.

I want to ask you about cleansing. We're going to come, we're going to talk about that a little bit.

You know, they've tried these things, they haven't worked, and they figure this is just, oh, I'm getting older, it's just as good as it gets. And so I feel like they lost their motivation because they lost their hope. And the person that I love to work with the most is the person like a Jeff Moore. Jeff Moore had lost his hope. He'd given up.

Right?

But then he had a glimpse. He had a glimpse into what was possible. He realized everything he'd heard before was wrong, that he'd been following the wrong set of rules. And he grabbed ahold of it like a lifeline. And that's what I say is just, you know, just grab ahold hold of this and just give it 2 weeks, it will totally change your life and you'll be in a totally different place. Just go for that, go for that, get your belief back. This is one of those things people are like, well, I'll, you know, I'll believe it when I see it. No, you've got to— you'll see it when you believe it. You have to start with that belief first and just go for it. If you live like a healthy, lean person, you will become one. That's just how it works. I mean, follow them around. They're not drinking diet sodas and eating diet food. They're not having skinny lattes and muffins. They aren't, you know.

I have a big friend, I won't mention his name, he watches my interviews. This is a long time ago. His first name is Doyle and he said he was drinking a diet soda.

Well, that's not a very common name so you just kind of called him out there, Doyle.

Doyle, if you're watching, He ordered a Diet Coke and he said to me, he goes, "You know what's funny?" He goes, "You never see skinny people order diet sodas." He's like, "You just don't." So diet sodas versus, you know, I mean, talk about artificial sweeteners.

Yeah, the worst science experiment that we've done. There are two really bad science experiments we've done over the last couple decades. One was taking the fat out of food. That didn't work. I mean, like, and people still are scared of fat. One of the most important things you can do in your diet is to make an oil change and eat good healthy fats. Eat a load of fat. And number 2 are these artificial sweeteners. What a dumb thing this is. First of all, they're 300 times sweeter than regular sweeteners. So all they do is dull your taste buds so you want more sweet food, more sweet food, more sweet food. They cause calorie dysregulation because now you've eaten eating the sweet food, your body expects calories but none come, which causes you to overeat. They've proven that in rat studies. And the whole thing that we thought, oh, well, you won't gain weight, but they raise insulin. So if they raise insulin, that puts you in fat storing mode. So that creates a problem. And then there's one other issue with them, and I think this is the most exciting area of health coming up, is the whole microbiome, the bacteria in your gut. They feed the bad bacteria in your gut. If you have too much bad bacteria in your gut, 'cause you're always gonna have some, there's good guys, bad guys, but too much of the bad guys, those bad guys actually extract the calories from the food you eat and they store it as fat. So I had one client, I had Leslie Hamill, who's Suzanne Somers' stepdaughter, and she lets me tell the story. She came to me, she was 40 pounds overweight, could not lose weight exercising, you know, cutting her calories. She had this SIBO, small intestinal intestinal bacterial overgrowth, too much of the bad guys. And all we did was kill those suckers off, boom, non-issue. Plus she had a couple food intolerances too, she had eggs and dairy. But people don't look at that. And you could be doing everything right, but you're eating these artificial sweeteners, you're feeding the bad bacteria in your gut and your insulin's up, and you will be storing fat. It is not a calories thing. Calories count, but they're not the absolute. Where they come from counts way more., right?

So let's talk about juice cleanses because I remember calling you up and I said, "I have a friend who's going on a 3-day juice cleanse and is picking up juice and cayenne pepper and lemon and all this stuff." And then you went on a full rant about it.

I went on a rant.

I went on a rant.

