Ari Whitten | The Energy Blueprint: Does Adrenal Fatigue Even Exist? | Wellness Force #Podcast

Is it possible to have HPA axis abnormalities or low cortisol or low morning cortisol or dysregulated cortisol?

Absolutely.

That is a real thing. But it is fundamentally wrong to claim that adrenal fatigue is the cause or the primary cause or even a common cause of fatigue. It's also fundamentally wrong to claim that adrenal fatigue, the chronic stress leading to low, low cortisol levels, is a real thing. That is also incorrect. And the reason I say that is because one of the other layers of analysis that I did is I looked at all of the studies on various kinds of stressors. So psychological stress, different kinds of psychological stress, chronic stress from being overtaxed with work and working a job you hate. Chronic stress from the opposite unemployment, chronic stress from relationship stress, chronic stress from financial stress, metabolic stressors like chronic cigarette smoking or alcohol consumption, chronic over exercise, over training syndrome. There's studies on all of those in relationship to cortisol levels. Is there any indication from any of that research that any of those stressors are reliably linked with low cortisol levels? The answer is no. You can be exposed to those stressors for years or decades and never get low cortisol levels.

They.

There's no predictable relationship whatsoever.

Ari, welcome to Wellness Forest. This has been a long time coming indeed, my friend.

Such a pleasure to connect with you people.

Know you as a science person, but I got the pleasure of being interviewed by you on the Energy Blueprint podcast. And I was, like, just astounded by how spiritual, how much depth you had that I really hadn't seen in your media and in your content. So today, obviously, we're gonna talk about this Blueprint for Energy. All your books you've written, the low carb myth, forever, Fat loss. There's so much you've put out in the world, man. But if people don't know you and they're just seeing you, maybe hearing you for the first time, how could you encapsulate yourself, you know, your current conscious level of development, your current embodiment of. Ari Whitton. Who are you? What do you do for people that don't know you?

Ah, well, that's such a big question. Let me give you the. I'll give you the avoiding. Give you the Reader's Digest by going super succinct.

Okay.

It's interesting that you brought up, you know, that you were sort of taken aback by my spiritual side, because in general, that's a very private side to me, in general, because I. My business is Very much science heavy. And it's, here's what the science is, here's what the studies show. And it's not a personal brand, it's not about me, it's not about me telling stories. And I generally keep the spiritual side somewhat private or not even somewhat, almost entirely private because it's technically a bit off brand for the brand that I've created. And I have a very strong inclination to want to have everything just be bulletproof. Here's the science, here's the evidence, here's every possible angle that you could attack this argument. And I've addressed this and this and by this evidence and that evidence. And as soon as I, you know, if you start talking about spiritual stuff, you get being, you get accused of being woo woo or not scientific or a quack or whatever. So yeah, I fight with myself a bit about that because on the one hand I would love to be able to share more of that side. I think it's really important and it feels somewhat inauthentic to keep it hidden. And then on the other hand I'm like, but, but I need to always be super scientific and not ever let anybody see this side of me that could be interpreted as woo woo or pseudoscience or whatever. You know what I mean?

Yes, I do. And it's so clear to me being interviewed by you, which I so enjoyed. And we share an affinity for so many things that, that are, I guess you could say, controversial in the world. Whether it's health freedom or mask wearing or vaccination or what it actually means to be energetic from your core, without caffeine, without crazy supplements. You know, this concept of energy fatigue I think falls into both categories that you play in because for a spiritual man or a man who is following a path that is guided by something higher, and for a man that wants to deliver academic and scientific rigor without energy, we can't do any of it. Like, it's just straight up impossible to do any of that stuff. So there's some core fundamentals that you talk about in your work. And we're going to list out for people that are with us, watching, listening, if you're struggling with energy, like really struggling. I'm 40 years old. I've noticed that I'm going to be 41 here next month and I have a baby on the way. And I know you have children. So for parents, for men, for women that are, you know, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, this is when we really look at how we treated ourselves when we were in our 20s and I'm curious for you if you could pull the E brake and just look back on your life. When did it arise that you actually were destined to follow this path of being an energy and fatigue specialist? You know, this evidence based approach that you take with science and energy enhancement? Was there a certain moment when you look back and you're like, aha, that was the moment where things changed. I knew this was going to be my path. I knew I was going to heal myself, I knew I was going to help others.

Yeah, there's been a bunch of moments. I mean, I could talk to you for an hour about kind of the full story of how that came to be. But the very short version is I was a pre med in college and I was, I thought I wanted to be a doctor and I kind of, I looked up to guys in the natural health realm, you know, the Andrew Wales, the Dr. Mercolas and people like that who had the MD after their last name, or in Dr. Mercola's case, a DO, which is the equivalent, and were out there sort of educating on the flaws in conventional medicine and why the natural health paradigm is so superior for the vast majority of chronic illness. So I wanted to go do that. And I was pre med and I got into a prestigious medical school and then I absolutely just hated it. From like two weeks in. I was already like, geez, I despise right away. Yeah, I despise being here. This is just, this is painful. Like, I hate this. What am I going to do? Like, am I going to stick this out for four years? And then, yeah, I just fought with myself for so long and you know, I would have conversations with my, my older brother, who's my best buddy, and I would be on the phone with him. It's just four years, you know, it's just three and a half more years. It's just three more years. And you know, like every week I'm on the phone, I hate it here. I don't want to do this anymore, you know, And I went through just about two years. I went through the entire, basically the entire curriculum of medical school training prior to when they go to the rounds in the hospital for the second two years. And at a certain point my health just started to deteriorate really badly because I was super depressed and stressed and anxious all the time by having to devote basically every waking hour to this thing that I hated and that I felt was fundamentally flawed in many ways. What I mean by that is I was an unusual medical student because I had already Been studying natural health for almost 15 years at that point, nutrition and lifestyle and exercise. And I knew the power of it because I had already been working with people and I had seen how important it was. And I knew the science on lifestyle diseases, cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases, many types, most types of cancers, diabetes, and obesity. I understood the root causes of those diseases, whereas I was surrounded medical school with a sea of people who didn't know anything about that, who were being indoctrinated into a paradigm that, first of all, doesn't educate at all about anything related to nutrition and lifestyle. I mean, literally nothing. And while you have 80% plus of the chronic disease burden being the result of nutrition and lifestyle, you have medical school students literally receiving zero education on the causal factors of that 80% plus of the disease burden. So I'm there with that knowledge. I'm in the hospital, in the internal medicine ward, seeing patients with diabetes, seeing patients with cardiovascular disease who are on 10, 12, 15 different prescription drugs, who are being taught literally nothing about nutrition or lifestyle, about the causes of those conditions that they're in the hospital being treated for. And it blew my mind, and for me, was intolerable. I mean, it was toxic to be in that environment. And then you add to that that I'm sitting there and I'm like, kind of occasionally hinting, hey, guys, maybe we should do something to teach this person about nutrition instead of eating garbage, processed food that the hospital is giving them while not educating them. And I would get kind of, you know, nasty looks or comments from, you know, classmates or teachers that, you know, made it seem as if I was the crazy one. Right? So I'm here in what is kind of just a toxic, absurd environment that is so obviously flawed, and then I'm being looked at as the one who's the crazy one. Or, you know, why do you.

