Category: Podcast

00:19 Light versus dark. That's what we're talking about today. Another solo episode where I am thinking through some thoughts, getting some things off my chest. I want to start with an email I received recently comments specifically on the crimes of industry and medical Patala terrorism episode from a woman named Vicky just reading a couple of segments from it. This otherwise long email to segment you did that I listened to last night has spurred me on to acknowledge your assertive stance on these issues. I am in complete the greens. I've learned a view in Lost Empire Herbs. We had Peter Ragnar whom I've known since 1988. It's not like me to reach out and make comments, but I felt strongly about doing so with you. If only to offer my appreciation and encouragement to follow your path. Sharing with others affects is one fantastic source of enlightenment and you do that so well.

01:14 Supporting others if they choose to look for alternative access to answers for their wellbeing as you do with your companies is such a gift. I have tremendous gratitude for knowing and understanding the difference between living from a place of health and how to maintain that versus what mainstream society and the few misguided souls are doing. Living the mission of pushing the structure in on us. Light and love truth in life are more powerful than manipulation, lies, greed, and any other destructive close hearted ideology and action, so be it. Thank you for all you do and for your presence. Thank you, Vicky. Getting messages like that is something that certainly feeds me in a way, and this is the reason I'm doing this podcast as well as many of the other things that I'm hearing. I would love to hear your comments. You can send an email to me, Logan at lost empire, herbs.com that goes straight to me.

02:09 You can reach out to me on social media if you're on there, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Instagram. I'm @Strongmanlogan. I might also start doing some things specifically with this podcast. If you want to use the hashtag health sovereign, I'll be starting to use that as well, so that will be a good way to reach me cause I'll be looking for that and it is on this topic that we are diving a bit deeper. I'm a bit torn. Do I focus more on the light or the dark and what do I mean by that? The light focusing on health and healing and wellbeing and all the great ways, the possibilities that are there for that herbalism being one thing I'm big into by the exercise. Breathing exercises, energy medicine, so many things out there that can help with and there's the dark side.

03:02 We have this Western medical model which I've been showing in past episodes, which I've shown in many of my writings is a corrupt system. Not everyone, obviously not, and there are some good aspects to it. I'll always say that there are some good aspects, but if we look at the overall system, there is tremendous darkness there and it is hidden away. It is kept secret. Even the stuff that does come to light and there is so much of it. I mean that's where I dig up stuff and talk about these crimes, the criminal cases against pharmaceutical companies and so on. Most people are unaware of it. It is in essence hidden in plain sight. So one of the things I've been wrestling with lately is do I focus more on the light or do I focus more on the dark? It should be 50 50 should there be a certain percentage I'm aiming for?

03:58 I feel to only focus on the dark is probably not even the healthiest thing to do because it's hard to look at this stuff. It's hard to recognize what is actually going on in the world, but only focus on the light. I also feel that maybe ignorant is a word or Pollyanna. The thing is the system is worldwide. This paradigm, it's spread everywhere. It's a mass illusion in many regards and people are not able to see the alternatives that exist right now. We're not waiting for some future new system. There are alternatives right now and people cannot see those because they are caught in this deception even though the information is hidden in plain sight. Well, I mean I'm saying light versus dark, but really with the dark, I'm not going full bore until I am shining a light in that dark, you know?

04:54 Even since I was young for some reason, I don't know why, whatever reason, I've always been fascinated with evil. I always found the villains in superhero comics or movies or whatever. Vastly more interesting than the good guys. Once again, I'm not sure why this is, but it seems to be the case and as I look out into the real world, it seems to be the case as well. I'm fascinated by what these few corrupt individuals are doing. And once again, most people are not like this. If you get caught up in a corrupt system or just understanding some of the systemic effects going on, many people that are otherwise good are just perpetuating said system. So the system itself may be the corrupted thing and it's hard to break free from that. I mean there's systemic aspects like I feel I'm a good person. That's definitely striving to be and I'm still contributing to certain evil systems because of how the world works, how we have to operate in the world.

06:00 That doesn't feel good, but I think being honest with ourselves about that is a first step or an early step and then taking the steps, the right kind of actions, ports, unwinding that, and it's interesting to think about this concept of transparency, like how is it that evil occurs? It is only done in the darkness. This quote attributed to Edmund Burke, I've seen this before, but came back into my mind recently quote, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. As I said, I like to think I'm a good man. I strive to be, and when you become aware of the evil that's perpetrated in the world to just do nothing to let it go by, that's part of the problem. Another aspect of this I'm wrestling with that has to do with the light and the dark is the Buckminster fuller quote.

06:59 You never change things by fighting the existing reality to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete when wrestling with that too, so digging up dirt on what's going on, exposing crimes is that not just fighting the existing reality, but then I also have to think, do we really need a new model? Are there not currently existing models that would allow people to have far greater health? I believe there is. There's so many possibilities out there. So many options that the prevalent existing model is not required, not as it is laid out. So as I've said before and talked about this in the interview with Ron Baker and how this connected to poison Oak and energy medicine, but I got riveted by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that is still unfolding at a big splash in the news a little while ago, six months or so for most people is fallen off.

08:01 I'm still following current developments, new lawsuits being brought and such going on. Once again, fascinated with evil, something about this case, this man, what is going on here as riveted my attention. And from that looking deeper into various connections. And I bring that up to say that to understand this is to get a better glimpse of how the world works. Now I'm not aware of how Epstein is connected into any pharmaceutical companies, anything like that. So recently I wrote about one my favorite books that I read in 2019 and favorite because it is so horrible, but exposing the same kind of deeds, misdeeds, and that is the Franklin scandal by Nick Bryant. You can read about that over at Logan, christopher.com I think it's a couple of posts back by the time this is posted there right now what I'm really trying to do, what I have been for the past half-year or so, really understand much better how the world works.

09:04 And the more I understand the bigger picture I can grasp and how all these puzzle pieces fit together, understanding that medicine and health is just a few of those pieces in addition to this podcast, I feel the other thing that's along these lines is the writings, what I'm calling the medical monopoly musings. And even more so than this podcast is those writings that are diving deeper into the darkness and with that I feel I'm stepping into a role of investigative journalist, for the most part, just relying on what other journalists have exposed, looking at the court cases, the science, various things like this, but as I go on, I'm beginning to dig deeper, pull together various sources that have never been pulled together before and specifically wanting to name names. For instance, I recently stumbled on this man Varmus who was the head of the national institutes of health, the biggest scientific body in the United States and with a stroke of a pen he did away with the rule that stopped scientists at the national institutes of health from having conflicts of interest with medical companies, did away with it completely and of course, he had many of these conflicts himself.

10:23 This guy then went to head up the National Institute that cancer, various other cancer-related industries and talked about how we shouldn't even be looking into the cause of cancer. Really we want the head of cancer-person to say that. He was like, he's saying science cannot look into cause. Wow. I would think we'd want to look at the cause. But you recognize that cancer is a huge industry that makes a lot of money for certain people. Do those people want things to change? We've spent decades on the war against cancer and still no cure. Most people don't even recognize the causes of it or still so many people around the genetic bandwagon. Oh, cancer's genetic. No genes have little to do with it. They play a role, but a minor role. So this concept of the medical deep state, are you familiar with the term deep state?

11:15 It has come into the public consciousness since, well since Trump got into the presidency and it's this idea that there are unelected officials that really control far more than the elected officials. It is wrapped up into these ideas of the revolving door between business and politicians and lobbyists. The revolving door that involves science as well, the captured agencies that are in place. So I feel drawn to shine more light on the situation. And the more I dig, the more I find. Have you heard of the Arkansas prison blood scandal? I am willing to bet that not a single person listening to this episode has heard of this before. I certainly hadn't until very recently. Now, if you have head on over to health sovereign.com leave a comment here. I would love to hear if you've actually heard of this, I will probably be doing a bigger piece on this to discuss what happened.

12:18 Huge scandal that got just about zero media attention and that was many decades back, but basically, in Arkansas at a prison, they were taking blood from prisoners to be used for various blood products in drugs for hemophilia X and people such as this. They were paying the prisoners for this and of course, the prison system was making money doing this, selling it off to drug companies. Well, they didn't have very stringent standards while they had them. They didn't follow them. Many of the prisoners had hepatitis and or AIDS and they were giving blood away. This contaminated blood products was then infecting other people. These products were primarily sold in Canada, but then other countries as well. This got shut down at one point by the FDA, but then reopened with the same exact stuff happening, again and again, a very corrupt system. And now like what?

13:18 One of the guys who was actually a prisoner that participated in this, saw this happening. He was talking about a corrupt system. When a system is so corrupt, you can look at any of the people involved in the system. If they are in a top position or high up in there, chances are not even chances, like almost guaranteed such a person is corrupt because if a system is corrupt, it will keep anyone that is not corrupt out of the system. You know, there's been a lot of talk about hierarchies lately and I really liked this distinction between competence, hierarchies and dominator hierarchies. So hierarchies are a natural thing, a natural part of nature. You can look at animals, you'll see them. It's not some man-made construct. Hierarchies are natural and really this has to do with competency. Like a leader will naturally rise to the top and rewards will go to him.

14:11 And that can be a good useful thing. You'd take any sort of profession. Let's take a contractor. Contractor does really good work. They actually, you can communicate with them, well they don't screw you out of money, that sort of thing. Then people are going to spread the word. They'll be word of mouth and we get reviews online and this person is naturally going to be more successful because they are competent. They're going to rise up. That is a natural or competency hierarchy. A dominator hierarchy is let's take that contractor and they contribute to a politician. That politician then has a job paid for by the city, by the taxpayers for that contractor or because helping these politicians out, that contractor gets some legislation passed, which makes it so that he is in a better position. Other contractors can't compete, so when a person gets to the top of the hierarchy using the power that comes with that in order to keep themselves in power, keep other people out of power.

