Don Moxley - Director of Applied Science at Longevity Labs Inc.

This is episode 253 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast. I am your host, Kari Schneider and I'm so, so excited to have a brand new guest. Dawn Moxley. Welcome to the podcast. I would love to share just a little bit about more about you and then you can tell us a little more. You are the director of Applied Science at Longevity Labs, Inc. And the developer of HRV plus from Mode and Method. So you're dedicated to helping people live vibrant, fulfilling lives at all ages. I love this longevity part. And you draw really upon your background as an athlete, a sports scientist and instructor to be able to lead and educate on the science of autophagy and longevity. You are long regarded as a human performance and longevity leader, known for making the complex simple. And I think that's what we're going to do here. You've got this amazing background as a former captain and Big Ten champion at Ohio State University, and you served as the university's first sports scientist. By giving athletes the ability to track their progress in strength, cardiovascular and resilience training, you've helped the wrestling team win a national title and three Big Ten championships. And you've helped athletes achieve Olympic medals, national championships and all American accolades as well. So welcome Dawn. I'm so excited to read your bio and I can't wait to learn a little bit more about what you have to offer.

Carrie, I'm excited to be with you. I mean, we had a little conversation before we started recording. I think there's a lot of commonality in our background. So I think, I think there should be some good energy here.

This is fantastic. And speaking of backgrounds, for those of you who are listening, I want to point out what some of you may be able to see when you see the YouTube broadcast, which is the video. We have different backgrounds. I've got a background of being in this kind of lake house, cabin environment up north in northwestern Ontario. And you've got an RV in your background. So the alignment comes in where we're truly living this life of adventure, exploration, best life for longevity and excitement. So tell us a little more about being in the RV and exploring the country.

Well, it's really pretty simple. We lived in Ohio for 60 years. I was born in Oregon, moved back when we were very, very young, but grew up in Ohio. My daughter, who graduated from Ohio State in 2020. She did grad school at our home outside of Columbus, and then she then went on to coach up at Northwestern University, women's lacrosse. And when she moved out a year ago, January, I looked at my wife and I said, we're done. She's out. She's our only child. I think of life in three thirds. You spend the first third of your life learning and then you spend the second third of your life usually in service to others, whether it's parenthood or working or things like that. But then you have your third third and that's your third. That's, that's, you know, that's the one that, that you, that you want to have, extend for as long as you can and get the most out of you can. And that's what drew me to longevity science. But so when my daughter moved out and she's got a real job and I said, okay, it's our third, third. And so my wife and I, we want to live in a place where we can drink our coffee looking at mountains and we didn't know where we wanted to be, so we purchased an RV. We've got a 42 foot fifth wheel. It's fully biohacked. That's, that's my sauna over my right shoulder and my red light system over my left shoulder. And I've got, we've got strength. I've got a Concept 2 skier that attaches to the outside. We've got a peloton bike. So we've now, in about 16 months, we've done 31 states, almost 50,000 miles under our belt. Right now you find me, I'm kind of midpoint between Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens out in Washington. So, yeah, that's our life right now.

So this is, I mean, it's interesting and I, I thought this was interesting to lead in with because of just the curious nature of it, but really it's leading to exactly what we're talking about when it comes to heart rate variability, longevity, because you are physically living the life that is functional, that is high performance, that is living your best life. And even though it's your third, third, it's still really, you're still giving back, you're still contributing because it's all part of what feels amazing as this part of your life.

Well, and third, Third to me does not mean dying, it means living.

Yes.

And, and, and again, we've, we've seen, we've been to amazing places and, and you know, I do a talk. In fact, you can probably put some Links on and if you go to my YouTube channel you'll see that. And I do a talk where my first slide is a picture of two orcas. One that lives in captivity and one that lives in the wild. And orcas that live in captivity, their dorsal fins tend to bend over. There's not enough environmental force for them to express their DNA. And Carrie, I just came across the study the other day. They were looking at mice and opiate consumption. And if you take a research mouse and you put it in a cage, you give it a bottle full of opiate laced water or regular water, the mouse will, will consume the opiate water until it kills itself. If you take a mouse and you put it in an enriched environment, an environment that stimulates, they don't even touch the opiate water. Okay. And so so much of our challenges, whether it relate to longevity or performance, either one. We live in aquariums unfortunately that we live in an environmentally controlled environments. We don't have to adapt. Our DNA was designed to adapt. That's the reason we were successful. It's the reason Homo sapiens outpace Neanderthals because we adapted better. But now we live in environments that we don't have to adapt to exist. But it doesn't mean that we thrive. And this is the important person. What does it take to thrive? And so whether you're an athlete or an executive or just Joe Bag of donuts out there that wants to get the most out of life, it our DNA requires adaptation. Okay, this is what you know, listen, we're both from the exercise industry. We've both got a background in high performance sports. We've, we've picked up way too many 45 pound plates in our day. But, but that is a form of modifying your environment to adapt.