I'm. I'm so blown away because I've heard this so many times from so many. Both now, doctors, previous doctors, or even students that were medical doctors, students like yourself. What the hell is going on with this indoctrination of medical students? Like, what is that all about? People's intuition? Jiminy Cricket is chirping on their shoulder. You know it's happening. Why are they choosing to ignore that? You didn't choose to ignore it, and we're gonna learn more about that. But what the hell's going on where people are ignoring their own conscientiousness?

I mean, if I.

If you ask me, do. Do the. Did the other students in my class have that Sort of, as you describe it, a jiminy cricket on the shoulder saying things wrong here. I don't think they did. I mean, I literally think that the ignorance is so high that they don't even understand that there's something wrong with the environment that they're in. And you have to understand also that the. What's the right word for it? The authority factor of that environment of, you know, all these doctors with fancy letters after their name and, you know, they've been in School for 20 years receiving, you know, their MD, their PhD and doing all the residency and all these other fancy certifications. And if you are a typical medical student who, in general, you don't have any background in studying natural health or nutrition or anything like that, you go into that environment and you think, you perceive all of those people with their white coats and their fancy letters say, oh, these people know everything about the science of getting these people healthy.

It's almost a blind trust.

There is no other science that these doctors with their white coats and their fancy letters are unaware of. And so to even consider that there might be. Hey, there's. Not only is there some science that those doctors are unaware of, there's a massive body of scientific literature that they're entirely ignorant of that they literally know nothing about. And they're so profoundly ignorant of the science around how nutrition and lifestyle is causing those diseases that, I mean, it's just insane. And they can't see it. The medical school students can't see it. So I would say it's really not the situation you described. I would say it's much more a situation of just profound ignorance all around than it is a case of everybody ignoring their conscience.

It reminds me of, I'm here in Texas, and yesterday we were seeing the cattle, the longhorn cattle, the Texas. And they're branded. And honestly, this is what happens with education, is people get branded. They get imprinted with a hot cattle prod of, do not deny that we are the truth. Do not deny that we are the voice of medical. The voice of reason. And look, I'm not here to demonize anyone. The whole point of the Socratic method existing is that we constantly question the results from a scientific lens. That's the whole point of it all. So right now, it's like the biggest point that I want to lead towards people before we hear even more of how this unfolded for you, is how can people just not even enter the system? Because once people enter this system, they have a medical record locator. All their diseases are basically Popped pills at. And people are just put on this treadmill of chronic sick care, which is the voice of. It's the voice that is echoed on so many podcasts, but especially on this one from so many people. Gosh, it's almost like, how do we do everything in our power to either never enter the system or how do we get out of the system as quickly as humanly possible?

Yeah. You know, I've been writing script for a video that I want to film that I'm tentatively titing. Smart science versus dumb science. And I'll tell you a story actually, from when I was in medical school. This is part of the kind of experience that really just. I just could not tolerate. There was another student, and he was actually in the year above me, the class above my year, and he sent out an email to everybody in the school saying, hey, I'm conducting research on diabetes, and I'm looking for participants to come help me with this research that I'm doing to try to develop a drug to cure type 2 diabetes. And in exchange for you coming and volunteering to be a subject for this study and, you know, donating blood or whatever it was, I will give you a box of donuts as a thank you. And I mean, this is not. I'm not exaggerating. This actually happened. And it wasn't meant to be a joke. It wasn't ironic. It was a guy who was, by the way, obese, who was conducting research trying to cure diabetes while handing out donuts. I mean, it's almost unimaginable, the absurdity of this. And this is actually a real thing. Another example that I could give is, like, what? You know, Bill Gates is funding some research right now to combat global warming where they're looking at how to spray particulate in the atmosphere to block the sun, to block rays of the sun with the idea that that's going to combat global warming. I mean, to me, this. And on the one hand, you have a huge segment of the population that will look at something like this and go, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. This is like cutting edge science. Look how sophisticated they are that they can use this technology and spray this particulate in the atmosphere to block the sun, and this can combat this horrible problem of climate change. And I look at that and I think, this is idiotic. And this is like, typical human hubris that we think we can go meddle with nature and we have no conception. We don't even have, like, an inkling of how our meddling with nature leads to so many cascades of unintended consequences, second and third order consequences that we are not considering that very often are worse than the problem itself that we began with. And agriculture is another example of this. You have modern agriculture with monocrop farming, spraying tons of herbicides and pesticides and all their fancy machines and fancy technology. And you have a segment of the population, a large segment that will look at that and say, wow, look at all their science and fancy technology and all those chemicals that can manage the weeds and the pests. Isn't this amazing? And yet simultaneously, if you look at the bigger picture system of what's happening off that chunk of land, you realize all those chemicals are getting into the waterways and they're not only causing toxic effects on wildlife or they're causing animals to be extinct, but they're causing hormonal disruption effects. Where now animals have hypospadias or ambiguous genitalia, their sexual characteristics are not being developed properly. Now we're seeing articles in the media, actually just very recently in the New York Times and a couple other sources talking about those same effect in humans. We're seeing mass die offs and bleaching of coral reefs and disruption of ocean ecosystems which provide 50% of the oxygen that we breathe. And not to mention obviously how those chemical residues affect human health when we consume those foods. But you just see layers and layers and layers of unintended consequences, while simultaneously a huge chunk of the population will look at what's being done and say, wow, I'm so impressed with how scientifically sophisticated they are and technologically sophisticated they are. This is amazing science, but it's actually very stupid science. And what seems to be way more primitive, something like permaculture, regenerative agriculture, where instead of using chemical fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides, you're working with nature to mimic nature to replenish minerals in the soil, to maintain the topsoil, to keep the right microbial balance in that soil so it naturally fends off pests and the diversity of plants so that you keep pests a day and so on and so forth. You can do all of those things in a way that leads to food abundance and doesn't create any of those unintended side effects on the entire world and all of the animal and plant life and ocean ecosystems that conventional agriculture is doing, while simultaneously that first segment of the population that was very impressed with the science of big agriculture would look at that method I just described and say, oh, that's so primitive. You don't Use all those chemicals and fancy machines and technology. Right. So there's a real issue here of perception and not being in the right paradigm. And I would say to tie this into health, you have to understand that a lot of what takes place in the realm of science is very stupid. Science based on human hubris that thinks humans are smarter than nature and that with our technology and our chemicals, we can do better than nature and chemicals, not just herbicides and pesticides, but pharmaceuticals, drugs. There's another paradigm, and it's a completely different kind of thinking that has nothing in common with the first time. And instead of that paradigm, it's basically, hey, we have respect for nature, human beings as part of nature, and we are going to do everything we can to mimic nature, to support nature and to optimize, to understand and optimize the natural systems of the human body and of nature more broadly. So what does that mean in terms of how you approach human health? Well, instead of looking at, it's literally the difference between looking at a disease like diabetes or neurological disease and saying, how can we study what biochemical pathway is causing this disease? And then how can we develop a drug that interrupts that biochemical pathway and therefore will cure this disease? Which is a paradigm that almost never works to actually cure diseases. 97% of drugs that have ever been invented are non curative. They can only address symptoms at best. Versus a paradigm that says how can we understand the big picture of what are the root causes of that that led to the development of that condition in the first place and address those causes at the root cause level, while also understanding that the human body has an innate capacity for self regeneration and self healing and how can we give the right inputs to allow the body to express its innate capacity for self regeneration? These are fundamentally different ways of thinking. And if somebody's goal is to actually be healthy and energetic and live a long life and not be one of those people I described before who's got various all kinds of diseases and symptoms and you're on 12 or 15 different prescription drugs in and out of the hospital with terrible quality of life. If you actually want health and energy and longevity, the goal is optimize the body's innate capacity for healing and self regeneration.