And I was just like, "Wow, I never even knew that." So for all the people that think they're doing a detox or they're doing a cleanse—

Okay, we need to detox every single day because every day we're getting hit by toxins. I like the idea of a detox because to me it means a focused time we're going to do good health habits. But let's just blow one thing right out of the walls right now, and that is that if you take the protein out of your diet to, like, give your body a rest or some really ridiculous thing, you need the amino acids to transport the toxins out of your body. The amino acids get together with the toxins and shuttle them out. No amino acids, you free up the toxins and you feel worse. So one of the funny things about a juice cleanse is people go, "I feel bad, it must be working." I'm like, "No, dummy, you just toxified yourself." You know, you just freed up those toxins because you've cut your calories way down, you're freeing up fat. Toxins get stored in our fat. It's one of the areas of weight loss resistance is if you're more toxic, if you have a lot of toxins coming in, your body will store the extra. If they can't get rid of it in your fat cells, and then your body cools down and holds on to the fat. So if you're starting to lose fat, you're releasing toxins. You need protein to pull them out. The other issue with the juice cleanse is a lot of these juice cleanses aren't just straight green drinks, which even if you're drinking just a straight green drink with nothing else, you're gonna raise blood sugar. But most of the green drinks, just like the one we just saw, are not really green at all. They use a little green to give it the color.

Mm-hmm.

But like, there's one popular cleanse out there right now that 5 pieces of fruit a day in the smoothie with like 2 cups of spinach. I go, so it's like 50 calories of spinach and 600 calories of fruit each day. And I had one poor guy— but you can have as much of that as you want, so you can do double, you can snack on some fruit. I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, right? Crazy, especially with the apples. So the big issues with those cleanses is they're pulling the protein out, which means you 'cause you can't then shuttle out the toxins. And no, you're not getting enough amino acids in the juice. And then most of the juices are loaded with sugar. Like look at that one that, you know, the maple juice and cayenne pepper and there's a maple, it's either maple juice, maple or syrup or it's molasses, either one it's sugar. And lemon juice and somehow that's okay. Like, no it's not. Yeah, so they're just ridiculous and I think reason people like them so much is they feel crappy and they think somehow that feeling crappy is good for them.

Yeah.

It's, you know, your body has no way to tell you. It can't yell at you and say, hey dummy, you know, this isn't working. So it just does things like lowers your energy or makes you crave things or makes you hurt or gives you a headache. And that it's trying to tell you, stop it, right? Totally.

Well, I think people really learn to tolerate feeling miserable.

Yeah.

You know, when you— because there's been many times in my life, I mean, when I grew up, my typical diet, because again I mentioned, you know, my father, single father, cooked every once in a while, but he was trying to just run a business and raise a couple of kids and, you know, very struggled. I mean, we didn't have a lot of money, so McDonald's, Arby's, Taco Bell, Chef Boyardee, I mean, just a lot of crap. I I mean, I was sick a lot, you know, and there was all these ingrained habits. And it wasn't until, you know, I became an adult and then I realized, well, yeah, I started reading. I never played sports in school because I had a kind of a sadistic Little League coach that ruined my liking of sports. And so I was never around health habits, and it took a tremendous amount of learning in education to unlearn all of these instilled habits. So talking about— I want to kind of go back to, to, to kids. Uh, what do you recommend parents do to set them on the right path? Because there might be some that feel really guilted right now based on what you said, and they're like, oh, I didn't realize this. But if you know this now and you don't do it for yourself and you're an adult, that's one thing. But if you know this and you're doing it to your kids 'cause that's just, I mean, you're not setting them up for success.

Right, once you know better, you can do better. But the issue is, if you think, I had one client who was a smoker, and I said, do you want your kids to smoke? And she goes, oh no, no, no, they're not gonna smoke. I go, they're absolutely gonna smoke. They'll go one way or the other, right? But if you want your kids to eat better, eat better.

Right.