15:11 This is where hierarchies go wrong. This is where corruption occurs, so we have to see this is happening and the FA system is corrupted. Then those people that are in operation with the system are corrupted too. We see that so much. Have I not shared enough examples? I mean I know I'm going through all the writings and digging this stuff up. I'm seeing example after example you have to ask yourself, is it just a couple bad apples or is a whole damn barrel rotten? I think if you look at enough you can see the pattern. It's the whole barrel. Once again, not to say everyone involved is, but the higher-ups, which may be because they are, you know as we said, some sociopathic psychopathic people, those exist, they are out there and they better than anyone else can get to the top of these dominator hierarchies.

16:02 Not necessarily competency ones, but dominator ones for sure. And other people just get wrapped up in the system or when good people try to change things because these people at the top have such power is shut down in various ways. So one thing I've done recently with my medical monopoly museums, I compelled it all the 26 first issues, 26 first articles into a report you can head on over to health sovereign.com/report and you can grab that there and I'm going to be continuing this writing and it is going to go deeper. I'm naming more names, I'm putting more connections together. This is something that's expanding and one of the reasons I'm talking about this here is I would like your feedback. Should I focus more on the light? Should I focus more on the dark? You want to see more possible most media stuff should I do videos about these topics as well?

16:57 You know when the upcoming guests I have is John Perkins and I'm very excited about that. If that name is not familiar to you, he wrote confessions of an economic Hitman as the most famous book. He's written many other books as well and I had the pleasure of journeying to the Amazon rainforest with them. Also went along with my wife to Guatemala with him, so very excited to have him on the podcast and I just re-read the new confessions of an economic Hitman. Also going through his other books as well. In preparation of this interview, understanding how the world works, do you know that the CIA has overthrown democratically elected governments before I ran back in the 50s many, many examples and these are public knowledge, but once again hidden in plain sight. The average American is not aware of this and this has been going on for a long time and continues going on right now.

17:54 This is how the world actually works. As I said, I feel most people, because this is intentional, we are caught in a mass illusion and if you want health sovereignty, if you want sovereignty period, you must break free from the illusion. That's why I feel that shining a light into the darkness is necessary even as we focus on hopefully, yes, new and better systems, but as I said, existing systems already exist, but they are hidden away. There are some times scattered to the winds in different ways. They are not allowed to come forth because of the corrupt system we live in. The word insidious has been coming to mind a lot lately and I'm not sure the actual definition, I didn't look it up before this, but to me, it is the fact that evil is shrouded in good that there is a Wolf in sheep's clothing.

18:50 I want to read this quote from, well, it's attributed to Joseph Goebbels, who was one of Hitler's pop men. If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The light can be maintained only for such a time as a state can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It does become vitally important for the state to use all of its power to repress descent for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state. So he's talking about the state here. How about the medical deep state, the supplies? As I said, few people seem to be those psychopathic individuals, those sociopathic individuals. Most people are, for lack of a better term, useful idiot. If you play along with the system because you are not aware that the system is corrupted, that the system is having these effects, then you are a useful idiot.

19:57 I know that's a derogatory term. I'm not sure a better term that that one's been used before you. Useful ignoramus would probably be better just because you're ignorant of the facts and most people, the majority of society has become this in relation to corruption in the system. Whether we're talking about political corruption, economic corruption, medical corruption. Then these all go hand in hand. That is the bigger picture. I like to focus on the health topic because well that's kind of a very important topic to me and my businesses are around that. That's where I have the most knowledge and I'm going to continue on that and I also feel that you cannot understand this topic in isolation. We need to at least refer back to the even bigger picture from time to time and realize that these patterns of corruption happen across these different major areas.

20:50 The systemic effects of corruption in one area tend to lend to another. If you have the military-industrial complex which is sending these contracts back and forth between the government, you have a revolving door between such officials. Same thing is happening in medicine. We have Vargas, the environment that is moving from being in the visor in these pharmaceutical companies to head of our sciences and changing the laws of such an organization so that people can have major conflicts of interest. Then he moves on to another organization, does the same thing, moves on to another one, keeps the research locked down this one path because the powers that being the powers that may have helped him get into such position one test to continue down the same path. This is not fun stuff and even if you're fascinated with evil like I am, I do give credit. It is amazing to see the power of deception, but also that it's getting worse.

21:53 It seems to be growing because when you change the laws so that monopolies can better be formed, then it becomes easier to have and consolidate even more power and that is going on. Not every pharmaceutical company out there is an evil company, but we can definitely see that track record with the big ones. And what happens, those companies buy up. The smaller companies buy up all the smaller companies until you have just a handful of huge companies that as we can see just from the public record, have committed fraud, broken all kinds of laws, pay big fines for it, but continue on with the same pattern. So I'd like your feedback more light, more dark. Where would you like to see me pursue? Definitely going to continue doing solo episodes like this, going to have a wide variety of guests. Talk about different perspectives, different aspects of health.

22:49 I would love to hear from you. So once again, probably one of the easiest ways, head on over to health sovereign.com. Just leave a comment in this episode or reach out to me on social media, on Facebook or Instagram various places that you can find me. If you want me to go deeper, please do let me know cause I can go very deep in this topic and I feel it is important even though there is social programming to say that they keep the illusion in place. People don't want to look at this because it is horrible to look at. What does this mean? It means that people do not care that people are being hurt and murdered. That's what it comes down to you. People are being hurt and it's easy to not think it's happening. It's easier to do than to stick your head in the sand, but I can't do it.

23:37 Not anymore, but I would like some feedback from you on how I should best approach this. Thank you very much. He'd be having a very exciting couple of interviews coming up. I'm looking forward to it and I think you will be too. Thank you. Do you want to take this mind and apply it to your health one-on-one? Learn how to activate your superpower level of health with a systems approach and finally understand why your health may not be where you want it to be despite, or perhaps because of living in the information age. I've got limited spots available in my coaching program. Find out more and apply at virtuousvitality.com.

Logan: 00:20 In this episode, we continue the discussion with Brandon Amalani to talk about electromagnetic frequency pollution, and more importantly, what can be done about it, how we can fight against this. If you missed the previous episode, be sure to go back and check it out to understand what this is doing down at a cellular level, how this is one of many things that is causing all kinds of disease and why not everyone's talking about it because of the muddying of the scientific waters, but now importantly what to do about it.
…
So, the positive side, what can we do, Brandon?

Brandon: 00:58 There are a lot of things to do. The most effective overall system, and why I got into importing, distributing and spreading the knowledge about this particular technology, is using a Blueshield home device and portable device, and this is a technology that's been developed over the last 30 years by a guy named Mark Langdon in New Zealand and his team, and there are a couple other engineers that he works with.
What it does is it basically sends signals into the environment that compete with the EMF, meaning it competes for your cellular attention, and to really oversimplify it, what happens is that your body stops perceiving the EMF as a threat because it's sympathetically resonating with the Blueshield signals. So, all that immune power that your body inherently sends out to attack the EMF, it reallocates that back into the body to where your body just strengthens, regulates the systems and strengthens the biofield. It just makes your body healthier, stronger and more resilient.
That’s the number one thing that I think is most important because it works on protection at the cell level when we're just bathing in stuff. You're getting Wi-Fi signals from your neighbors if you're in a really populated area. That could be several different Wi-Fi signals that are sending chaotic energy to your body and your body doesn't know what to do except for fighting it.

With transverse electromagnetic frequency wavelengths, these things lose power over distance, so distance is your friend. Like you mentioned earlier, when we were talking, keeping your cellphone off your body, this is very, very important, because that near-field plume that the cellphone emits is probably one of the more dangerous aspects of it, besides the piggyback frequencies that are chaotic that really wreak havoc at the cell level in the body. Distance is your friend. That's a huge point.

Logan: 02:37 That’s something that cellphone manufacturers will tell you if you read the disclaimers, the fine print of the information. They say, “Do not hold this next to your body.” That is there. You can look this up. Maybe I'll find a link to such information, but they tell you. They're kind of covering their own butts on this one.
Brandon: 02:54 Yeah, and actually one person that brought that piece to light for me was Dr. Devra Davis. If you look her up, she's a really good resource of information. She has some lectures online, and back in I think the ’70s or ’80s, she was on a committee and she was paramount in making awareness happen around cigarette smoke. Back when science was questioning whether secondhand smoke was bad for you or not, she was basically researching that and responsible for making it to where smoking on an airplane is illegal.

She originally thought, EMF, it's all fine and dandy like everybody thinks, but then she turned her gaze to it with a more critical eye, and then once she started looking at the research with children, in particular, she felt compelled to really go after it and really educate the public on the dangers of cellphone use. She mentioned that if you went to the legal section on your iPhone or things of this nature, and I don't know if that's changed since those lectures, but, yeah, she said in the legal section, they would tell you not to keep the phone on your body.
Logan: 03:57 Yeah, so it's basically three things I do because I use the cellphone, amazing piece of technology, has a lot of uses, and we need to be aware of these things.

One, I never put it in my pocket near the genitals because that's one of the things that's super clear as to how that affects sperm counts in men and fertility, which is a problem we're seeing grow and grow over time.
When I do have it in my pocket, I have pants that I often wear that has a lower pocket, or if I'm wearing a jacket, I'll have it in that pocket, so it's a little further away from the body and further away from more vital areas. But, even then, I tried to not have it on me that much or if I'm going to extend it and don't need to have it on,
I’ll actually put it in airplane mode for that reason.

I really do try to never have the cellphone up to my head almost always, when I'm talking about it. I'll use speakerphone instead.
So, those are some of the things that I do with the cell phone.

Brandon: 04:51 Yeah, that's a solid practice, especially airplane mode. That's the next thing I was going to mention. You can actually turn off its ability to communicate. Some people have debated that, but, more or less, it's not trying to seek out a satellite or a cell tower and vice versa, so that's a really good strategy.
Another strategy I like to use and what I'm moving towards personally with my office in my home is getting wired in versus having a Wi-Fi router at all in my house, which I don't know how the family will like it because they're so used to having that instant Wi-Fi access for various things, but that's another direction I'm moving with my personal strategy.