Yep. Going out for a walk, it's a stimulus response. And, and when our stimuli is, is simply so controlled, so absent, absent, controlled, comfortable, then it's this, then everything else is, is everything that really feeds us. The, the opportunity to live and really live big feels uncomfortable when we're coming from these very, very controlled environments. And that's the, you know, you have an adult child, I have adult children. And it's this thing where I imagine that you put a lot of intention in around the extent experience of your child's life so that they're not coming away from their own life being a, a carefully packaged, bubble wrapped human and instead putting them in environments that are going to challenge them, that are functional, that are outdoors, that are going to have them. And, and I Believe, and I want to hear your take on this. I believe that then that initial experience of life in that first say 20 years of that child's upbringing in that creates some of the, the cellular environments in order to create longevity when they get to your, as you're pointing to your, the third third of their existence. And, and yet at the same time we're so bloody adaptable that even if somebody was bubble wrapped for the first three decades of their life and they got exposed to these amazing things that are going to stimulate them and make them change and adapt and they still can. Like that's to your point. I love how you said this, that our DNA is designed to adapt. So even if you had this perfect stimuli growing up in the first couple decades or you were bubble wrapped in a white room, we're still designed to thrive with stimuli.

And, and in the absence of stimulus and the absence of the core nutrients and we can talk more about that there are a core set of nutrients that our body requires for cellular energy, cellular metabolism. In the absence of that, you develop dis ease, you develop a, you, you, you, you develop problems. And, and this is, and so much. And listen, this is one of the challenges that we have. I, you know, I, I don't know, I don't know if you're a Peter Atiya fan or not, but, but you know, Peter's latest book outlive. I love the concept that he has in it. He talks about medicine 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 that we're currently living in a time of medicine 2.0 where we're responding to symptomatic problems. And I also like to think about. There's a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, his name was Martin Seligman and when he was the president of the American Psychological association, he asked the question, he said, listen, psychology so much about moving people from minus 10 to. He said why aren't we working on moving people from zero to 10? And, and, and so medicine today is all about minus 10 to. And you're not, they're not even getting to zero. They're just moving up until we become a symptomatic. But we're still dis. Eased. And, and you and I come from a field where we're, we're trying to help people go from 0 to 10. It's the same continuum. You just, you're just moving up it. And, and, and this is, and this is what's so important about what we do. High performance. Listen, Descartes was wrong. There is not A mind, body duality. The mind and the body are intimately linked. Yes, they, they're, they're critical, they're connected. And we'll talk more about HRV and things like that as we go. But there's evidence of this. There's good hardcore evidence of this. And this is, this is the point that if you want this performing well, well from there Dow needs to have the work, the nutrients, the feedback, the recovery, the tools so that you're able to optimize the entire system.

I love, I love this. It's, it's so in line with how much of our audience operates or the growth, understanding and really encompassing the bigger picture of who we are as beings. We're not just doings, we're not just bodies, we're not just thoughts, we're not just emotions. It's our being, which is all of those things that are either interweaving or moving through whatever we perceive as, as the, the eye, the, the, whatever we are. And this, as to your point, is becoming less and less woo woo. Because there is more and more scientific evidence that is showing what is what because it's easier and easier to support or deny various, various thoughts that have been out there. You mentioned absence of stimuli or core nutrients that really brings into the development of dis. Ease. What type of core nutrients would you say at this point are missing? And I know we could go, you and I could probably just go down that rabbit hole.

There's quite a rabbit hole there, isn't there?

But if you had to just really narrow it down, what would you say is really missing? As in core nutrients?