Right? I mean, that's the very first thing, walk your talk. You know, you be the change you want to see in the world. So that's—

I was, you know, I did a couple weeks ago, I was interviewing Arianna Huffington about all the stuff I've helped her with, with her book. And I quoted Dan Quayle, and she, because I heard this quote from Dan Quayle, she's like, I haven't heard, you know, anyone quote Dan Quayle in years. And he was being interviewed about television, you know, sex and violence on on television and the person interviewing him saying, well, you know, that doesn't cause people to go out and do things. And he said, well, you know, if television didn't influence people, there'd be no such thing as advertising. And I just thought it was a really interesting statement because your lifestyle is your advertisement for your kids. I mean, it is what is the message that's conveyed. And I, on this video with Arianna, I said, I said, you know, there's a story I heard about a father who went to see a movie with his two children, and one was the child, whatever the limit is, 12 or 13 years old, and the other one was, you know, like 13, the other one was like 10. And so the father said, "I'd like, you know, three tickets, two adults and one child." And the person selling tickets said, "Well, sir, you know, I never would have known that your other son was, you know, out of age, you could have got two, you know, two child tickets and saved money. And he said, well, you wouldn't have known, but they would have known. And, you know, I always loved that because it's like, what sort of message are you conveying? And, you know, my father smoked. My father died of lung cancer because of— but I say he really died of addiction because he was addicted to— and so the thing— so what advice is the very best you could give to parents on how how to shift that and what they need to do, other than of course read the book and learn how to do this.

But, you know, as a mom, I used to give this advice before being a mom, and now I go, you know, really, you have to be a mom to understand this because kids are their own people, right? The good news is start as early as you can because exposure equals preference. Don't ever make the dining table a war zone. That's just a ridiculous thing to do. But the more you can involve your kids My son, this is a really funny one, my 17-year-old, I had a friend said, oh, you should check his computer, I bet he's watching porn. I go, my baby angel is not watching porn. So I go sneaking in there, and I trust my kids, so I never check anything, but I'm like, just to prove a point, I go check his computer. My kid is not watching porn, my kid is watching cooking videos.

Interesting, food porn.

He's food porn, yeah, because he was, he was watching like how to make make mashed potatoes. So I was like, dude, we have to talk, right? But, you know, the more you can involve them and make this not a mystery, they'll eat what they prepare because it's fun, right? So that's a big thing. Also, you put all this stuff— like, we have fruit, we have vegetables, we have hummus, we have nuts. We don't keep crap in the house. We never had juice in the house. We have sparkling water that we've always had. We have green tea. That's the stuff they know. Now, it doesn't mean they can never have the other stuff, but they learn that you go out to eat, if you wanna have a dessert there, you can have a dessert, but we're not keeping that stuff around. It's not a daily thing. I was raised, I started the day with Pop-Tarts or Cap'n Crunch.

Yep.

And we had dessert every night after dinner. And that was what you did. My mom had a wicked sweet tooth. And all of a sudden at 12, I realized this was not working for me at all, and I started on my path. But, you know, for my kids, this is just their normal. But I also am like, well, you know, it's not about being 100%. Be 90%. So if you go out, you know, if you want to have a dessert, go ahead. So they learn the proper place for these things. They don't become crazy. Because I remember growing up, I had a girlfriend and she was not allowed to have any of these things in her house. So she'd come over to my house and lose her mind. You know, she'd be like, my mom's like, what happened to the cake? It's like Evelyn Blyer was Oreos here, right? So it's really teaching them to eat the good stuff first because kids get full. Adults don't really get full, right? But kids get full. And just like I told you with Bryce trying the Oreos and going, oh my gosh, I can only eat 2. Same thing happened with Halloween candy one year. I'm like, go ahead, eat whatever you want. And literally 5 pieces, throwing up. And then we just got rid of it.

Well, see, that's one thing too, once you get your body adapted to clean eating, when you start introducing crappy stuff, your body pretty much tells you.

Yeah.

And it's kind of cool.

The big thing with kids is you focus on activity and energy and fitness and doing fun stuff and sports. Like, there's so many girls with tweaked body images because of the ridiculous things we see in magazines of, you know, like a model that literally I remember standing next to one of these models, I'm like, you weigh like 50 pounds less than me. You know, you're my height. How does this work? I could like knock you over with my pinky.

Boof.

You know, but, you know, I think it's important to really focus on activity and sports and all that. And then they get a different idea of food as being fuel and they want to have the energy. And my one son's a tricker, so he's really careful about stuff because he he wants to be able to throw his flips.

Right.

Right?

Right. Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

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Do it now. Come on. Thank you.

Watch them.