Logan: 05:25 Yeah, I do have Wi-Fi in the house, but when we go to sleep, I always turn that off. In fact, I've just recently gone to the power breaker, and I haven't done it with the whole house just because I would have to reset clocks every day and I kind of don't want that hassle, but I shut off the power in the bedrooms. So, not only is the Wi-Fi off, but there's no electrical wires that are running there, and you have to understand that most times your house is wired. There are wires everywhere and this shouldn't be too bad, but often those wires are running right at where your head will be if your bed is aligned with that wall, so if we can minimize that down.
A lot of people go camping, right? And they feel great. Why do they feel so great? One of the reasons, there's fresh air. There’s the forest bathing effect. There’s a whole bunch of different things. It's not just a single thing, but often there is a reduction of EMFs around, which is one of the reasons for that.

Brandon: 06:18 Yeah and one of the nice things and convenient things about Blueshield is that just putting this in your environment, your body responds as if there's no EMF in the environment. You can see that on a pure physical level.

Also, one of the interesting things that Mark did early on, back in 2000, he did a yearlong chicken farm study where they were actually experimenting with animals, because they were getting all this great, awesome blood and urine research from people and just anecdotal stuff, how they felt, how it has helped them sleep better, and so on and so forth. But they were like, What's really going on? Is this placebo or not?

What they did was, they tested on chickens for that year and then they also did a cow study where these cows were grazing on fields where they had wind turbines, which was generating a lot of stray voltage and just EMF in general.

What they found in both of those cases was that the animals responded positively. In fact, one of the crazy statistics I found just shocking when I was first getting into this and trying to figure out if it was legit or not, was that they would lose, on average, 60 to 100 chickens per month at this factory farm setup, because they're
nervous animals and they get aggressive, and kind of peck on each other, and they're in close proximity.

What they found was, in the first couple of weeks, that death toll went down to zero. They didn't have any aggression with the animals, so it kind of harmonized them in the environment. They felt better and more relaxed, and it went up because there’s always a homeostasis. Blueshield is 93 percent effective at protecting you at the cell level from EMF because nothing in nature is a hundred percent efficient. If you're being exposed to something, there's going to be some kind of energy loss, so to speak, but what they found is that that death toll never went above 16 to 18 chickens in a particular month.

So, going from 60 to 100 down to 16 was pretty incredible, and they were measuring things like shell density and quantity of eggs. They were looking at skin conditions, like if they had rashes or this or that. They found that the chickens were overall healthier, producing more. The decibel count went down, so it's a very noisy environment and it actually became quieter when they plugged the Blueshield in. We currently have some new research in the UK being conducted at this very moment, along with some more blood research, so we're just pushing the envelope as far as testing and verifying this stuff.

But one of the things that I found was really interesting—in helping Mark spread the word in the West here in the United States because nobody really knew about these products and they were out and about in Australia, Europe and so forth—and I just thought because it's a subtle energy device and it's working with superluminal energy there, okay, just take away Blueshield, take away EMF, in general. How many people are really sensitive to their body and really feel what's going on?

The body will tell you what's happening if somebody is sensitive enough or can listen to their body. Most people have so much noise in their head that they're not really present to a lot of stuff that's going on, so they don't really feel a whole lot regardless.
I thought there was going to be some kind of percentage of people just returning them because they're just not really sensitive in their own body, even though we've shown with animal research and human research that it works regardless if you believe in it or not—it's not psychosomatic—but we found that it has less than a 1 percent return rate over the last few years and that’s a pretty crazy statistic for any business, but especially for something that's using really advanced longitudinal scalar waveforms as the carrier signal to transmit these frequencies into the environment.

Logan: 09:37 Yeah, my personal experience in that, I'm a pretty sensitive guy and I've cultivated this, but I wasn't able to detect any noticeable effect once I started using the Blueshield device. But based on the research you were talking about, I was also kind of amazed just reading the stories of people. Earlier we talked about those hypersensitive individuals and, when you hear stories like a woman that was not able to go into her house, but then she plugged in the Blueshield and she could go into her house, that's transformative. That's pretty amazing.

And, yeah, sure, it could be a placebo effect, but you see this over and over again, countless testimonials that you've gotten, sharing on the website there that begins to become a pool of evidence. My belief is, okay, let's say, worst-case scenario, it's not doing anything, although I believe it is actually doing something, so it's worth doing.

And I don't put my faith in it a hundred percent, so I'm still doing all these other steps, in addition to using the Blueshield unit. That way, I feel like I'm covering more bases and, as you said, it's 93 percent effective. Let's try to get that other 7 percent with the other tactics as well.
Brandon: 10:48 Yeah, and what they found with that other percentage is that usually it's more of the localized tissue heating, so don't sleep with your cellphone on your chest or in your pocket or something like that. That's the element that you really can't protect against because it's just too close-proximity and you get that thermal effect that we were talking about from phone. If you hold your phone up to your head and you're talking for an hour, you'll feel your head becomes hot.
That's what we're talking about.

As far as long-term DNA, Mark has been using this technology or some form or some incarnation of it for 30 years, so it has been pretty profound. He looks great for his age and he has high energy, and it's really amazing that something like this exists because—and this might be a little bit too technical for a lot of people—he really innovated scalar physics to a large degree. So, the way that this complex algorithm is transmitted to the body is really unique in a lot of respects.
Logan: 11:43 Yeah, I feel it's important, that principle of doing the best you can do. I like technologies like this because, one, if our technology can be aligned with nature and maybe that's something we can get into a bit more, how these frequencies work. You've discussed that a little bit, but even myself, it took me a while to begin to grasp how this is working. Now it's different.

So, you've got this device in your pocket or in your house that is producing EMFs. They're just different EMFs and that's important because EMF is not bad. Right? We discussed this. We couldn’t see. We couldn't be warm as there was no such thing as EMF. You have to understand the kind of native versus non-native, and even with non-native, if we can do it in alignment with nature under the foundational principles that it can be beneficial, rather than detract from our health.

Brandon: 12:34 Yeah, and what's interesting about the scalar energy in particular, it's not electromagnetic. It's not on the electromagnetic spectrum, so there are no radio frequencies. There are no magnetic fields coming off this thing. It's just pure informational fields, which is, I don't know if we have time in the scope of this interview, but it's very much related with quantum physics, so it's a quantum device in a sense that the information, the frequency algorithm, all the layers of code are piggybacked onto a multiple waveform that's scalar in nature.

It's subatomic and moves 1.5 times faster than the speed of light, and it's penetrating through everything. It'll go through a Faraday cage if you're familiar with the Faraday cage, so it'll go through walls, steel, concrete. There's nothing that can really stop a longitudinal scalar wave and that's why it makes a perfect carrier signal for what we're trying to do as far as transmitting the signal throughout a house and protecting everybody who's in the house. We want the cells to hear it, so to speak.
It’s not blocking anything. That's what a lot of people might find a little bit confusing with the name Blueshield. It's not actually shielding you from anything. What it's doing is it's using a principle of sympathetic resonance, which I'm sure you're probably familiar with it. If you had two tuning forks that are tuned to each other and you hit one of them in close enough proximity to the other, the other one will start vibrating and ringing without being touched, just because it's in close enough proximity and the vibration from the original strike on the other tuning fork affects the other one. That's essentially sympathetic resonance.

So, what we're doing at the cell level, as you can imagine, like all of ourselves having little antennas or little tuning forks, and what we're doing with Blueshield is we're sending out a pulse every half-minute and that pulse will basically affect those cells in a positive way.
It's no different than dialing in a station on your radio, so you're turning a coil; you're tuning into a resonant frequency that resonates with a carrier signal. And there are plenty of radio stations out there, right? That radio station comes in clear and you hear a coherent song. It doesn't mean all the other radio stations aren't bouncing around the airwaves. They most certainly are. But your radio is only tuned in to one of those carrier waves playing a very specific song which it correlates with or it's basically like a coherent energy.

So, what we're doing with Blueshield is that you're tuning yourselves to that specific frequency range and moving it in a natural way to where your body is never stimulated with the same combination of frequencies twice because that's a problem with a lot of EMF products, which is that they're repetitive frequencies. Even though they're in a quote-unquote, “good range,” they still affect your body negatively over time because they're repetitive and they're not moving in a natural way.
Blueshield doesn't stimulate you in the same way twice with the same frequencies, but there are mathematical codes that represent, to the body, coherence, like the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, these different mathematical multiples that are happening all the time and that your body perceives as a natural energy source.
Essentially, you're not blocking anything. What you're doing is you're tuning your body to where the body stops perceiving the EMF as a threat. From a lot of people, the question we get is, Isn't that just tricking your body? Aren't you just getting your body not to respond to it, but you're still getting the damage? That's a resounding no because if there was some threat at the physical level, your body would respond to it. It's built to do that. It's not really tricking your body in any way.
I think there's a lot that's not known about the different octaves of reality and electromagnetism, where we're at in time-space and how many levels we really exist on, do you know what I mean?

Logan: 16:03 Yeah, that's very interesting. There are basically three things in the universe. There's matter. There's energy, and there's information. We know E = mc2 so that energy and matter can be converted, although that's quite a process to do so. We don't really know how to fit this information thing into the others. That’s what we talked about with Perry, once again, on that DNA, because that is a code. Code is information, so where did that come from and that whole? We really don't know.

You're saying that, with the scalar waves, it's an informational wave rather than an electromagnetic wave and, still, that the cells become incoherent with this. They get turned into that frequency, which basically just keeps them dialed into that frequency, which is always changing, so the “shield effect,” quote-unquote, just occurs by the cell itself rather than from this device.

Brandon: 16:56 Yeah, absolutely, and that's the interesting component because there was a Scottish scientist named James Clerk Maxwell back in the mid-1800s. He was the first person to figure out that electricity and magnetism were connected. You can't have one without the other. Prior to that, we thought electricity was electricity, and magnetic fields were magnetic fields. When he was working on those equations, he also presented the theoretical possibility of what we know as scalar energy or longitudinal energy.