Let's just pause right there because, wow, there's a lot to unpack with what you just shared. And the biggest thing that hit me was the transition of this allopathic model where it's like symptom chasing, what band aid can I put on it? What pill can I Swallow versus a holistic lens of, like you said, supporting the system so that our natural check and balances that give us homeostasis can actually breathe and thrive. And that is a massive disconnect from, I guess you could say, the clinical model, the ivory towers of the ama, even the dental association. I mean, anything at all that's related to health. There are systems that have decades and decades of investment and buy in. It's almost like, have you ever in your life been in a relationship that wasn't working out and you held on too long and you look back and you go, wow, I could have broken up with that person two years ago. But we just stay on because we invest so much into it. And I feel like we're about to break up as a society from the traditional model. And the only way we break up is when we get really exposed to the ideas you're bringing to Wellness Force today, where we can really digest them. So in your own journey, for you, did you hit a rock bottom where you were like, cool, I'm done with allopathic. I will, from this moment on, always focus on supporting my own homeostasis. And how did that transition into you being a voice for that, for your community?

Well, I left medical school. That was the hardest decision of my life for sure. And it was very painful. And I had all kinds of feelings like, oh, I'm disappointing my parents. What are people going to think of me if they're going to assume I flunked out or something like that?

That's a big dragon. What are people going to think of me? Dragon. Oh, my go. That's a big one for so many of us.

So, yeah, I was in a deep, dark depression for a couple of years after that. And health was always my passion since I was a little kid. And I was obsessively studying health science since I was 12, 13 years old. So I always knew that that was my thing. And it took a while to figure out and also to gain the confidence to just be like, okay, I don't need that md. I can go teach people without those letters after my name and do my thing. And that was a thing. Like, you know, then there was all these other dragons of like, what if I don't have that md, then people won't listen to me and, you know, nobody's gonna take me seriously and, you know, all those kinds of things. And so, yeah, it took me a long time to just find my confidence and be able to start writing books and to start making programs and to start teaching people. And then as the feedback rolled in and I got to see how much I was helping people and how much my voice counted and how much I was able to help people who weren't able to be helped by the conventional medical system. Naturally you gain confidence and then you become a better and better teacher. And of course, I've learned a lot and grown a lot since then as well.

The training model My background was in health and fitness, so I worked in 10 years on training room floors. So like 10,000 plus hours with clients. And the biggest piece I got about working with people in a training perspective was it wasn't necessarily about me making them have the perfect form or have them do drop sets or exhaust them. It was about how much emotional space, how much understanding and compassion and how can I keep the conversation going, which is really like what podcasting is. It's a genuine curiosity for the well being of the guest and the people that are here. And so do you look back on your career? Were you ever a trainer? Did you work in that capacity? If so, like, how did that morph into what you do now?

Yeah, after I left medical school, I was a trainer for several years and then I went into a PhD program in clinical psychology and I did all three years of coursework for that PhD program and then realized I didn't really want to be a therapist, A talk therapist.

You left again from something you didn't believe in?

I left again, but I completed all the coursework for it. What I didn't complete was all the internship hours that I would have had to do. And it would have been years, several years of basically like unpaid internship.

What did you see in that model that wasn't gelling with you? Was there something about the psychological clinical model from an academic perspective that wasn't working?

Well, actually the biggest thing that influenced that was when I did my first psychedelic journey when I was in that PhD program. And after that journey. Well, let me give a bit of context. When you're in that PhD program, you're required to go through personal therapy. So you have to get a psychotherapist and be doing sessions with a psychotherapist on your own as part of just you understanding what that profession is all about, in addition to the courses that you're taking. So I was in seeing a therapist for a year or something like that. And then I did my first psychedelic journey, which is something that we talked a bit about on podcast on my show where I interviewed you. And that absolutely just rocked my world where I was like, I Mean, it was orders of magnitude beyond anything that I could have even conceptualized was possible for a human being to experience. And it was. It created such a profound shift for me because in the few years prior to that, I was in a. I was in a severe depression from leaving medical school also. This coincided with dysfunctional relationship I had with a girl that I became very obsessed with. And it was a toxic relationship. And I was very depressed about that whole thing, and all my mental energy was being consumed by that thing. And I was doing therapy. I was talking about it for a year, and then I went and did plant medicine. And it, in the span of one night, completely lifted my depression and completely changed my life. And, I mean, it felt like the equivalent of 100,000 hours of psychotherapy in one night. And I don't even think that's an exaggeration. I think that's like a pretty legitimate comparison. And that experience made me go, what the hell am I doing studying to be a talk therapist? When something. When there's a tool like this that is available. And I do think there's a place for talk therapy. I don't want to bash the whole profession or something like that. And it's obviously the case that not every psychological illness is conducive to being treated by psychedelics or something.

Sure. Plant medicine is not for everyone.

Yeah, most definitely. And there's even certain illnesses or certain psychological issues where psychedelics can actually exacerbate it.

Absolutely.

But for me, that experience really shifted my focus, and that was part of what changed the course for me. And then the combination of just studying nutrition and natural health since I was a little kid, basically, it all got merged into one. And I basically just said, you know what? I don't want to be shoved into the box of any one particular predefined profession. Like, one of the things that influenced it was I discovered that if I go get my license as a psychotherapist, I cannot practice nutrition because then I can have my license revoked for basically practicing outside of the scope of what I'm licensed to do. So what I realized, and this was part of why I didn't pursue it further, is I'm actually, by doing all the years of internship and getting this licensure, I'm actually now limited from practicing all this other stuff that I've been studying for over a decade. And so I basically realized, hey, by not doing that, I actually have more freedom.

Yes.

So I basically just said, I'm going to teach people about health my way. I've Been studying this for, at that point, 15 plus years, and I know a lot. I'm going to start writing books and training people and coaching people and doing programs and teaching people about health. My way.

Yeah, and your way. It's almost like Bing Crosby, I think it was. I Did It My Way. That's the song that I'm hearing in the background because, gosh, so many people are sold the golden ticket of if I have the certificate, if I have the degree in medicine, if I have the psychiatry degree, I have in my training career and even now in my life. I never graduated formal college. The whole thing just turned me off. It was like I went into it and then I was dealing with my own things in life that I was healing from and recovering from. And I saw so many people, Ari, that were in positions of power in these different entities, and their relationships were terrible, their physical health was terrible, their emotional health. They weren't connected to themselves. But what was the message that plant medicine gave you that finally allowed you to rip the band aid off and say, like, this wasn't for me. Was it a subtle message? Was it a loud, clanging message?