I'm going to dodge the question, okay? But here's why. So Harry, you and I are two very different people. I mean, we're two different genders. So we have, we know there's a big DNA differentiation. There's. Yeah, and, and, and in the absence of extinction, there is no evolution. There's only diversity. And we haven't had an extinction event in humans for a million years. Okay. So we have an amazing amount of diversity. And this is the reason why some people, some, some person may thrive on carnivore, while another person thrives on veganism. And they're equally thriving because of the diversity. And I think, and so going back to Peter t and medicine 3.0, a lot of what we're moving into now and able to do now is we're able to do the N of 1 experiments. What makes Carrie better, what makes Don better, we're able to get feedback on these things. So that we can make decisions. So, so let me go, let me go. Now that I've dodged the question, let me go back and address it a bit. There are core nutrients that we know. Listen, back in the 1600s, certainly, listen, 1492, Columbus put a bunch of guys on a boat. They came across the Atlantic. It was about a 30 day visit.

Got a little scurvy.

No, we didn't have scurvy for another 200 years. Really when we started living on boats for extended periods of time. This is the age of piracy. Early on it was. But as we spent more time and what we. But do you know who did not get scurvy on the boats? The people that ate the rats, because rats produce vitamin C on their own. But, but we see, so we saw an essential nutrient that one person's behavior led to no scurvy and other person's behavior led to scurvy on this essential nutrient. And we keep learning about these essential nutrients. So Longevity Labs, the company I work with, there's a molecule out there that we've known about for hundreds of years. It's called spermidine. Spermidine is, it's called a polyamine. It's in every cell of your body, men, women, plants and animals. It declines with age, but it's critical in the autophagy process. And autophagy is, this is the process that's most highly aligned with longevity, particularly health span. So as autophagy drops, inflammation goes up and all those diseases that are going to take you out, you know, from 40 to 90, are probably inflammation related and autophagy preventable by upgrading. So when we look at spermidine, this is a molecule that supports the entire autophagy process. So it's an essential nutrient that you've got to find in your diet somewhere along the way. And if you can't get it from food and Carrie, one of our challenges is we live in a time where so much of our food is industrially produced. No one's looking at micro. You know, when a farmer in Ontario or Ohio or anywhere else is raising a field of wheat, they're not really concerned about the micronutrient. You know, they're looking at, at bushels per acre and they're looking at, at proteins, fats, carbs, things like that. But they're not looking at the micronutrients. Well, spermidine is a micronutrient. We can't find it in the wheat that we produce in North America. We get ours from Europe, were a European company. And the rules for raising food in Europe are different than they are in North America. So these, these are the kind of things. And so let's take it another step. Let's look at the nutrient of light. Okay. You'll see over my left shoulder you see a red light panel. Our bodies, we know light directly affects mitochondrial behavior. We know that. We know that if you put certain light bands on your skin, we. Mitochondria wakes up. It puts energy into it. We also know there's toxic light, too. The same way some foods can be nutritive or toxic. Light can be too. Too much UV in the middle of the day on skin that's not prepared for it is toxic.

Yep. Too much radiation.

Yep. But. But getting light at the right level is. Is healthy. So these are all nutritive strategies that we have to pay attention to because we live in aquariums. You know, if we have an aquarium in our home, we have to pay attention the way we're supporting the fish in that aquarium or the organisms in there. Same thing. Listen, you're fish. Okay? The third. The third slide of my presentation shows a big glass building with human hands on the glass. Question is, what side of the glass are you on?

Yeah, yeah. Well, and then we're not. You know, if you think of it, I think of my daughter. She has. She's 12. She has a little aquarium at home. And, and that little aquarium at home also has a filter, also has a little light, also has, you know, a heater. And it gets. It's. They. She changes the water. She's diligent about what she feeds them and all this stuff. But the point is, is that we're not that diligent about what's in our homes or even getting outside of our own personal aquarium. Whether it's the light bulbs that we have going, whether it's the WI fi, whether it's the cellular signals, whether it's whatever we have going on. And we. We are. It's invisible. So ultimately, not to anyone's fault. We're blind to what we're exposing ourselves to, whether it's the lack of nutrients in the food that we're eating, something we can't see, we don't understand, or the electrical frequencies that we're exposed to. Something that we can't see and don't necessarily understand and yet accumulated over time. We're either denying ourselves things that we need or exposing ourselves things that we. That are not great for us. And that can be anything from like you're pointing to the nutrients, the, The. The light Nutrients, the electrical frequencies, the emotional frequencies that come through us whole nother. But all of it is the culmination of whatever we are eating, breathing, experiencing in our. To your point. Aquarium. I love, I love that analogy because it's so fitting.