What's interesting about that, even Heinrich Hertz—which you've heard of, Hertz frequencies, what frequencies are named after—he even worked on Maxwell's theories and they ended up kind of disregarding it because it was too mystical. It's physically unmanifest. How do you slow down subatomic particles that are moving faster than the speed of light to really investigate them? It's hard to do with the reductionist scientific method, and it wasn't until Nikola Tesla was playing with lightning that he figured out, accidentally rediscovered the scalar waves, because he was playing with really violent, abrupt, direct current charges.
Long story short, the evolution of this has gone on and on, and what Mark's team has done that I thought really innovative was that he figured out ways to create those using light or what he calls crystal photonics. So, you don't need really high voltage; you don't need coils; you don't need a lot of this stuff that's historic. There are lots of ways to create a scalar field. You can use magnetic fields; you can use radio waves; you can use different energies because what you're trying to hit is net zero.

That's where people, I think, get confused about all of the different names for scalar energy. There's zero-point energy. There’s tachyon, orgone or radiant energy. Some of the more scientific minds would call it standing waves or Tesla fields. It's basically the leftover net energy when you remove all other known energy. So, there's not actually a net zero in time-space.

What’s interesting is that you can take the most powerful microscopes in technology and zoom in on what we know as physical matter, and you can go infinitely deep and figure out that, Hey, most of the stuff is empty space because all of these things keep dividing and dividing. The closer you zoom in, the more things spread out and you're realizing that there's just a lot of energy in motion as what's happening in time-space.

All this gets quite a bit technical and really gets into quantum physics, but what they found out as far as scalar waves is that they don't lose power over distance, which is really nice if you're doing what we're trying to do, which is get the body bathing in a symphony of frequencies that are coherent, that are beneficial for the body. You don’t want that to lose power over distance. So, it doesn't matter if you're two feet away from a Blueshield or 20 feet away from a Blueshield; your body will respond to the same level of intensity.

I thought it was really mind-blowing once I signed the NDA and got to learn more about it, and talked with the guys that developed this technology. It's pretty amazing and a lot of what they had to do in the very beginning was very grassroots. They put a lot of their money into developing the tech, the animal farm studies. This wasn't done in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
Logan: 19:57 Probably wouldn’t be allowed.

Brandon: 19:58 Yeah, and also it's also really, really expensive. That $30 million study that the FDA did, that was cheap. They had to build systems that were $100,000 each for a controlled container that could irradiate these poor animals, these rats, at the same level, no matter where they went in this container to keep a constant going.

We're working on new stuff now that's going to be more videotaped and technically written, just to kind of prove we’re doing this stuff and we're keeping up on even 5G, and that's what's interesting. Another question that we get is, Is it 5G ready? Because we haven't had a lot of 5G exposure to really test it, and based on the theory and based on people that happen to test the city for 5G, the answer is a resounding yes. Anything short of ionizing radiation, based on the principle, the body will always respond to what's beneficial versus what's not beneficial, and I think that has really hit home.

Bruce Lipton, in his book, The Biology of Belief, was referencing the studies that they would put human cells in a Petri dish. They would take the scientist out of the room because obviously, human cells resonate with humans, so thoughts can affect the experiment. They would videotape it, and they put beneficial nutrients on one side of the Petri dish and toxic substances on the other side, and in a hundred percent of the time, the cells would always move towards what's beneficial and away from what was toxic, kind of proving a natural cellular intelligence.

So, the body wants to resonate with nature. We've evolved to be outside and be exposed to this multitude of frequencies and coherent energy, and that’s why forest bathing, like you, we're saying is really like a nature frequency therapy type thing, if you really break it down, where we're kind of evolved to do that.
But we put ourselves in electromagnetic cages. If you take all the drywall out of your house, what's running through the house? It’s all these wires that are surrounding every room in the house, and then, couple that with cell towers, the stuff is just really everywhere—it’s nice to know that we have something that actually works at the cell level to protect us versus trying to do this blocking methodology, which, based on the people I've talked with and consulted with, all points in time and space are connected, so you can't really separate yourself from nature. Faraday cages only get rid of the physical measurable component, but the energetic or informational fields that are created when a frequency is generated and transmitted is still very much very real and affects the cellular physiology.

Logan: 22:17 Right and the Faraday cage is not going to be very convenient or cheap to install anywhere, so it's not really a feasible solution anyway.
Brandon: 22:27 If you believe in that theory that it's actually going to block everything, you're blocking beneficial electromagnetic fields, the Schumann fields, the magnetic field of the Earth. There's a lot of energy that our body needs in nature that we're blocking out with the Faraday cage as well.

Logan: 22:41 Something that just kind of connected for me, you were mentioning the forest bathing and the benefits of that, and we see this sensory, so the complexity, the kind of fractal patterns of … I'm looking out my office window and the tree there, and studies showing that just this sensory stimuli of that is beneficial to the human body, to the cells within. That's what different frequencies of light, when you're out in nature, you're going to have the wind rustling through the trees, which is sending all kinds of airways, which is different frequencies.

And then, something we haven't talked about, but also important for this EMF protection discussion is earthing, that physical connection to the earth, which is that you can just go barefoot outside and this puts you in coherence with the earth where there's electronics change, and this then also acts to make you kind of shielded from EMF effects to some degree, assuming the ground isn't running negative electromagnetic pollution, which unfortunately is the case in some areas.

Brandon: 23:41 Stray voltage, yeah.

Logan: 23:42 Right. So, we see that there are all these frequencies of nature, and the Blueshield, from what you're saying here, is not replicating, but doing something similar and in alignment with nature, just in how it's pulsing this wave out every half-minute or so.

Brandon: 23:57 Yeah, you can't replace nature. Nature is nature. Think about it as going in one of those high-end massage chairs and not feeling really good, but nothing can really place human touch and that intuition.

Logan: 24:08 Especially a good masseuse.

Brandon: 24:10 Yeah, for sure. So, getting in there backwards, it’s just we're getting to a point where we're putting 10,000 satellites up and we're trying to get conductivity everywhere on the planet. This is a real problem because, right now, you can go in the backcountry and get away from a lot of stuff, and feel really, really great. But once they're transmitting 5G all over the planet to try and connect the whole planet in that way, we don't know what the ramifications on all the wildlife is.

We don't know what the ramifications in general are.

So, yeah, it's really important to have some level of protection. I agree with you—stacking the odds in your favor in any way you can by grounding or doing these kinds of things is really beneficial. There's not just the electron exchange. It’s a brainwave state and will put you in alpha brainwave patterns which are really healing to the body.

Logan: 24:53 Right, the more research that goes into earthing, it’s showing benefits all across the body because, once again, we see reductions in inflammation and all kinds of stuff going on.

Brandon: 25:02
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that the mitochondria is bacterial in nature and it has evolved over eons since changes in the external condition, so the electrical light temperature, your body will regulate itself based on what the mitochondria is experiencing in those ways. What we find is the scalar energy is really nice as far as optimizing the millivolt potential of the cell, oxygenating the blood and getting movement and circulation, not just protecting against EMF.

If you didn't have problems with EMF or needing protection from it, what's interesting about the algorithm and the frequency code is that it's beneficial regardless, and will probably be a really good longevity tool, considering if you didn't have to use it to protect yourself against environmental pollution like EMF.

Logan: 25:49 Absolutely. Probably some of this conversation went over people's heads. I know the first time with me looking into this, it certainly did mine, but you can listen again.

If you head on over to FightEMF.com, that'll take you to the U.S. website for Blueshield. There's a ton more information there, so if you want to dive into some of the studies, for instance, that we discussed about the dangers of EMF or see more information on how this stuff works, you'll find that over there. Of course, pick up devices, and you'll see lots of information regarding them and what kind of device you might want.

But, once again, I do recommend this stuff. This is something that I personally use. I feel it's one of those steps in this multilayered-look perspective on health that you really do need to deal with EMF pollution in some way. Like I said, I use these devices and that's not all I do. I mentioned some of the other steps I do, too. I think that is good practice, some good habits to get into.

Brandon, any closing thoughts?

Brandon: 26:50 Yeah, I just hope people take a serious look at EMF, the non-native EMF, and look to protect their family and their children, and especially the next generations. That's very important with what we're finding with children especially. So, yeah, I just hope people take a serious look and have an open mind about it, and know that there are solutions. I know it's easy to get into a really fear mindset and, yeah, there are definitely things we can do and I hope people would take a serious look.

Logan: 27:20 Yeah, 5G is coming. Some cities have been trying to fight it based on the lack of any sort of safety studies on 5G itself, yeah, all the dangers we see in
this, just this way of amplifying it that they're beginning to do. Once again, you see the benefits in them doing so, but does your refrigerator really need to be connected to the internet? I personally don't think so. But that's the direction we're going in, so this stuff is important today. Like I said, some research is just saying since back when electricity started being used, it was important back then, but it's only getting more important because of the direction the world is going in.

So, once again, head on over to FightEMF.com. That'll take you over there. There's a lot more you can learn.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode. This is scary, but also can be a rewarding subject to dive into, especially when you realize that you can become sovereign here. You can take a few steps that really help protect you against the environment that is today. So, thanks for listening.

Logan: 00:20 Hello and welcome. This is the Health Suffering Podcast, and on this podcast, we talked about everything that has to do with health. Today's topic is EMFs, electromagnetic frequencies. Joining me is Brandon Amalani.

I know Brandon pretty well. I'll get into a few of the details of that, but Brandon is the owner of Shen Blossom and also the U.S. distributor of Blue Shield, some technology we will be talking about. He also works for me, I guess, at Lost Empire Herbs, and in addition to that, I've consulted with him a little bit on that Blue Shield website that he's been working on. In addition to that, we’ll be, as I said, talking about Blue Shield. That's more in Part 2 of this interview. In the first one, we're really going to dig deep into the dangers of EMFs.

A lot of people have heard this, but have not dove deep into it as I have started to do and Brandon certainly has as well, and really kind of understanding what all is going on here.
Brandon, welcome to the show.

Brandon: 01:22 Thanks, Logan. Good to be here, man.

Logan: 01:22 Yeah, this should be a fun discussion. Where do you think we should start with this?

Brandon: 01:30 I was thinking maybe just outlining what EMF is. Like you mentioned, people have heard about EMF and know about electromagnetic fields, but I don't really think that people really consider how pervasive that is in our environment, especially considering that it does affect cellular biology, and it's a type of pollution in this day and age that we don't really or some people don't feel. A lot of people do feel it, but it's something that we don't really kind of get a vote on.
It’s just put out into the atmosphere, put into our environment, and it affects everybody in different ways, depending on where people are at on that bell curve of their genetic constitution, resiliency, their immune system, and so on and so forth.