My first journey with 5 Meo DMT was really all about. It was all about death. And as I talked to you about previously, I had the experience, what was an extremely terrifying experience of. Of watching myself suffocate to death. And I was absolutely convinced that I was. That it was. I was actually suffocating to death. And I. I mean, I was literally telling the guy to call an ambulance because I'm suffocating to death.

And I was like, plant medicine is not for.

Everyone was convinced that I was having an allergic reaction to it. Guy came over to me and he closes my eyes and puts his hand on my chest and he goes, just go with it. I'm like, screw you, go with it.

Like, I'm dying, dude.

Like, you need to call an ambulance. And then I'm fighting with myself and thinking, oh, maybe this is supposed to happen. Maybe everybody experiences this. No, you are obviously feeling you're suffocating to death. You can feel this. This is real. Like, you need to fight back. No, but maybe I should trust it. I'm fighting myself and eventually I go with it. And then I won't go into all the details, but it became an absolutely ecstatic, revelatory experience. Once I surrendered into dying and I let myself die, the boundaries of my body exploded and I was transported into an entirely different realm, a different kind of consciousness that was totally detached from my individual egoic. Consciousness, me as Ari Witten as this personality.

So it was literally like being transported into what I can only describe as God consciousness. Consciousness, where it was looking down. I was like looking down from that state on my own sort of lifeless body there with all my attachments and all my fears and anxieties and all these things that I was so caught up in that it had made me so depressed for the previous two, three years. And it was like laughing at all of it. I got to experience how small that was in the grand scheme of everything and how silly it was for me to be wasting so much time and energy being caught up in all of this nonsense. And it was like, what are you doing wasting all your life and all of your energy. You could be doing something productive and worthwhile. And so anyway, that first experience really shifted my whole world. Got me out of that depression and then allowed me to start working on stuff. And I started creating programs, I started writing. And then I struggled. I was still going through my PhD program at that point, and I was really struggling with. I felt like it wasn't the right path for me to become a talk therapist.

But I was like, well, I already.

Left medical school and didn't complete that and become a doctor. Now I have to go be a clinical psychologist. I can't leave this one and not bring this one to completion as well. And so I felt so much pressure to do that for that reason. And yet I knew that that wasn't the right path for me. And so I did another session.

That.

Really helped me get clarity on that.

What year was that? Do you remember the year?

Maybe 2009?

I want to say, yeah, so over 10 years ago, really, to bring this to fruition. And the Internet at that time was a very different place. I mean, 2009, 2010, 2011, YouTube, Facebook, they were just coming online. It's so funny to look back and be like, in 10 years, the entire world shifted massively how we do everything. And being an entrepreneur, especially with what you do, there's so much, I guess you could say competition. But if you're operating from the place you're operating from, which is, I'm going to go ahead and take this one lane of giving people the most beautiful, harmonious. That's the key. Like being in harmony with oneself, with their homeostatic mechanisms, and also with their mind, I'm going to give people the best energy possible. Was it because you went through that journey yourself? Is that really the prime motivation? Or what is it about the energy blueprint or Energy in general, that is such the magical quotient for really health, vitality and wellness as a whole.

Yeah.

Well, in that next journey, I got a very clear message. And it was the famous Joseph Campbell line, follow your bliss. And that resolved all my struggle. And it was like, okay, you don't.

Need to worry about what society is.

Pressuring you to do. Follow your bliss. And what my bliss was, was very obvious to me. It was teaching people about natural health, the full scope of that, nutrition, lifestyle, psychology, spirituality, all of it. And that was the message that allowed me to separate from all of society's pressures and what will so and so think of me. And what if. What if I don't have these fancy letters after my name? And it was just like, no, nope, I'm going to do things my way. And I'm going to take all of this knowledge that I've acquired from so many years and teach it to the world in the way that I want to do it.

That's a profound moment, isn't it, where you finally are like, oh, I found the cave. It's going to be the one that I'm fearing most to enter, which is another Campbell mythology quote. And I think about the cave for most entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, like anyone that wants to live their life by their own terms, it's not easy. You meet a lot of resistance. I can only imagine the late nights you've had at the computer. Once you have the revelation that your bliss points this way. It's not exactly always the easiest thing. Just because you're going towards your bliss doesn't mean that you're going to meet no resistance. What was one of the biggest resistances that you found in growing the energy blueprint? The community, really the global community, that at the time, maybe it felt like it wasn't your bliss, but then later, looking back, you're like, okay, that happened for a reason.

Well, one of the biggest areas of resistance is it takes a lot of courage, as you know, to put yourself out there and to put novel ideas out there and say, to stand up and say, hey, I've got the solution. My solution for this is better than what else is out there. And to write a book and say, here's my solution. And to fill that book with novel ideas that are uniquely your own. It takes a lot of courage because you're putting yourself out there in a way where every random person, every random stranger can go tear it down, and every random idiot who might not even read the damn thing, who might just read the COVID of it and make assumptions and go on Amazon and write a one star review saying, ha ha, this guy's an idiot. Because da da, da da. He thinks that this, this and this.

I don't like his shirt, it's too white.

And as my wife will tell you, I had many, many nights where I was very disturbed over getting a one star review on my first book or something like that. And not be like, no, I'd be just furious. Like, this guy didn't even read it. It's not even a verified purchase. He didn't even buy the damn thing. He didn't read it. He just made assumptions and then attacked me and wrote this nasty thing. And I would get very disturbed about that. And you know what? That's a huge thing. So like recently in the last few years, I've been mentoring my brother to start an online business. There was so much resistance to do it. He's a doctor of chiropractic and he's been a clinician. He's got world class knowledge, he's amazingly skilled. He's brilliant at what he does. And he was so scared to start putting out content, to put out videos online on a YouTube channel telling people how to do things, to put out written content or books and things like that. Because it was like, what if these people attack me because I'm putting out these novel ideas? What if those people attack me?

What if people say this, what if people say that?

And there's so much resistance because of fear of being attacked for putting out new ideas that I would imagine a huge portion of people, maybe the vast majority of people, never even do it, never overcome that resistance to actually put something out there because they're so afraid of being criticized or embarrassed or humiliated. So for me, that was a big thing that I had to overcome. And I had to just get used to the fact that, hey, there are trolls and there are idiots out there. And no matter, you know, you can read all the great works of literature, go on Amazon and look at any, any great work of literature and there's some portion of people, 1%, 2% of people who are on there writing nasty, negative, one star reviews. And that's just the way it is. And it took me a long time to get used to the fact that I would have anybody attacking me and normalize to that, but I'm so glad I did because it's been just a beautiful, beautiful journey ever since then.

And there's so many people that are hearing you speak and they're visualizing your story. Like, some people have written to me, and they're like, josh, I listen to Wellness Force with my eyes closed so I can see the pictures. This is why I love podcasting. But also, we're here on video. And you can see in Ari's eyes, this is a genuine human being. Like, you have not had this linear path. You weren't gifted, like, 500,000 bucks by some trust fund. And no offense to people that have that. I would love to have that. I'd be. No judgment. No judgment if that happens to you. But your path came from your own, really, in a way, suffering and transmuting that suffering into having it be of service for other people. I don't care if it's like John Wineland or Jordan Peterson or many of the ancient masters, they're all saying the same thing. The wound is actually the place where you serve from. But you have to have the wisdom so that you're not projecting any of your wounds that are clouding your wisdom. And I get that from you. Like, so what is the essence of your wisdom? What is the essence of your wisdom that you really share when it comes to fatigue and burnout and energy? Is there an overarching sentence that that wisdom is encapsulated with, or is it much more nuanced?