Yeah, it's. And you know, one of the things. So I work in this biohacking environment. You know, this is the term we've put on it now. Listen, you and I have been biohacking, you know, modifying our external environment ever since we picked up weight for the first time.

Yeah.

So that we've. This is not new. It just has a name that's gotten popular. But it can be overwhelming to the novice. You and I geek out on this stuff. We're looking at deep levels. And the point that I make to people is that Stephen Covey's book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, absolutely love that book. And in it, they talk about. The presenter comes out and puts a jar on the table and he puts rocks in it, and then he puts gravel and so forth. And if you haven't read the analogy, it's a great book.

But big rocks. Yeah.

My point. Yeah. What are the big rocks? You got to get the big rocks in the jar first. And, and I'll send you a link to a talk that we can put in show notes. But I talk about my five big rock. My, my four big rocks in the jar. My. My rocks are. The big rocks are. Movement is number one. If you're not moving, nothing else counts. Okay. You've got to move. We are. We are a. We are an organism that's designed to move, lift, do things. You hack that with exercise, and there's ways to hack that, too. You can do blood flow restriction, you can do sauna. There's lots of things you can do that. Feed that rock. But it has to be fed. Number two is nutrient dense food. You know what? If you're raising your own garden, good on you. You're probably a long ways down the road. You know, growing up on a big farm in eastern Ohio, we had two acres of garden going up, mainly because we were relatively poor. We did not have. We did not have enough money to buy our food. We had to raise it, let alone the fact that it was so nutrient rich in what we were doing, you know, who knew? Cleaning the barn, going on the garden.

Was no, it wasn't an intentional thing for, for health or thriving. It was a necessary survival thing. Same with my grandparents and my parent. My grandparents in Minnesota, my parents in Canada, you know, grow that garden because we need this, we need this food.

Well, and it's, it's so nutrient rich. That's the beauty is that we're not using pesticides. We're not. I, listen, I spent too many hours on the idiot end of a hoe out there in the potato patch, you know, so.

And shoveling crap in order to, to fertilize the, the land. And meanwhile, you know, you've got this. You're dreading it and hating it in the time, but now you look back and go, oh, why isn't everyone doing this now?

I didn't need to go to grad school, right? But so, so my second rock is nutrient dense food. You hack that with supplements, okay? If you, you got to get them in, some of them are essential, some of them are beneficial. My third rock is sleep, okay? For so long, we deprioritize sleep and it was a huge mistake. You can't hack sleep. You can hack the sleep environment, but you have to have good sleep. And then my fourth rock is light. Being able to get light on your skin, getting your eyes exposed to light at the right part of the day and eliminating toxic light. Okay, you know, that's. So those are my four rocks. Movement, food, sleep, and light. And those all go into the jar of what I call purpose. Our environments are powerful. There's a lot of environmental forces saying, ah, you don't have to move that much. You can eat this crappy food. You know what, stay up a little later and oh, don't get light on your skin. That's easy to do because of the environments we live because of our aquariums. Well, it's purpose and I tell the story. Listen, you and I have, have, have had the same experience of coaching some amazing athletes. And it's. When you meet these people, it's such a privilege and it's just so cool. And you, and you have relationships for the rest of your life with these amazing people. But when, when my point is, is that I've coached Olympic gold medalists and national champions and professionals. My favorite coaching job was my daughter's 8th grade field hockey team. Okay, I love that. And I would. And I can't wait to coach my grandkids. And I want to be that crazy Wrestler When I'm 85 years old who still goes into the room and teaches. Okay? I want to be that person. And that is my purpose. You know, my personal mission. Helping individuals understand the changes necessary, who alleviate suffering and contribute to the betterment of all people. That's my mission.

I love It.

And so that's something I can wake up and do every day. It, It's. It doesn't force me, but it provides me an opportunity to constantly bring in. I'm reading, I don't know, I read 10 research papers a day. Because of my role with the company, I've been able to align my loves with my revenue sources. So I get to do those kinds of things. I get to talk to people like you and your tribe. And I love that. That's a purpose that can drive me for a long time.

That's phenomenal. And, and that as well feeds into you living your best life. It's simply, you are, your actions are aligning with what's meaningful for you in your heart and your mind.