Logan: 02:08 For the most part, I would say, it's out of sight. It's not something we see. We see visible light, which is part of that EMF spectrum, but most of it is not something we actually notice, so most people don't pay attention to it.
We've talked about the range of frequencies, so EMF is this wide, wide, very wide range of everything. It includes visible light, UV, cosmic rays, microwave radiation. It's all these different facets. Infrared heat is a part of that. Really, it's a wide range, but usually when the term EMF is used, one, we're often talking about this EMF pollution, these negative or parts of the EMF frequencies that have these negative health effects on us.

Brandon: 02:55 Absolutely. You have everything from ionizing radiation, gamma-rays, some electromagnetic spectrum through ultraviolet, visible infrared and then down to radio. There's this electromagnetic spectrum of measurable [hertz? 3:08] and transverse waves that we can identify through scientific method.
We, as humans, only really see an experience. We can sense a very limited bandwidth, like you mentioned, light being one of those. I like to make the distinction that there's good EMF. There’s naturally occurring native EMF, and then there's non-native EMF, which is these repetitive frequencies that we're seeing primarily on the microwave radiation range, and now that we're seeing [high DME? 3:34] on ultra-high frequency bandwidths.

Logan: 03:37 So, that term non-native EMS was good, a useful way of thinking about this. It's how we often think of chemicals and more people are, I guess, attuned to this area. We have chemicals that are naturally found in food, herbs, supplements and all kinds of different stuff that are out there. Then there's also these manmade chemicals, often starting off as natural things, but then we treat them molecularly often for patenting reasons or just producing them for oil, all kinds of different ways. The human body or anything living, because these are new novel chemicals, often there are much bigger problems in the body processing them. This similar sort of thing could be seen with native and nonnative EMF, right?

Brandon: 04:22 Right, they're isolated frequency ranges and they're chaotic. They're not harmonic or coherent with the body's energy, and the body tends to mount an immune response to try and attack them. We naturally need a wide variety of frequencies.
If you look outside and you see different color spectrums throughout the day as a sunset, sunrise and during the middle part of the day. When you go out to nature, you see animals, birds chirping. All these sounds and things that we see in nature can be represented as a frequency range on the electromagnetic spectrum. We're designed and have evolved to experience those in a variety that moves in a natural way, in a coherent way that’s symbiotic.
Now, a lot of these isolated frequencies, like you're saying, correlating with isolated nutrients, those are very repetitive and they don't move in a rhythm that's harmonious with how nature moves or energy moves in nature. So, our body, again, like I said, really tries to mount an immune response because ever since AM radio, our bodies have been fighting this stuff and it really depletes our immune power. It disrupts cellular communication. It breaks living DNA, which is probably the scariest part because, if you hit a frequency on the body repetitively, it's like hitting a hammer on something. Eventually, it's going to break off pieces of the DNA which create these micronuclei, which are little fragments of the DNA.

What's interesting about that is it doesn't necessarily kill the DNA, but that DNA micronuclei starts to actually grow itself, but it's mutated because it has been broken off. This causes problems with irregular growth patterns in the body and what doesn't mention all the other multitude of things that happen in the body, but these frequencies are pervasive. Cellphone towers, Wi-Fi things in your house, your computer, your wiring in your house produces a lot of this dirty electricity and/or electromagnetic fields that are not native that irritate the biology and affect the body at the cellular level.

Logan: 06:16 Brandon, haven't you heard? There's not enough thermal effects from a cellphone to cause any sort of damage.

Brandon: 06:23 Yeah, the “it doesn't heat you, so it's not bad for you” theory. That's been fairly debunked, especially on that $30 million FDA study that was conducted. It just basically proved without a shadow of a doubt that these do have correlations with cancer and the development of cancer, for sure.

Logan: 06:41 Yeah, it's crazy if you look at just the amount of science on this, thousands and thousands of studies showing that there are maybe consequences from various forms of EMF pollution out there from Wi-Fi to all kinds of different stuff, right?

Brandon: 07:00 Absolutely, and it has been correlated in certain areas, but then we start getting into how the FCC works, how the FDA works, and we should really start realizing that customer demand—people want faster download speeds. They want all of this kind of stuff—so the commerce side of things is actually fueling this technology to become more widespread. But FCC is still running on regulations that date back to the ’70s and they're well known for not very well enforcing certain aspects if they find a research study that proves that this may be harmful. There's no regulatory action that really takes place.

Logan: 07:35 Right, and there is some irony in us having this discussion right now. We're connected over the internet. I'm on Wi-Fi right now. I'm not hard-wired, something we'll probably touch on a little bit later, and the people listening, likely listening through a cellphone or on the internet, doing the same sort of thing. So, there is some irony that we're making use of this amazing technology and there's very good reasons why this technology has moved in this way. Yet, so much of our technology, we're not recognizing because oftentimes they're much more subtle. They're much more long-term, the consequences of such.

Brandon: 08:12 Yeah, absolutely. There are also ways to do it correctly. It's just that everything is so compartmentalized. The telecoms communication or the communication industry doesn't really talk with the health industry.

One thing we're working on with Blue Shield is that our algorithm, which is extremely complex in its code, can be piggybacked onto any carrier signal. We particularly use a longitudinal scalar wave, but for many purposes, we'll get into it later, but making our own routers. We can use the same microwave signals or the Wi-Fi signals that people are used to but piggyback coherent energy on the informational carrier wave, so there are ways to do it. It's just a lot of people don't really know how that's done or that it should be done.

Logan: 08:51 Right. It's complicated science and there may have not been any nefarious purpose, to begin with, but just ignorance of how these things would actually affect us and now compound that with, as you were saying, the commercialization and revolving door and whatnot that we get to where we find ourselves today.

Brandon: 09:10 Yeah and a lot of it just comes as opportunity. Microwave ovens, for example, that was really thought of and discovered in a sense to heat food or cook food with going back to the Navy. People on ships would gather around the radar because they'd find that it warmed their body up. They didn't know that they were cooking themselves from that, but what they found was that it heated their body and it stayed warm, so they thought they would hang around this. Then, from that technology spawned microwave ovens and using microwave frequencies and adjusting amplitude to where it would actually superheat food.

5G is another classic example of that type of reincarnation happening again where the 5G, the gigahertz microwave bandwidth was used as weaponry, and then, they found that if they dialed it down and did certain modifications to it, that they could use it for super-high frequency information transmissions.
Yeah, a lot of these things come in one form and then they're evolved to another form to be used for communication purposes.

Logan: 10:11 I want to backtrack a little bit and talk about the FCC. Actually, in the previous episode to this, I discussed the tobacco playbook or the industry playbook, how they manipulate science and much more than that, and we see that this is a really good case in the telecoms industry that we have all this stuff going on in.
The important thing to understand is that the tobacco playbook has evolved since tobacco lost ultimately, right? So, they learned from that. They do all those things and even more, and one of the big things is that seems that these various industries—because this is done in the pharmaceutical industry and this is done in telecoms—that they get greater inroads toward the government, because when you have that kind of united front, then no one can question it.

I feel it's starting to break, and more and more people are recognizing this. The science is so clear that, if you have a cellphone in your pocket, there goes your sperm count and there's massive infertility rising. This is not the only reason, but one of many. So, for a long time, this EMS stuff was regarded as tinfoil hat type of thing, right? But I feel that's starting to break. Once again, it's understanding this tobacco playbook, understanding that the FCC is a captured agency, right? And so, there are all these roads that allow them to continue pushing this thing for the purpose of making more profit off it.

Brandon: 11:37 Yeah, “captured” is a good word, because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), you expect them to regulate these things, so people assume that they're just automatically regulating and have codes. Common people like you and I, we wouldn't really go in and look at how they go about that, how they operate, how they go about these things regularly. But when you talk about a captured agency, that's really looking at how the FCC lobbies to basically get laws passed in their favor, so that they can keep the whole show going and keep things rolling forward.

Logan: 12:11 You mean that [crosstalk 12:11] lobbies the FCC.

Brandon: 12:14 Yeah, a little dyslexic on that one. But, yes, that's correct. These interest groups end up contributing a lot of money, and they can get congressmen, senators, whoever, to kind of really enable things for them on a kind of political level. Actually, one of the biggest, the Telecommunications Act back in ’96, that was one of the most lobbied bills in history from what I understand. It’s pretty crazy.

Logan: 12:36 Yes. Just seems that the industries themselves often write legislation and because they're able to drive … really that's like direct cash payments or they have a whole bunch of roundabout ways of doing this, contributing to politicians, able to get passed these laws in Congress, and all kinds of connections that they have.

It's really crazy that this is the kind of next level of marketing like, yeah, you can spread your message out there, but if you can get passed legislation that makes it so you can make a lot more money and keep out competitors, and even control the science along with that, it's impressive. It sucks, but it's impressive.

Brandon: 13:21 Yeah. One egregious aspect of the Telecommunications Act, and not a lot of people know this one either, is that local governments have zero power to deny or regulate the placement of any of these wireless towers based on environmental health concerns or anything. That was written into law based on this act, which is crazy because you see some people who have these things in their backyard and some people start getting these weird physical ailments over time, just having this tower less than a mile away from where they actually live and sleep. It's a very serious thing that needs to be considered.

Logan: 13:55 Yeah. You mentioned a little bit how these EMFs can damage DNA. We made a joke about it. It's not the thermal effect that's causing this, but there's much more. The best theory and evidence I've seen is Dr. Martin Pall, who talked about how these interact with the voltage-gated calcium channels. I know there are a couple of other theories out there, but can you describe in a little more detail how this thing we can't see, this frequency, going in and disrupting our body?
Brandon: 14:25 Sure. Our body, on a very physical level only, we're electromagnetic water machines. Our cells carry a charge. All the processes in our body, hormones, neurotransmitters, all of these things rely on a specific level of voltage.