Look inward, both literally and metaphorically, because the source of energy is your own body cells. It's not stimulant pills that you take externally or this prescription drug or that prescription drug. It's how do you build more energy.

At the cellular level?

How do you create and cultivate a body that is capable of producing more energy? That's what it's all about. And to tie that in with almost the last. One of the big reasons that I went specifically down this journey of the energy blueprint was I started to look. Well, I had my own personal fatigue experience in my mid-20s. I had Epstein Barr virus mononucleosis, and it wiped me out pretty good. And for many, many months, I had severe, debilitating fatigue. And that, for me, an athlete, a fitness guy, my whole life, I always took energy for granted. And that was something that kind of rocked my world and made me go, whoa, when you don't have energy, your life kind of goes to shit and your relationships fall apart, your job, you can't do your job properly, Everything just falls apart. And so I became uniquely fascinated with the science around energy. And then what happened from there is I spent a couple years exploring.

What.

Natural health has to offer. And natural health's always been my Jam. And I've followed a lot of the same guys that you followed. One of my mentors, the guys that I really admired and learned from when I was a teenager was Paul Cech. I know you know, Paul had some.

The brother repeat. He's probably had 12 hours of time on Wellness Force.

Yeah.

So I've been following natural health since I was a little kid and reading guys like that and many others. But what was interesting to me is as I started to dig into what the natural health guys were talking about when it comes to energy optimization, there was this whole paradigm of adrenal fatigue. And everybody, including Paul and many others, everybody was like, oh yeah, chronic stress just wears out your adrenals and then you get low cortisol and that's the cause of fatigue. And I was an avid believer in that for many years. I assumed it was all true and backed by good science. And I had an interesting, I would say experience, but it was prolonged over more than a year of digging into the scientific literature obsessively around that and trying actually intentionally to find scientific support for it. Because I was really irked that conventional medicine brushed off the whole adrenal fatigue thing as nonsense. So I was like, I'm going to prove that it's a real thing. And I went into the science and found every possible study that I could find related to that topic, which was, I won't go into all the details of why, but was a very difficult undertaking to find all of those studies. And basically what I found at the.

End of it is that I was.

Wrong and that all the people talking about adrenal fatigue were wrong and that the science doesn't support it at all. And then I discovered also that conventional medicine, when I looked into what they are offering to people with fatigue, basically they have even less of a clue. They're basically just like, we don't really know what causes fatigue, but here's our best four treatments. And this is from an evidence based guidelines published for physicians on how to treat fatigue.

According.

That's supposedly evidence based. It's called fatigue. An overview is published in the American Journal of Family Physicians. Basically the four treatments that they have for fatigue are antidepressants, cognitive behavioral therapy, a recommendation to go for a walk for 30 minutes a day and to use stimulants as needed.

Damn. So no sleep. No sleep hygiene, no emotional intelligence, no conscious relating, no nutrition, no water or water quality.

Exactly, yeah.

Can I pull the E brake on you? Because you mentioned you found that the natural perspective of the, I guess you could say Addison's disease or adrenal fatigue. You found that it wasn't true. Can you elaborate on that?

Sure.

Well, first of all, we shouldn't conflate Addison's disease with adrenal fatigue. Addison's disease is a real thing, but it's also an extremely rare thing and it has basically nothing to do with the vast majority of stress related exhaustion and burnout. So stress related exhaustion and stress related fatigue or burnout is a real thing. The problem with the adrenal fatigue story is the claim that that is caused by chronic stress taxing the adrenal gland, leading to low cortisol issues. And that's the cause of fatigue.

That's not the case.

And the reason I say this definitively is because I reviewed literally every study in existence, which is about 79 studies that have been done over almost 30 years, every study in existence that has tested the relationship between cortisol levels and HPA axis function, hypothalamic pituitary adrenal function and fatigue or stress related exhaustion or chronic fatigue syndrome. They go by many different names. That's why when I said before that it was hard to find all of those studies. It's because there's zero studies in existence on adrenal fatigue. There's lots of studies that have examined HPA axis function in relationship to lots of other kinds of syndromes that are synonymous with stress related exhaustion or chronic fatigue of various kinds of. And digging all of those up took a very, very long time because I literally had to discover what terminology they're using. And it was a very long process, over a year of work. And basically I compiled all of those studies, I put them in a big, long document, and it was basically a book that I had written on that subject. You look at every single study and at a certain point I just said, you know what, I'm just going to add all these up. I'm just going to count the number of studies that had this result or that result and then see what those numbers look like. Basically, the end result of it is there was 59 individual studies. There was 20 systematic reviews on individual topics. This is where researchers look at.

A.

Handful or a dozen or two dozen studies on a specific topic like HPA axis function, specifically in clinical burnout or specifically in chronic fatigue syndrome. I looked at everything across the board, all the different fatigue syndromes, and Basically of those 59 individual studies, what it looked like was 15 of them found evidence of slightly lower cortisol levels in people with the stress related Exhaustion or burnout or chronic fatigue syndrome compared to healthy controls.

Salivary or blood? Does that matter? Salivary or blood for cortisol?

Salivary is accurate and there was some variation in the types of test methodology that each of those studies used. And that's why I just said let's look at all of them and include all of them. But I would say the vast majority use salivary. Probably 90% of them use salivary. Basically. 15 of 59 said there's evidence of slightly lower cortisol levels in people with these fatigue syndromes and not even abnormal levels we're talking about. It might just be 10% or 15% lower, but still within the normal range. Eleven of the 59 found the exact opposite, finding slightly higher cortisol levels in the people with the fatigue syndromes relative to healthy controls. And then 33 of 59 found zero pattern at all, zero correlation between any change in cortisol levels in the people with fatigue syndromes. It might be severe full blown chronic fatigue syndrome or clinical burnout syndrome versus healthy controls. When you have a body of evidence like that, what that means is there is absolutely, it is fundamentally incorrect from a scientific perspective to say, hey, we know the primary cause of fatigue and stress related exhaustion. It's your adrenals aren't putting out enough cortisol. Cortisol. That is absolutely wrong based on the scientific evidence that we have.

Can I challenge you on this? Because I learned from Reid, from fdn, Reid Davis, and he talked about the pregnenolone steel, which is the master hormone in the tree. Is that out the window right now?