Yeah.

So when you, when you speak to. There's. There's a couple things I'm curious about from your perspective, especially with your background in hrv and hrv, as a reminder to our audience, is heart rate variability. And that is just very simply defined the differences between beats versus the people think as soon as they hear heart rate. If someone's not familiar with this area, they often just think, oh, this is my heart rate. This is my beats. Well, heart rate is the beats per minute. How many beats happen in that minute. And heart rate variability is how, how frequent or infrequent they are. Over beat to beat. Is this beat to this beat a long span of time, or is this beat to this beat a short span of time? And, and to sum that up, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say about this and how it plays into longevity. To sum that up, if someone is having a high number in heart rate variability, meaning it's very variable. It's not like a metronome. It's long beat, short beat, long beat, short beat or short beat, short beat, long beat, short beat, short. But that high level of variability is an indicator of activating one part of our nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system, which allows us recovery, digestion, rest, all of these wonderful things that our society. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna stretch here and say our aquariums, our controlled environments are limiting that. And then we tend to be a little more boom, boom, boom. And that, that boom, boom, boom, that sympathetic, the other part of our nervous system, it contributes to over stimuli. That's not helpful for us.

Well, it's, it's, it's really important. Okay, so that, that, that sympathetic, that, that low hrv. Listen, you're in northern Ontario. There's a Chance. A bear walks through the door of your cabin. Okay? And if a bear walks, If a bear walks through the door of your cabin, your. The amygdala in your brain says, hey, that's something that can eat you. You probably want to go away. And it dumps a bunch of resources. It dumps cortisol, it dumps adrenaline and gives you the ability to escape the challenge. The problem is we now, in our aquariums, everything is a bear. We have taxes, we have relationships, we have work, we have social media, emails. We have emails. We have all these things that our brain. You know, I was, when I was at Ohio State coaching back in 17, one of my wrestlers, I'm walking in, it's early, but right before Nationals, and he says, Coach Moxley says, will playing Fortnite affect my hrv? And I said, luke, I said, your brain doesn't know the difference whether a real gun is pointed at you or a fake gun on your computer is pointing at you. Your brain just recognizes threat. And so literally, we had to have a lesson on. It was a great question. Listen, I'm so glad he brought it up, but we live in an environment now where we have tons of paper lions, paper tigers, paper bears. I'll tell you a story. So we were measuring HRV on the wrestling team rather extensively. We measured about three and a half million data points in one season on a wrestling team. So we're, we're going into the 18 Nationals. Last year I was with the program. The guys are coming back from holiday break, so we send them home right before Christmas. They get about six or seven days home. They come back and we, we really start our important season there, the beginning of January through the very beginning of March. So we've got about a six day training block when I can just bury these guys and get them recovered before we go into the competitive season. Yeah, And I'm thinking, they're coming home, they should be ready to go. We had the worst HRV measurements the day they came back that we had the entire season. Okay. And so we've got this practice planned. I see these numbers. I go to the coach, I go, we can't do this.

Can't do it.

I said, so we modified what we learned. Family stress is the worst stress. So, you know, we had to build this into our process. And that's the beauty. Listen, with all the disadvantages of the time we live in, we have some amazing advantages too. And I think this is where utilization. And this is the medicine 3.0. This is the ability to Take wearable technology, whether it's your HRV measurement device or your continuous glucose monitor or just any of these devices, aggregate them. The challenge that people. One of the challenges is, Carrie, is. I said this early on. You're Carrie, I'm Don. We're different.

I'm Kari. It's Kari.

I apologize. I'm Kari. We, you know, we're different, okay? And as we move through this, Kari has to figure out what makes her environment work for her the best, okay? And Don has to figure out what makes. And everyone else is in the same place. You may be vegan, I may be carnivore or the reverse. You may, you know, you may thrive on cardio, I may thrive on strength or reverse. This is the time that we live in. But if we want to prevent dis. Ease, if we want to prevent inflammation, the thing that will kill us, movement to go ahead and keep this going, diet to go ahead and make sure that we have autophagy in place, that we're able to resolve inflammatory responses will yield an improved hrv. High hrv. It just means resources. It means the higher the hrv, the bigger the fight you can get into. You know, and. And two years ago, three. It's almost three years ago, I had a knee surgery that I got a MRSA infection from, and I was very ill. I was very ill for about 90 days. And I always, when people ask me how I'm doing, I said, well, if a fight broke out, I wouldn't get into it. As I started to feel better, if a fight breaks out, you know what, I might stay in it. And then when I feel really good, I'll start the fight. So it's about the resources available. And that's what high HRV does for you. It gives. You have resources available to utilize in.