In healthy humans, we see a very specific voltage range that's considered healthy, around 70 to 90 millivolts, so when people start getting into chronic disease, degenerative disease or just a compromised immune function, they're going to hover in the 15 to 30 range, which is considered really low.
The cellular biology is negatively impacted on various levels, one of them being, as you were mentioning, the voltage-gated calcium channels. These are calcium channels, obviously regulated by electricity—that's what they're called voltage-gated—and they are responsible for releasing specific amounts of calcium to affect things like neurotransmitters and a whole host of physiochemical responses in the body.

What happens is that when you're exposed to RF or radio frequency, it has been shown over and over that your body releases a hundred times the amount of calcium than it normally would. That has downstream physiological effects that lead to really serious chronic diseases, but the immediate effects look like anxiety, depression, compulsive disorders. We're already having certain responses to the dopamine reward system thing that we get with modern technology as far as the apps and the software, and how we interface with technology. But there's a very real neurotransmitter effect just by being exposed to the energy alone, let alone actually participating in “How many likes did I get?” or “How much this?” and always looking at the phone and checking if there's a new email.
There are a lot of them, but on the particular voltage-gated calcium channels, there are many studies that show causality directly correlated with microwave radiation exposure.

Logan: 16:17 And inflammation would be one of those downstream effects, right?

Brandon: 16:20 Of course, yeah, inflammation, a white blood cell response. We've seen in animal studies, in particular, that the white blood cell response is extremely high. The body is producing a lot more white blood cells in response to being around powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation.
When you're out in nature in the backcountry or you're protecting yourself with technology that actually works, what happens is the white blood cells normalize. They come into normal ranges and inflammation markers recede, and also the free radical and products that you see in urine and those types of testing, those also come down.

But there's just so much out there, and I know people get overwhelmed with information and trying to figure out what data is real. There's one guy in particular that has become pretty well-known. His name is Dr. Carlo. You can check this stuff out. You can check out a lot of his studies at Health/Concerns.org.
He was commissioned by the mobile industry to conduct research on these products and he had a study that involved 200 research doctors, and I think it was 15 epidemiological researchers. This was I think in the early-90s. I think it was ’93 to ’99. They spent $28 million and they were researching this stuff for a few years and found that, especially in children, there was an increased risk concerning tumors and genetic damage.

He was really kind of outspoken because a lot of his information was heavily suppressed by the telecommunications industry back in there, just trying to figure out how dangerous this was actually. A lot of that stuff was pretty suppressed—not uncommon. We see this with vaccines and other things—but, yeah, there's a lot of good information, really good research that people I think need to really do their due diligence research on.

Logan: 18:02 The scientists find information that is not in alignment with the industry, once they have a whole bunch of tactics in which to target and discredit such people. That is part of or many of the different plays in that playbook.

A couple of things that I just want to pinpoint. Our whole Western medicine viewpoint has been focused on the chemical aspect of us and, yeah, that's important. There are hormones, neurotransmitters and all the different things in there, but equally as much, we are electromagnetic beings, so that is an important thing to recognize.

And so, if these EMFs are causing inflammation, we understand inflammation is at the root of virtually every disease there is. You don't need to believe, It specifically causes this thing. Yeah, we see cancer is on the rise and EMF is one of the reasons for that. Autoimmunity is on the rise; EMF is one of the things for that and it's not the only thing.

Again, with that Western medical paradigm, they try to pinpoint things that one cause equals one disease, but, no, not with chronic illness that we're seeing today, which is the real big thing that we have. It's all on the rise because of many things that go together, so it's not so simple. It's complex and we are complex living beings. That's really just how things are, so we have to recognize that, but we can really see it in that simple sort of way, while it may show up as cancer in one person or will show up as an autoimmune disease in another person and a different autoimmunity in another person, by having this kind of background of the EMF pollution that we're in.

Brandon: 19:37 Absolutely. That's well said. There are so many factors and I’d like to remind people that EMF is just part of the environmental aspect. There are other reasons that somebody would be healthy in spite of this EMF pollution that's everywhere. Exercise, breathing properly, healthy diet, structured water, all of these things are part of what makes a person healthy.

Everybody's at different levels of the bell curve and sensitivity. Usually, people that are more immunocompromised in some way, feel the effects of EMF more so than people that are robustly healthy and have just a strong genetic constitution that was passed down from their parents.

Logan: 20:15 Let's discuss that, the term “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” or sensitivity, and even the World Health Organization recognizes this as a thing and they label EMF as a probable carcinogen. It would be higher, but the industry has inroads to that organization as well. This has been, once again, one of those things, I would say, tinfoil hat loony. In the show, I don't know if you've seen it or listened to it, Better Call Saul, which was one of the spinoffs from Breaking Bad. One of the characters had this and then they show it’s fake towards one of the seasons in there and I was like, Oh man, and then they went away with it.

But this idea of the bell curve, could you go into more detail on how that's working and why some people are more sensitive than others?

Brandon: 21:03 Definitely, and it's funny because it depends on what year it is actually. At one point, it was a possible human carcinogen and now it’s probable. They changed the language around it.

We’ve grown up in an age where, and I think you and I are probably the last generations that remembers life before the internet, back when we saw pagers were the first thing that came out, and there were actually phones on the street that you could pay for and utilize, and you can't really find those anywhere. Times have just changed so much and we've kind of gotten to this point where we're just inundated with this stuff.

Some people grow up closer to high-power cables or lines, or their nearest cell towers. Some people, because of pollution, because they're not eating well, and maybe they’ve just got bad luck of the draw with parents that didn't take care of themselves, these people will develop kind of an allergy and it's very similar to the nutritional concept of eating the same food over and over.

The body could probably process something like wheat, which causes a lot of allergic reactions to people. A healthy body with a good inner ecology and a good microbiome can actually digest wheat fine. But if somebody is eating that every day for many years of their life, they'll develop an allergy or a response to that gluten.
Likewise, if somebody is really exposed to high levels of EMF and their body's immune system can't really adjust or adapt to it, then it gives people these symptoms like dizziness, heating in the body, actually a physical feeling of being hot, poor memory. Some people have similar to what a lot of people experience in detox reactions or detox symptoms, except its low grade and it's chronic, so it's happening all the time for them. They're just not feeling at the high-level performances they could with joint pain and inflammation in their body.

Logan: 22:47 I also want to remind people, people who have been listening all along and heard the recent interview with Perry Marshall, where we discussed how genetics really work and the importance of epigenetics. One of the examples he mentioned in there was that smoking in a grandmother would then in the granddaughter, even if they had never met the grandmother, have heightened amounts of asthma and other issues. Similar sort of possibilities exist with the epigenetics around EMF.

Thinking about what you're saying, the internet is relatively new, and I heard someone talking about how these problems started to come about when electricity started to come about. Really, we've been just increasing our usage of technology that may have negative health consequences for a long time and that the effects, and you right now can have effects, down the line that actually exacerbate things, make it worse, so that because we're in this, even though you may never really feel like you're affected, the next generation could possibly be more susceptible because of such links.

Brandon: 23:50 Absolutely. It's no different than how herbs interface with the DNA. You take like herbal extracts; you take foods into your body; everything you're doing and exposed to affect how your mitochondria and DNA change and modulate themselves effectively. It's just something that's really scary to me, especially when you start having this DNA breakage, literal micronuclei just splitting off and trying to reproduce itself.

We already have to deal with telomeres. We already have to deal with making copies of copies of copies and passing on our genetic material to new cells. This is just a really interesting point in time because, like I said, there's a lot of research and it's just amazing that we haven't really gotten to the point as a collective society to really question what's going on with these telecommunications and how they may be impacting our health.

Logan: 24:39 Yep. Now that we have scared the crap out of you—and, really, I don't want people to go on a spiral of depression. This is the world. This is what's happening—the good news is there are many things you can do, steps you can move in a positive direction, and now we're going to begin to talk about those.
For more information on the subject, you can go to FightEMF.com. That's going to take you to the blue shield website. Full disclosure, this is an affiliate link. If you purchase something there, then that will send some money back to me to help support this show in growing. But understand this, I would never promote something that I did not believe in, and this is some technology, which we're going to talk all about coming up here, that is really helpful and one of many steps. Also, going to be talking about some solutions that can help, that cost nothing, that you can do for free. So, that is what we're going to get into now.

That's all coming up in the next episode, so stay tuned and find out all of the many things, the many possibilities, and why there is hope when we're talking about EMFs.

00:20 Hello and welcome. Today we are diving into what is often called the tobacco playbook. If you want to understand health in this modern day and age, unfortunately, you kind of have to understand the tactics used by industry such as was used by the tobacco industry in order to distort science and distort public opinion. As I said, it is unfortunate that this is the case, but that doesn't mean that it is not the case. This playbook is used by industry after industry, not all of them, but certainly a good amount and we'll be getting into examples today, so we're going to be covering some of the history, some of the facts of what happened with tobacco, and then showing a whole bunch of other cases how many other people have used some of these same Paktika. Before we get into that, I want to say please share this podcast with people.

01:17 If you are enjoying it and you think other people would benefit to tell them about it, share it on social media, posted on Facebook, however you want to do it. Share this out there as well as leaving reviews. That would be great. So a lot of this, I'm going to be reading quotes from a published article called inventing conflicts of interest, a history of tobacco industry Paktika. This covers a lot of stuff and I'm actually shortly going to be reading a book that dives into more detail. So perhaps this will be a multi-part series. As I said, very important to understand this information so that you can see that you can not get roped in by science, which really isn't. Science masquerades as science and how so much can be distorted through these methods. The tobacco industry is programmed to engineer the science relating to the harms caused by cigarettes marked or watershed in the history of the industry and moved aggressively into a new domain.

02:19 The production of scientific knowledge, not for purposes of research and development, but rather to undo what was now known that cigarette smoking caused lethal disease. If science had historically been dedicated to the making of new facts, the industry campaign now sought to develop specific strategies to unmake a scientific fact unquote, so you have to understand science as an ideal is focused on what is true and only on what is true. However, science is done by human beings and human beings are corruptible, plain and easy. Sure. There's a handful of them that are not and we'll get to some examples of people that were not corrupted through these tactics, but a lot of them are through various ways, both more overt and covert. So when this was understood that for-profit reasons, we could downplay this science, we could muddy the scientific waters. That is what tobacco sought to do and tobacco was not the first industry to do this.