I've been through the FDN course, by the way, so I'm familiar with how he thinks about it. I would basically say he's just, he's flat out wrong. Now is it possible to have HPA axis abnormalities or low cortisol or low morning cortisol or dysregulated cortisol? Absolutely, that is a real thing. But it is fundamentally wrong to claim that adrenal fatigue is the cause or the primary cause or even a common cause of fatigue. It's also fundamentally wrong to claim that adrenal fatigue, the chronic stress leading to low cortisol levels, is a real thing. That is also incorrect. So and the reason I say that is because one of the other layers of analysis that I did is I looked at all of the studies on various kinds of stressors. So psychological stress, different kinds of psychological stress, chronic stress from being overtaxed with work and working a job you hate, chronic Stress from the opposite unemployment, chronic stress from relationship stress, chronic stress from financial stress, metabolic stressors like chronic cigarette smoking or alcohol consumption, chronic over exercise over training syndrome. There are studies on all of those in relationship to cortisol levels. Is there any indication from any of that research that any of those stressors are reliably linked with low cortisol levels? The answer is no. You can be exposed to those stressors for years or decades and never get low cortisol levels. There's no predictable relationship whatsoever. So, for example, just on overtraining syndrome, there was a 2017 systematic review that looked at cortisol levels in relationship to overtraining from exercise. Four of the six studies found zero relationship between cortisol and overtraining syndrome versus healthy athletes without overtraining syndrome. And then of the other two, one found slightly higher, one found slightly lower. There's no pattern here.

So, basically.

But again, HPA axis dysfunction is a real thing, and it is possible to have dysregulated cortisol. Let me give you an example of one of the most common causes of it. Extremely common cause of it that almost without exception, people who believe in adrenal fatigue are entirely unaware of. And that is being a night owl chronotype. So just the one factor of going to bed late at night, you go to bed at midnight or 1 or 2am instead of 10pm?

Yes.

That one factor alone will dramatically alter cortisol levels. And there's numerous studies on this. And by the way, I'm talking about healthy people, people without fatigue or without symptoms. I'm talking about if you take a group of healthy people who are either morning people or night owls, and you look at their cortisol levels and you chart it, those night owls, on average will have cortisol levels that would get them diagnosed by someone who believes in adrenal fatigue as having adrenal fatigue. Okay, they would say adrenal fatigue. Practitioner would say, oh, my gosh, your cortisol levels are tanked. Clearly, you've had chronic stress that has been taxing your adrenal glands, and now you have adrenal fatigue, when in fact that's not at all what's going on. It's just a function of being a night owl chronotype. That's one factor. But circadian rhythm and sleep dysregulation across the board is the single most common reason for HPA axis dysfunction. There are a few other reasons. There are prescription drugs that can affect it. There are psychological factors that can affect it. There are toxins that can interfere with enzymes that are involved in cortisol synthesis, oxidative stress, chronic exposure to mycotoxins and inflammatory cytokines being at a high level can contribute to cortisol abnormalities. There's a variety of other things, but there is no case to be made for adrenal fatigue being a real thing. And there's certainly no case for it to be made that it's a primary cause or common cause of, of fatigue.

I'm curious though, because when we look at the gas model, you know, the Hans Selye where it's like you have the alarm, you have the resistance, you have the exhaustion. I talk about this in the Breathe Breath and Wellness program because in my research, when I started to really understand the vagus nerve and the ANS and how it innervates into the enteric nervous system and what's really going on, as if we're all connected, because we are. I mean, there's more things inside of our body from a cellular level than there are stars in the sky. We're pretty damn complicated. So I agree with, like, if we try to reductionize science and be like, oh, it's adrenal fatigue, it doesn't always have that kind of a clear cut answer. But I'm really curious from your perspective, all your research, all your experience, like, how do you contrast Cellier's work where there is an alarm phase, there is a reaction phase, and there is this phase where, let's be honest, people flatline. Don't you think in that flatline, the last step of the gas model, they are in a lower cortisol or are they in an elevated cortisol? How do you apply the gas model to adrenal fatigue?

There are a number of ways that Celia's work is outdated and just not accurate. But one of the, I would say the core mistakes is if you take animals, let's say you take a bunch of rats or dogs, you stick them in a little cage and you just shock them repeatedly at random. The floor shocks them and they've got no way to escape.

You get certain phenomenons that reliably arise from that, like learned helplessness. And if you were to do that for days and weeks on end, you would almost certainly see some kind of hormonal changes, probably in lots of different hormones, not just cortisol, but many different things would change. And if you could measure, let's say you could do a full metabolomics panel that could measure the full array of hundreds of biomarkers in that system, you would find not only did cortisol and 10 other hormones change, but probably hundreds of biomarkers were altered by that. It would be wrong to single out any one of those biomarkers and say, this is the reason that that dog has just laid down and whines all day and has given up on life and is super depressed and is whining in pain and sadness all the time.

Right?

So I think there's a reductionistic component here that's very flawed. But I also think that there's a component of that dog being trapped in a little cage, being shocked at random without any way to escape for days and weeks on end is not analogous to a human living in real life. And whatever hormonal changes that that dog incurs while being tortured for several days or weeks is not what happens to humans while living in the real human world for decades. It's probably analogous to what a prisoner of war experiences when trapped by the enemy and being tortured for several days or weeks, but it's not analogous to what humans have experience. And the fact, I have no doubt that a prisoner of war, chained up with his hands tied behind his back, being tortured and waterboarded and whatever else by the enemy that's captured him would create a very different hormonal response than athletes who are engaged in over training or people who are slightly overstressed from.

Well, their amygdala is not as hijacked. I mean, if you're getting tortured by the enemy, you're in full primal mode. I mean, there's like hard wiring, forget about hormone cascades. There's like circuitry that's just being pushed. So I want to go back to this because, like, I love learning and I really respect your work. So how do we even apply the gas model? Or do you just not use it anymore? What is so outdated about Selye's work?

You know, it's been a while since I looked at it, but I know that Robert Sapolsky had some really nice criticisms in his book.

Which one?

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcer. I think he also talked about it in Behave.

Basically. Why?

You know what is outdated about Selye's model? Off the top of my head, I couldn't necessarily tell you beyond what I just told you, but I know that the hormonal. The hormonal aspects of things simply don't follow that trajectory with chronic stressors. And I already told you and I've actually got an article on my site. So looking at here's all the literature on Chronic stress from unemployment, chronic stress from relationship stress, chronic stress from cigarette smoking, from alcohol consumption, from over training, and whatever other stressors, forms of psychological or physical stressors, none of them are reliably linked with any period of cortisol tanking. It doesn't happen. So you can also look at overt diseases. So like from this model where we interpret total allostatics load on the body. You familiar with that term?

Sure.

Like total body stress load. So everything from psychological stress to spiritual stressors to metabolic stressors, toxins, everything could be lumped under this category of total body stress load. And you could look at people with overt diseases, people who unquestionably have had way too much total body stress load from poor nutrition and other poor lifestyle habits for many years or decades. So people who get diseases of lifestyle like type 2 diabetes and obesity and cardiovascular disease and so on. And there are studies on those, those people and what their cortisol levels look like. You would think if somebody has had super high total body stress load, which those people have undoubtedly had for many, many years or decades, that have led to the actual overt emergence of those diseases that are from too high of total body stress load from bad nutrition and lifestyle factors, that those people, of course, would have low cortisol. That would be a basic prediction of this model. They don't, they don't have low cortisol. If anything, on average they have slightly higher levels of cortisol compared to healthy, normal people.

So those glands don't fatigue those adrenal glands. Literally, you can beat them up for decades and they will still pump out everything they need to.

Yes, that's correct. The exceptions are autoimmune diseases, Addison's disease, where you get an autoimmune destruction of the adrenal gland. And that's one exception. The other exception is there are specific.

Markers to test for Addison's to rule out just general fatigue. Or as you would say, the adrenal fatigue model that you're saying from your research has been proved to be false.