Stressful situations from a practical standpoint for people. You know, now, unlike when I was involved in this type of research, now there's. There's aura rings, there are Garmin watches, there are Apple watches there. You can get a ECG on an Apple watch. You can. There's so many different things you can do. But the thing that I. I want to re. Emphasize that you're saying and just really hammer this home is that it's not a one size fits all. It's not a. A prescriptive thing when, when someone doesn't know you. It's not a. A recipe. It is a. You figure out what works for you. And if you're a human who's lived a few years, what worked for you at 25 likely doesn't work for you at 35. What works for you at at you know, in, in a high stress time of your life probably doesn't work for you when you are at your best. It's just a different and we have to have the self connection to be able to continue to take a look. Well, is this still working for me is doing. Is running three times a week still working for me is lifting four times a week still working for me for the goals. Have my goals, have my objectives changed for how I want to perform in my career, in my leadership, in my life and my, my training. How my family, my family.

How.

How am I showing up after I've done that? Where might used to be a maybe a three hour workout and then it was no problem breeze through the rest of the day and then later maybe because of other stressors in life or kids or who knows what that three hour workout means. The rest of the day is crap and you can't function for the other demands that you have. And if we'll buy those things.

Yeah, let's throw in there. I think you've probably recognized this. You know there was a point in time when a three hour workout was a badge of honor. Okay.

Yeah.

When you, when you put, when you put metrics on it, what you figure out the benefit of that workout happened before the 45 minute point. The rest of it was really a waste of investment. I think it's important to look at life through economic windows to what is the return on my investment? How much of an investment do I need to make in strength? You don't have to wind up in a CrossFit gym laying in a puddle of sweat to get the benefit. The benefit came long before that. And I think this is. And for the listener, I think it's important. You don't have to become expert. You have to become aware of what you're doing. There's people like myself and Kari and there's a lot of coaches out there and there's, and there's, there's an emergence in medicine. There's an emergence in, in medicine 3.0. There's emergence in functional medicine away from the classic medicine 2.0 that you. There's people to help advise you these look for these kinds of people in your life. And again, you know what? I, for my long time, my wife was a model. She worked for Victoria's Secret Corporation and she was a fit model. They, they made the clothes they fit on. She would come home and talk about fit Sessions and things like that. And I'm a good husband. I listened. I don't necessarily remember it all, but.

I listened to and work, husband, good work.

But the point is, is that I did learn some things along the way. When I put on a, when I put on, listen, I love Lululemon clothes because it fits me well. And she can explain to me why. I just know I like Lululemon. But so there's people like you and I that will geek out on human performance and there's people that, you know, my accountant is telling me about these things and I'm like, listen, I write you a check to file my taxes. Stop talking to me because this is not part of my love affair.

Yeah.

And so there's some of us that geek out in this place and get those kind of people in your life. Learn, learn around. But learning to self monitor is so important. Again, whether it's longevity, living, you know, you know, it's I, I. Fitness. When I, when I opened my fitness facility, we, we had to define fitness and we called it the physical capacity to enjoy the life you're given. That's what fitness is. No one takes a picture of their scale and puts it on Instagram. Okay. You put pictures up there of the trip and of the wedding and of the 5k and of things like that.

Experiencing life.

Yeah, that's what, that's what you're investing in when we're talking about this and thriving. And again, I can't wait. You know, I love putting pictures of my daughter's success up there. I love doing things like that. That's really important to me. And as you move through life and as you do these things, get advisors in these places to help you with those.

I love that, I love that advice. Because ultimately there's a responsibility for us to know ourselves and understand ourselves, and we're not necessarily always our own most objective experts or feedback. So having someone else give some, some on some objective feedback is important. Now I just want to touch on, on one last thing that you and I had spoken about, and that is the, the role of cannabis and hrv. What's, what's that? I mean, this is something that's been emerging for a while, especially in places that are more open to cannabis use, like Canada, because it's legal. Know I tell that to some of my friends in the States and they're just like, I can't leave, I can't leave the state with my cannabis. And I'm like, yeah, well, come to Canada. But the point is, is that what. Tell us a little bit about that role between cannabis and HRV and some of the research relationships there and what the, what the relevance is.