03:25 You can see examples going back further, but they were in are the most well known for this. That's why it's often called the tobacco playbook because this is what they did. They're the biggest example. You can see it clearly because in the end it was all revealed in many other cases, it has not been revealed. That information is there. If you dig deep, you can find it. But tobacco is where it came into the light eventually. Next quote, if public relations could engineer consent among consumers, so two, could it manage the science? Although medicine and science had never been sacrosanct from a range of social and commercial interests, the tobacco industry campaign crossed into new terrain to build a powerful network of interests and influence in quote. So another thing worth understanding is that public relations, PR propaganda as it used to be called this was a burgeoning field around the twenties 1920s, not the 2000 twenties that we're entering into here.

04:30 So this was a new field and it was revealed that, Oh, with advertising, right, we can mass market our products, we can change public opinion, we can get people to buy into such things. We could through the right kind of ad, get women to take up cigarettes and become a big group of people that would smoke as well. When previously women had avoided doing so. So this part of the quote, if public relations could engineer consent among consumers, so two, could it manage the science? And that's really what it was. It was to take this PR to take propaganda and use it within the scientific field within scientists themselves, but also to then spread this science out to the laypeople out there, quote public relations. Man Hill understood that simply denying emerging scientific facts would be a losing game. This would not only smack of self-interest but also ally the companies with ignorance in an age of technological and scientific hedge Amani.

05:28 So he proposed seizing and controlling science. Rather than avoiding it, he'll advise that the companies should now associate themselves as great supporters of science. The companies in his view should embrace a sophisticated scientific discourse. They should demand more science, not less in quote, so heal, and this is the guy we're going to be talking about through this. He was part of the PR firm, Hill and Knowlton that was hired by the tobacco industry, started with one tobacco company and then basically they all kind of grouped together in working with PIL and his public relations firm in order to run with this program. Science is a great thing. Like I know I bash on science a lot because it does need bashing on it because most people do not understand these facts. When you understand how science can be so easily and so often manipulated. This is, like I said, very important stuff.

06:24 So science as an idea when it is done right, it is amazing for uncovering the truth. And it was this idea that had really become widespread throughout, definitely in the U S but across the world. And even to this day, really scientists still held as the ideal, the ultimate arbiter of truth, even though we see these problems over and over again. So we can't say like, Oh no, forget science. Science is not important. Or you can't say, who cares about science? None of that works now. None of that would work back then. So he was saying that we need to jump on the bandwagon. We need to say yes, science is great and basically what he comes to say is that we don't have the science. The science is not clear. That is a phrase that is used over and over and over again. Quote Hill's proposal offered the potential of a research program that would be controlled by the industry yet promoted as an independent.

07:25 This was a public relations masterstroke. He'll understand that simply giving money to scientists through the national institutes of health or some other entity, for example, offered little opportunity to shape the public relations environment. However, offering funds directly to university-based scientists would enlist their support and dependence. Moreover, it would have the added benefit of making academic institutions partners with the tobacco industry in its moment of crisis end quote. So it's all about the money. Really. The thing we always need to look to is the money. Where is the money coming from? Where is the money flowing to? Not the only factor involved. And there are other ways that people can be compromised, but money tends to be the major factor in so much of this and how the money flows is very important. So the tobacco industry could not just give money straight to a national institutes of health, which is kind of the big governing body, which focuses on science, but instead, they created an institution that basically would then fund scientists directly and through academic institutions, through colleges, universities, medical centers, places where scientists work and did research.

08:46 And this funding is what drives things. So it's not necessarily straight up bribing a person like personally giving them money, but you are them work four years if they study certain things. So there are multiple ways that money flows, which is not just directly a straight bribe. And again, this is very important because it's actually seldom used that way where there's just a straight like cash payout. Yeah, sometimes we do see that, but more often not. It is how funds are shifted. How research is funded, leads to the research that is desired. Oftentimes, not always, but very often. Another quote here, the tobacco industry research committee TIRC a group that would be carefully shaped by Hill and Knowlton to serve the industries' collective interests would be central to the explicit goal of controlling the scientific discourse about smoking and health and quo. So we have this tobacco industry research committee.

09:46 This is the group that was completely industry-funded and industry-led and as part of this PR firm, in order to drive the science in the direction desired, this is what we often see with other companies. There are these groups that drive science in a certain direction, not the direction that the science shows things to be true, but the direction that is desired and the more money that is funneled through such organizations, the more effective this can be because funding drives science and if funding is driving science, it's often driving certain results in that science. Again, I'm not saying that this is how science should be done, just that this is how science is actually done in many cases. Another important point is how this being a PR campaign, right? It's not just about the scientist, but then spreading it through mass media. Next quote, the firm's systematically documented the courtship of newspapers and magazines wherein it could urge balance and fairness to the industry.

10:55 They offered members of the media along list of independent skeptics to consult to ensure balance in their presentations. The problem in this formulation was that science was treated as the analog of common political debate and social controversy. At that time, few journalists had any sophisticated scientific education or training by fashioning a controversy Hill and Knowlton successfully secured media coverage that maintained by its very nature that tobacco science was unresolved. In quote, a few key points here. They offered members of the media along list of independent skeptics to consult to ensure balance in their presentations, so perhaps that busy these media people that they used, there were smokers themselves and they didn't want to believe that it was unhealthy and so they legitimately believed that the science was unsettled, that it was not causing cancer. That's one possibility. Through a variety of funding methods, media people could also be bought.

11:56 Advertising could occur in papers and magazines for instance by the tobacco companies that would be threatened to be polled if these independent skeptics and it's independent quote-unquote, cause they're not really independent. We're not used in the coverage. And so what it's saying here is that journalists will often provide both sides of a story. Probably used to do this far more than they do today. In doing that, just because there was some people that they could talk about here, it seemed like it was a controversy. If you have a side saying that yes, tobacco causes cancer and aside saying, no, tobacco doesn't cause cancer, it looks like there may not be consensus that it may not be true. And even if it's just one person or a couple people saying on the know part to the average person out there reading the media without being able to understand science, to look at the studies themselves, it's hard for them to decide.

12:53 So this was part of that PR campaign to one, push the science in a certain direction, but then push the public awareness of the science that they were doing to do this next quote. After its founding in 1958, the tobacco Institute quickly emerged as one of Washington's most powerful, well-healed and effective political lobbies. Just as the industry had made critical innovations in advertising and public relations and now pioneered new and aggressive approaches to managing its regulatory and political environment. Here we see that it is not just the authority figures of science that are manipulated. It is not just the authority figures of media and journalists that are manipulated. It is also that the authority figures of politics are manipulated the most powerful, well-healed, and effective political lobby. Hmm. Do you think that lobbying still has a big, big massive impact on today's legislation, on what happens in our government and allows the corporatocracy, the rural by corporation to come to fruition?

14:11 Lobbying is such a huge part of this and we see that this was integral even back then in 1958 with tobacco. So it is through the threefold science media and politics that we see that this manipulation can really a cure. Because once again, as I said before, those are all authority figures. This is different people where we get our information from and they talk about each other. The journalists talked about the politicians and the scientists. The politics talked about the scientists and part of their public opinion is coming from the media. All of these are tied together and presents a unified front. May not be unified in the sense that, yeah, there's other scientists, there's other politicians, there's other media people that are saying that, no, this is really a problem, but there is some media, some politicians, some scientists all saying that, no, it is not, or the science is not settled.

15:13 That is a critical point. Next quote. Trusting science, confidence in the media and the social responsibility of corporate enterprise. We're all substantially harmed by Hill and Knowlton's efforts on behalf of the tobacco industry by making signs, fear game in the battle of public relations. The tobacco industry set a disruptive precedent that would affect future debates on subjects ranging from global warming to food and pharmaceuticals and quote. That's basically the summation of what we've covered here. Once again, this was not done. Tobacco was not the first ones. They may have done it super well, but they had some flaws. They didn't do it well enough that they were not caught in the end. It took a long time though, so understand this. With tobacco selling cigarettes, this is, I don't know how much they sold per year, but I'm guessing somewhere close to in some years, billions of dollars worth of cigarettes.

16:10 Obviously this is in the industry. It would be spread throughout the big companies that are selling such cigarettes, so part of this game is one, if we can avoid getting caught at all that is ideal, but even to just delay the inevitable, that is tremendously profitable because what do we see nowadays? Cigarette smoking has gone down dramatically because this information is now widely accepted and the tobacco industry is no longer allowed to advertise, which is actually one of the reasons that they're one of the most profitable industries because they're not spending any money on marketing. You know, people are still buying their products. So this delaying tactic for them worked so well in just allowing them to become more profitable, to make more money and understanding that with more money, they could then funnel that into more science, more media manipulation, more lobbying, and politic manipulation that we could continue this in certain directions.

17:15 So they did eventually get cut. How many other industries see the success of this and then follow suit? A lot of them. So now we're going to switch gears and look at some of these other examples. This information comes from the union of concerned scientists website. They have what they call the disinformation playbook. So another name for this tobacco playbook. And specifically, they detail out five different moves that are done. You have number one, the fake, which is conduct counterfeit signs and try to pass it off as legitimate research. Number two, the blitz harass scientists who speak out with results or views inconvenient for industry number three, that diversion manufacturer uncertainty about science where little or none exist. Number four, the screen by credibility through alliances with academia or professional societies. And number five, the FICS manipulate government officials or processes to inappropriately influence policy.

18:26 We saw the fake, the blitz, the diversion, the screen, and the fix all with tobacco. Now let us look at a few other examples. Once again, this all comes from the union of concerned scientists website. I will have a link to that in the show notes for this episode so you can go and see the finer details of these examples. So the fake how Georgia Pacific knowingly published fake science on the safety of asbestos industry groups use cherry-pick signs to avoid regulation of chromium. Merck manipulated the science about the drug, Vioxx fossil fuel companies distorted the science about the dangers of benzene, DuPont and 3M concealed evidence of PFAS risks. So what do we see all these chemical companies, drug companies, all these people manipulating the science itself and many different ways of doing this. Not just the statistical manipulation but the way the trial is set up.