Correct.

So the way that you test it is via acth. ACTH is the hormone that is released from the pituitary gland that goes to the, to the adrenal glands to tell it to secrete cortisol. So what you see in Addison's disease is a pattern of very high levels of ACTH and very low levels of cortisol. And what that's telling you is there's nothing wrong in the brain, in the pituitary, the hypothalamus and pituitary are working fine. They're detecting that there's very low cortisol levels in the system and they're pumping out tons of acth, basically, so screaming at the adrenal glands, we need more cortisol, we need more cortisol. And the adrenal glands are literally incapable of producing that cortisol because there's autoimmune destruction of the gland itself. So high levels of acth, low levels of cortisol, that's the signature of Addison's disease. There's also another kind, which is a hypothalamic problem, but hypothalamic, I should say. But most of the time, high acth, low cortisol. But what you see in people with stress related exhaustion is not that stress related fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome. You do not see a pattern of high ACTH and low cortisol. First of all, you don't even see low cortisol in the vast majority of those people. Second of all, you don't see high acth, you see normal acth. So there is no detection of the brain going on that's saying we have too low of cortisol, we need more cortisol. And then no sign of the adrenaline adrenals not being able to produce enough cortisol like the brain is telling them. There's also a number of those studies where they do challenge tests. They inject ACTH or they inject crh, which is the hormone that goes from the hypothalamus to the pituitary. And they see, they test if the adrenals are capable of responding, which is a very direct and elegant way to test are the adrenals capable of responding, of producing enough cortisol. And what they find in those studies is the adrenals absolutely are capable of producing enough cortisol. So unless you have.

Let me interrupt you there because you just delivered so much and it's very challenging to many of the guests we've had on. So I want to give you this space. If cortisol's not the determining factor of burnout or fatigue, what markers are? Right. I know you were closing in the loop there, but I just wanted to plant that for people that are with us here because we've covered a lot of psychosomatic, even spiritual, and you talked about the allostatic load, which is all stressors of every type. I think people that are listening and watching with us, they're like, okay, what do I do now? Now that I know Ari's background, I know his heart, I know his Soul. I know his academic perspective. That's very challenging to the alternative world, which honestly, I'm going to have to do some research when we're done because I'm like, wow, you're really igniting my curiosity here. But what are the markers then? If cortisol's not the golden gauntlet, then what is?

Yeah, good question. Well, first, I want to put something in a way that I think people will get. Let's just take. Because people are very attached to this whole adrenal fatigue theory and needing to be cortisol and the adrenals to be the thing. There's so much years, decades of people investing their energy in that.

It kind of reminds me of earlier when we were talking about how many people are vested in the AMA model. It's almost like the alternative world is vested in this, this cortisol adrenal fatigue model. What's the real truth?

Yeah, I will also say, and I don't want to lose my humility factor here, but I will say that no one, literally no one, has explored the scientific literature on the subject of cortisol and HPA axis function in relationship to fatigue syndromes like I have. There is no other analysis in existence that even comes close to what I've done. And I've published mine online for free. And you can see literally every study going back to like 1995, 1994, something like that, through 2019, every study that's ever been done anywhere in the world on that topic. Here's the conclusion from that study. Here's the screenshot of cortisol levels in people with the fatigue syndrome versus healthy controls. Look at those studies, look at those results. If the adrenal fatigue theory is true, I would challenge everybody who believes in that. If the adrenal fatigue theory is true, how could there be 50 plus studies? Every study that has ever been done, basically virtually every study has failed to support it. Basically what I'm saying is for anybody who has a commitment to following the scientific data, there is no case for it. And that's why there are studies, 2006 Scientific Systematic Review titled adrenal fatigue does not exist. Because they reviewed a lot of the same studies I did and they came to the same obvious conclusion. What is the only conclusion if you're committed to following the evidence? And there's. I forget the name of this particular endocrinological society, but it's something endocrinological society. These are doctors who specialize in studying hormones. Cortisol is a hormone. And they said something like this is almost a direct quote. There is no scientific evidence to support the notion that chronic stress wears out the adrenal glands and leads to low cortisol and many common symptoms. The evidence doesn't support it at all.

All right, you got to tell us the markers now. You got to give us the real stress markers.

I just wanted to give an analogy. So like, let's. Since people have so much energy invested in that, especially clinicians who have been claiming to diagnose people with adrenal fatigue, they swear adrenal fatigue is a real thing. I see it in my patients and I diagnose people with it and I give them these adrenal formulas. We could talk about that, which is.

A whole other issue.

But just imagine that I made a claim that, hey, all migraines are caused.

By.

I don't know, too low of thyroid levels. There's just too low of thyroid hormones, and that's the cause of migraines. Then you went and you looked at all the studies that had looked at people with migraines that had measured their thyroid levels, and you found, hey, look, 99% of these studies show that people with migraines have normal thyroid levels that are indistinguishable from healthy controls. Does my theory that migraines are caused by low thyroid levels have validity or not?

Well, I would say no, but you can find any evidence anywhere to support any theory.

Well, that's why you have to look at everything. Yes, you have to look at the full body of literature. And if the studies have tested it and there doesn't exist other studies that have, if somebody's not cherry picking, if there doesn't exist another similar sized body of research or better research that has found the opposite conclusion, then you have your answer. If the studies are valid and well designed, and there's lots of studies and they're all consistently pointing in one direction, there is no argument against that position. That's just what is anyway, the markers that can test it. There are good markers, actually, that will reliably identify chronic fatigue syndrome.

That was very anticlimactic. Ari, we were waiting for five minutes and you're telling us there's no specific markers.

So there's a brilliant researcher who runs a lab for mitochondrial medicine at UCSD named Dr. Robert Navio. I'm privileged to have spent some time with him in person, gotten some personal lessons from him. Absolutely brilliant guy. And he's done some groundbreaking research. I think he's one of probably the most brilliant person in medicine, at least one of them in the last 50 or 100 years. One of them is called the cell danger response. And it talks about how mitochondria are not just these mindless energy generators, but are critical hubs for sensing what's going on in the environment. They're not just energy generators, they're environmental sensors and they have essentially two modes and they regulate energy production at the cellular level. Depending on the signals that they're getting from the environment, they'll either be more in energy mode, which he calls peacetime metabolism, which is basically like, hey, we're safe, we're good, we're in a healthy, peaceful environment. Let's pump out lots of energy. And the other side of that is, hey, we're detecting the presence of threats here. And those threats could be anything. They could be poor nutrition leading to high inflammatory cytokines.

Mitochondria has to be self created from the mind, where the mind could convince the mitochondria that there's a threat even if there's a threat.

Indeed, there's a field called mitochondrial psychobiology. And a researcher named Dr. Martine Picard, who I've actually had on my show, who has done experiments talking about how mental stress can lead to alterations in mitochondrial function within a matter of seconds. And obviously toxins. We know that many types of toxins, heavy metals and many other types of toxins, have direct toxic effects on mitochondria and so on and so forth. So the mitochondria can sense those signals from the environment and basically go, hey, we're under attack. Let's turn down energy production and devote energy and resources towards fending off this threat. Another example of this is infections. What's one of the most common symptoms of having a flu or a cold or coronavirus fatigue? Is it because chronic stress wore out your adrenal glands and you've got below cortisol? Or is that fatigue likely caused by something else? The primary sources that regulate our energy.