Well, and I came to this, I understood HRV before I understood cannabis. I was, when we were working with this and when I was working with this at Ohio State and we're doing a really deep dive. I had friends from the HRV community migrate business people migrated into the cannabis space and they're reaching back to me saying, hey, what do you know about HRV and cannabis? And so on. I'm like, I don't know anything about it. Well, I had an opportunity to do a deep dive. I call, I did a deep dive into the deep end of the pot pool. And, and we have part of our central nervous system that's called the endocannabinoid system.

Yeah.

Okay.

Is that pain receptors there?

Pain receptors, performance receptors, all these things. I did not know the word endocannabinoid system until I dove into the pot pool. I've been teaching exercise sciences for 35 years. I'm a professor. I've been teaching. The reason you exercise is to stimulate your endocannabinoids.

Cannabinoids, period.

Okay, that's. That should be chapter two of exercise. One on one, you produce an endocannabinoid called anandamide. When you orgasm, you produce an endocannabinoid called 2Ag there for a reason.

Yeah.

Well, the challenge is, is that we may not be moving enough. We may not be. We may not have the core molecules in our system, but when we bring cannabis into our system, it helps support our existing endocannabinoid system. If you, and, and again, I talked earlier about the amygdala in the brain, the fear sensing part of the brain. We, with trauma, we modify. Well, we know it happens in dogs and mice. We can't study this in humans because humans don't do well after the autopsy. But, but in dogs, you know, you know, but, but in dogs and mice, if you fear condition them, there's a drop of anandamide in the amygdala and it does not come back. Okay. And, and you can imagine taking, you know, I think back to the 60s, I'm old enough to remember this, that you think back to the 60s in Vietnam, we take a bunch of kids and we drop them into Vietnam. And, and, and I do another analogy. I call about if you're, if you're born in a snake pit, a rattlesnake pit, the only way you survive is through hyper vigilance. Okay. You have to develop hyper vigilance. Well, many of us, unfortunately, live in snake pits. Whether it's sexual abuse or trauma or financial or. There's. There's lots of things that drive this. So it only makes sense. There's a natural drop of anandamide in the amygdala. And we support this with some with exogenous consumption of cannabinoids. Now, our problem is, Kari, is that the cannabis business is legalized on the backs of cancer patients and epileptics. But as soon as it's legalized, it becomes an adult use market and there's a race for THC potency. THC is an anxolytic. It makes you anxious. Okay? It's the other molecules in there that tend to have the parasympathetic response, the terpenes, the other cannabinoids. So I'm. While I'm a cannabis person, I'm not a THC person. Now, there's some value in thca, but what we know that people who consume cannabis, there is a change in hrv. And in fact, so the way we got to the product that we have is that when we started selling Spermidine Life in the States and I started talking to our customers, we had a lot of people saying that hr, that Spermidine life was improving their HRV scores and improving their deep sleep. And I thought, oh, this is interesting, this. And then I started talking to them. A lot of them had aura rings. Most of them didn't know what to do with it, but they were getting this HRV score with their oura ring. And so the company came back to me and said, hey, is there a way to do an HRV supplement? I'm like, I've already done it. I said, when I worked in cannabis, I figured this out. I lived in Florida for a year. My wife and daughter were back in Ohio. My apartment in Palm beach was breaking bad. I mean, I had gram scales and beakers all over my counter. But I was figuring out cannabinoids and terpenes and things. So we created a supplement called HRV plus, which is a combination of cbd, CBDA and beta caryophylline. Beta caryophylline is known as the super terpene or the super cannabinoid. Cbd. A is the acid form of cbd. I'm not a huge CBD fan, but it just comes. It comes to the party, right? It's that. It's that third wheel, and then this is all in a dha. Epa. Fish oil, the number one driver of poor HRV is inflammation. Okay. So if you have inflammation, it'll drive down hrv. So if you want to raise hrv, you have to resolve inflammation. And there's also a new product on the market that are called specialized Pro resolving mediators, SPMs. These are the biologically available Omega 3s. They're ready to resolve the inflammation. So we've created a product, HRV plus which has this dha, EPA SPM combination in the fish oil combined with a cannabis based cbd, CBDA beta caryophylline mix that we ran a little open label study here in the states. We saw 10% improvement across the board with HRV, saw 23% improvement in quality of life measures. The sleep data that we're getting back or the sleep testimonials that we're getting back are ridiculous. And so, so that's, that's, we're putting our, kind of putting our money where our mouth is. What are the critical nutrients to, what are the critical nutrients that are not available in our aquariums? How can we replace them? CBD beta carry offline cannabis extracts can do that. Fish oil does that. We can go ahead and improve the efficiency with the SPMs. And that's, that's, that's how we use that in a supplement.

I love, I love a, your, your science based curiosity and research. Just how you're approaching things and how you want the answers and to figure it out yourself. I also love that you answered a question that I was going to ask when you had said number two on your big rocks as being nutrient dense food and then with some supplements. So I was going to ask, well, what are those supplements? Well now you're telling me what those supplements are. I love this.

It depends on your food source. Depends. I mean that's why we're all different.

Yep. And, and, and recognizing that it's not the same for everyone and figuring out what is, what is going to be right for different people. So I'm really curious about this product. What I would love for you to do as we wrap this up. What I would love for us to do is to have these links in the show notes so that then people can find out more about you, find out more about your product and maybe some of the research or any pertinent information that you think people would be really curious about. And last question here. If, if you could go back to your 20 year old self and you had something to tell your 20 year old self and with the knowledge that you have now, what would that be?

Have compassion? Have More compassion that, you know, having. My wife and I celebrated our 33rd year to marriage this year.

Congratulations.

Thank you. And it's not easy. It takes work. You better be in love when you get married, because it's going to take work. And that work is. Is being able to suppress the ego. And this is not easy to do. I mean, trust me, it's something I fight with every day. But showing compassion for others, you know, just your life is not what everybody else experiences. You know, we live in an interesting political time when everyone wants to push their life on top of others. And I'm like, no, you need to have. Listen, they have a different existence. You know, I go, kari, I go back, and I remember at the beginning of COVID there was a story on the news about this bus driver in Detroit. It was really early on, and this guy, they interviewed this guy and says, people are coughing all over me. African American guy, a bit obese, you know, classic, you know, inner city aquarium. And three weeks later, he was dead. And I think to myself, we know Covid interferes with the autophagy process. And if you have good autophagy, you are much more resistant to the COVID virus. We know that. That's what the science does. This is a guy that wakes up every day just trying to make enough money to pay his rent and to pay his car payment and to feed his family, driving a bus in Detroit. And he has all the core mobilities. He has all of the. The comorbidities. He has all these things. And all of a sudden, this novel virus takes him out. This is a guy just trying to get through life. He's just a fish in a tank, okay? But he doesn't realize he's in a tank. And I think that's the challenge that we have. And I think we have to have compassion for others, whether it's homeless or whether it's someone struggling, having compassion for where they came from. That person that you see there that may be as attractive as can be and you think has all their shit together, may have been through some really bad stuff, and you need to be prepared for that.

I. I love that this is how we are wrapping everything up. And one of the reasons is that is that what you've just pointed to in this part of your life and your final message with compassion is. Is what I think we all need more of. We're. We've become so divisive, we've become so separate. And yet as organisms, as biological organisms, we are meant to coexist. And intermingle and be be diverse. Just as you supported in the very beginning is we are diverse and let's.

Try and be more supportive and less combative.

I I love that. Well, thank you so much, Dawn. I am so I'm so grateful that we've been able to have this connection and I'm I feel very, very lucky to have had this interaction with this kind of alignment because ultimately we get to explore other things and hopefully share some things that maybe some people haven't heard before and enlighten or have them be curiosity curious about something that might be impactful for their lives. So thank you for coming on the Empowered Team Podcast. I invite our listeners to pop a rating a review and give some suggestions and questions so that we can keep providing what people really care about and what can help people grow in their best lives. So thank you Don and have a if you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. The Empowered Team is our group coaching and accountability program where we provide the tools, skills and community for you to grow your self mastery as a leader and optimize your results alongside other leaders. The Empowered Team runs year round to learn more about our leadership consulting for business and our Empowered Team Group coaching. Head to www.theempowered.ca empowered learn more. That's www.theempowered.ca Empowered learn more. We we can't wait for you to join us. Let's go.