Levels.

Are our mitochondria and our brain. There's also something called sickness behavior, and that is how inflammatory cytokines or toxins can also be sensed by the brain, where the brain now engages in what's called sickness behavior. One of the fundamental symptoms of sickness behavior is fatigue. It's your body's evolutionarily conserved way of responding to threats, is to rest so that it can divert energy and resources to fending off that threat.

I would think that'd be a huge mirror of depression. So if people are struggling with key chronic depression, their mitochondria would shift to support that reality. Which is why it may feel so hard for people to get the hell out of depression.

Yeah.

Because their mitochondria are literally holding them at ransom.

It's very possible. But I'll mention one other study. So Robert Navio also did another study, a metabolomic study. I don't know if people listening are familiar with that term, but it's basically like the new generation of the next generation of testing of biomarker testing. So instead of testing for a standard blood panel that tests 40 or 50 things, it tests for 600 things. It tests for almost every known biomarker imaginable. In this study that his team did, they took a bunch of people with chronic fatigue syndrome, and they ran a metabolomics panel on measures, every hormone imaginable and hundreds of other biomarkers. They found that about 80% of the biomarkers that they measured were off and most of them low, lower than normal.

Interestingly funny, cortisol levels were normal. So above all things, you know, Reid.

Is not going to be happy with this.

I know. Yeah.

Reid and I. I don't think we've ever. We've maybe briefly exchanged some things in person, but I don't. I can't say that I know him really well. I have gone through his course, though, and. Yeah, so that's. That's the reality of what you see.

It's.

You know, you can look up the study in 30 seconds online. You know, Robert Navio and metabolomics, chronic fatigue syndrome. It'll come right up. And. And, yeah, so what I'm saying is, in people who are sick, there is widespread dysfunction in the body. And the body is a system. It's interconnected. And so you have a huge array of biomarkers that are going to be off in anybody with any kind of severe illness. The fallacy of our thinking is us humans, and even within functional medicine. Functional medicine is certainly a lot better than conventional medicine when it comes to dealing with diseases of lifestyle. But even in functional medicine, we have our handful of tests and biomarkers that we're testing for, and we imagine, I think, in a lot of people's heads, we think we're looking at everything there is to look at everything that's going on in the body. The reality is you're probably looking at 1% of all the different biomarkers that are in that person's body. That could indicate something. Yeah, it's a very complex story. But here's the cool part. Symptoms are a really good indication of what's going on. Let me mention one other thing. Just on the whole testing and biomarkers, I would say we really overestimate how much information that is going to yield. I'll give you going back to that study I mentioned earlier, the evidence based guidelines for physicians to treat patients with chronic fatigue. They talk in that study about testing and what they say is, hey, we recommend that you do standard blood panel testing with all your patients with fatigue. And here are the results from what we know about standard blood testing in patients with chronic fatigue. 95% of the time those tests do not identify anything that is abnormal in that person with chronic fatigue. Only 5%, 5 out of 100 people with chronic fatigue might be told, hey, your test identified, you've got anemia or hypothyroidism whatever whatever. But 95% of the time they're told your blood panel looks normal. So, yeah, that person might have debilitating chronic fatigue. So what I'm saying is the tests and then you get into functional medicine, you can test for a lot more things in functional medicine, but then you start to get into questions of how valid or accurate or clinically valid or reliable those tests actually are.

But they're great clues. It's clues that are leading to a more holistic solution.

They can be, yes, absolutely. But symptoms and lifestyle variables are also enormous clues as well. And for unless somebody's got a genetic illness or something like that, the vast majority, 80% plus of lifestyle illness, you can uncover a lot just based on someone's symptoms and especially looking at what's going on in their nutrition and lifestyle. Anyway, I'll leave that.

Yeah, we're scratching the surface on your wisdom and this is why we should have booked three hours for this podcast. But I know people have so many questions. We're going to be going over this more in the Wellness Force Group. But one thing you and I talked about before we hit the red record button was a place where people can start to digest, understand in a simplified manner. Exactly all the teachings that you have because as you can tell, you have a lot of knowledge, as everyone can tell. So where do they begin? You know, this is a process that we've linked up for everyone here@wellnessforce.com energyblueprint so this is the beginning point. But please, Ari, like, tell people when they go to wellnessforce.com energyblueprint what exactly is this? How is this going to walk them through the ABCs? Because a lot of these people are probably dealing with chronic fatigue.

Yeah, totally. Well, one simple good Place to start is supplements, nutrition hacks and supplements and that you can use various foods and supplements that we know have a proven effect on people with fatigue. And so one of the things that I like to direct people to because people like things that are easy, effortless and provide results, is as a webinar, basically talking about all the top supplements and foods and science behind them of how they interact with people with chronic fatigue, showing the research on how it benefits energy levels. So I have a whole full free webinar on all those supplements, I think, and foods. It covers probably 30 or so different compounds and some really amazing mind blowing science specifically on energy levels. So some really good stuff there. That's a great place to start. I have my full energy Blueprint program as well. That is a much more in depth and training that requires a lot more effort to adjust lifestyle and nutrition factors. And that's also available on my site as well.

Okay, excellent. We got to get you and Sean Wells linked up on a conversation. Have you and Sean Wells spoken?

I know of him, but I've never spoken to him.

He's a friend. He's the ingredient ologist. That'd be an interesting conversation. So, Ari, I've so enjoyed this time with you. I knew it was going to be great. And when we have you on again, let's have you on again and we can go a little bit deeper into some of these biomarkers because I think we really again just scratched the surface. So everyone watching wellnessforce.com energyblueprint Ari, as we say goodbye, is there parting guidance you could give us from this top lens of the energy Blueprint? How does it relate to wellness? You know, in your own life? You being a father, a business owner, a human being, somebody that's changed his life seems like two, three times over. Maybe right now you're in Costa Rica and you're considering what's next. How do you see wellness? You know, how would you define wellness?

You know, there's a movie, it's very quirky movie that probably most people never saw. It was on Netflix for a period of time. It's called Surf Wise. I'm a surfer, so I watched it. But it's on this very unusual family. This guy who was a physician, very prestigious, he had all these accomplishments and then he just got sick of it and he said, I'm dropping out and I'm gonna go raise a family. We're gonna go pack ourselves in an RV and drive all over the world. And just my kids. And he's a very quirky, very interesting, insightful guy. His name was Dorian Taskowitz, and he says something at the very beginning of the movie. They show him as an elderly guy in his 90s. I think he passed away last year or something like that. But he died in his 90s. And he said something to the effect of health is not just the absence of disease. Health is a vitality. It's a pizzazz. It's living your life with that just energy of passion and aliveness. And I love that. I think if I was going to leave somebody with one thing, it's to understand that their physical energy levels are critical to their experience of life, to their ability to engage with life and do all the things they want to do. So energy is really the key. And, yeah, I would say live with pizazz.

That's the coolest definition of energy I've ever heard. And I feel we're going to link all the things you've talked about, especially that movie, because that was a really cool movie. Ari Whitten, thank you for coming on the show.

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, brother. Sam.