19:27 The poor use of placebo controls cherry-picking so many different ways this can be done and it's done over and over again. And this is why science is in question because it is done like this. So often examples of the blitz the NFL tried to intimidate scientists studying the link between pro football and traumatic brain injury. Syngenta harassed the scientist who exposed risks of its herbicide atrazine and that was Dr. Tyrone Hayes, how the fossil fuel industry harassed client scientist Michael Mann, Glaxo Smith Kline tried to silence the scientist who exposes the dangers of its drug Avandia. In some cases, there are independent scientists out there that are saying like, Oh, this is really a problem and there are a variety of tactics that can be used in order to minimize or harass what they are saying. In the case of dr Tyrone Hayes with the herbicide atrazine. He was actually hired by Syngenta and he did not find what they wanted them to find.

20:34 So they then discredit him, him. And even now you can punch his name into a search engine and you'll likely see some of the really what should be libelous things they said about him. Examples of the diversion, how fossil fuel lobbyists used AstroTurf, front groups to confuse the public. And in case you're not familiar with the AstroTurf name that is describing a quote-unquote grassroots organization. So a true grassroots organization is where there's legitimately like people, citizens that are getting together and doing that in order to exert some sort of public opinion and AstroTurf being fake grass is one that is actually set up. Funded has an agenda by the industry itself. So it takes on the appearance in order to mold itself and shape public opinion because we often think, Oh, if there's a union of concerned parents for this thing, then it must be legitimate.

21:35 And they probably have the reasoning for that. And since I don't have time to look into it deeply, I'll just kind of go along with what they're saying. So this is what a AstroTurf organization is about. Some other examples, corn refiners association used front groups to spread disinformation about sugar and health. The indoor tanning association used misleading ad campaigns to this sort skin cancer science, how the American chemistry council sold uncertainty about formaldehyde risks. So this is once again, manufacturing uncertainty about science when little or none exists. This is muddying the scientific waters and then spreading that information out. Examples of the screen, how Coca Cola disguised its influence on science about sugar and health, Purdue Pharma and the opioid epidemic. The fossil fuel industry hid the truth about its funding of fracking research and the case of ExxonMobil and the American geophysical union. So we see that this is done with academia, with universities, but also these associations, these larger groups that we think should be independent.

22:42 If they're getting funding through one of these industries, then oftentimes that is going to influence the information that they pass on to people. And finally, the fix about government officials being used. How Dow chemical influence the EPA to ignore the scientific evidence. Pfizer pressure the FDA to downplay the risks of it's our cynical animal drug, how the NRA suppressed gun violence research, BP and other companies exploited a regulatory agency to continue negligent offshore drilling and we all know what that led to. So once again, these are just the headlines literally of articles pulled from that website. I invite you to go deeper. This is important information to understand because, without an understanding of the tobacco or the disinflation playbook, we take science at face value and to actually get to the bottom of science. Is it funded by people? Cause sometimes these conflicts of interest are not even listed on there even though they should be to understand like, okay this is a grassroots organization.

23:44 Is it really? Is it funded by the industry that is in the pocket of these big industries? When it comes to our politicians or the associations we are in the information age, the information economy, that means that this information is one of the most powerful tactics out there. And it is used regularly in a variety of ways. In order to manipulate health opinion to manipulate the information about what is healthy. We have to understand this if we want to be health sovereign because that involves knowing and being able to act in the right manner. So with all this, this information out there purposely put out for the purposes of profit, we have to be able to wait through that and that's a hard thing to do. So understanding the tactics, you can at least be aware of what is going on and therefore any new information that's presented.

24:43 If it doesn't line up with things that should be making sense, principle-based sort of things, then you can look a bit deeper and find out what may be really going on. That's going to wrap it up for now on this, we may be revisiting this topic in the future. There's so much to understand here and so deep to dive and who has the time for this in this day and age, but unfortunately that is this day and age. That is how the world is working right now. So learn about it, understand it, be able to perceive it out in the world. And that is one thing you must do now to be a health software and I'll talk to you next time. Forget fat. How about you base your health on sound principles that have existed for millennia? That's what my book powered by nature, how nature improves our health, happiness, and performance is all about if you want a special deal, my company lost empire herbs will give you a $30 gift card to buy a $20 book. Plus every sale will support indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest. To find out more and pick up your copy at poweredbynaturebook.com.

Logan Christopher: 00:18 We continue our conversation with Dr. Mike T. Nelson. If you missed the previous episodes, there you can find the topics of metabolic flexibility and fasting. And now we dive into stress, adaptability, and heart-rate variability right after a short commercial break.

So, I want to shift gears a bit into talking about stress and heart-rate variability, which is something you're quite [crosstalk] on.

Dr. Mike T. Nelson: 01:08 Sure.

Logan: 01:09 I believe you did some research papers on that. Is that right?

Mike: 01:12 Correct.

Logan: 01:12 Yeah, so for people that are not familiar with heart-rate variability, how would you explain that?

Mike: 01:18 Yeah, so heart-rate variability is a noninvasive way to get a marker of stress on your nervous system. Most people are familiar with what the average heart rate is, and if you polled, most people, they would say, Hey, your heart rate at rest should be just like a metronome. Right? So, very little to no variability.

What we find in research is that's actually very bad. There was an old Chinese proverb that said that if your heart beats like a metronome, your days you have left to live are limited or something like that. So, even hundreds of years ago, they've kind of known that this is a thing and you can go back in time, too. Galen was one of the early physicians who had looked at variability in heartbeats when listening to people he took care of and all sorts of stuff. But it wasn't until probably about the ’60s that we were able to have the equipment to actually measure it.

Initially, HRV was used to measure the status of the Russian cosmonauts. So, when they started putting them up in space, they were like, Oh, how do we know if they're going to be healthy or how do we know if something goes wrong? Because the communication, the radio waves were very, very limited on the amount of data that they could move back and forth.

So, what they did was they found this heart-rate variability and found a way to actually measure it, so they would have the cosmonauts do a little heart rate strap and they would send back literally three to four bits of data from one right after the other, which is called the RR intervals. And then, they would process that basically back in Moscow or wherever they were monitoring them and they would translate that into their heart rate variability score, which would give them a marker of how much stress they were under.

That very similar methodology is still used now, and when I started doing research on it, it was probably almost 10, 12 years ago, the equipment we bought to use was probably $12,000–20,000. It was in the tens of thousands of dollars and you had to come into the lab, and I had to write this little silly MATLAB program to transfer this and to take it and drop it into QBOs, and there was a monkey motion to get the numbers out of it to process it. So, it was kind of a pain in the ass.

But starting about seven years ago, they had phone apps that would start to do this via your smartphone now, which is like a microprocessor in your pocket, and there's many of those programs now. You can literally wake up in the morning, put on a little heart rate strap or some type of finger sensor. It'll take 60 seconds in the case of ithlete to measure. And the accuracy in most of them, I would say, not all of them, but the ones that have published research shows that it's actually really good. It's probably almost equivalent to some of the bigger, fancier pieces of equipment.

And the nice part then is you get a daily measurement that takes just a few minutes because if you're training, you have other stressors you're doing. Maybe you want to do a seven-day fast or whatever and just some crazy stuff like Logan is doing. Just start slow. You can then see how your stress level is changing from day to day, and that to me is the most useful, because a one-time-point measure of stress, yeah, even if it's the morning, not that useful. But now can I see how it changes each day. Oh, I did something different in my nutrition. Oh, I did some different training. Now it becomes useful to try to help figure out what's going on with how your body is responding to all the different things that you're doing.

Logan: 04:47 This just popped in my mind. Are you aware of any researcher correlating this to the stress hormone cortisol in the body?

Mike: 04:53 There is some. The hard part is that they don't line up quite as neat because they're looking at stress response, but a little bit different. So, cortisol is, in my opinion, a little bit more of a long-term-ish management of stress, right? So, if we all of a sudden run, walk through the woods and we see a bear, yeah, by all means, cortisol is definitely going to go up and then it'll come down. But most of the changes that we're going to see immediately are modified by the nervous system itself.

So, related to heart-rate variability, we'll see that the parasympathetic side, the kind of, quote-unquote, “rest and digest” branch of the autonomic nervous system, that will actually go and change very fast. And then, we'll have the sympathetic portion of the nervous system, the stress kind of fight or flight, and that will also change very fast, too.

I tell people it's like having a break in the gas pedal on your car. I push down harder on the brake. That's more parasympathetic activation. The car is going to slow down, right? More rest and digest. If I jam harder on the gas, it's going to be fight or flight, and that's going to make the car go faster, but the engine is going to be under more stress.

So, there are associations between cortisol and HRV. Most of the time acutely they'll look at specific nerve trafficking. They'll take a tiny needle, which I've had done, which is not a lot of fun, and they jam it in one of the nerves, and they actually listen to the nerve traffic, and then they can do different things like maybe put you on a tilt table and tilt you up and down, and do different things and monitor HRV at the same time, and see how there are kind of correlated to that.

Logan: 06:37 Hmm. Interesting.

Mike: 06:38 Yeah, and my comment on that, too, is that a lot of people get mad at me for talking about HRV and then they're off doing four-point cortisol tests all the time. I'm like, Wait a minute, yeah, I don't know how much the saliva cortisol test is associated with things. I think it's an okay marker and gets you in the ballpark, but even if it is a hundred percent nuts accurate, you're still talking $100 to $400 a test. How often are you really going to be able to do that? I can give you an app on your phone that costs very little to almost free. Now you can do it daily and see how things are changing, which to me is a lot more interesting than just these single-point measures.

Logan: 07:14 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and then, it speeds up the feedback loop because you can do that. Rather than like once a quarter, -

Mike: 07:21 Yeah.

Logan: 07:21 - once a month, you can do it every single day, which is important.

Mike: 07:24 Exactly. Yeah, it'd be like learning, right? It'd be like, Hey, go squat and I'm going to tell you how your farm looks like four months from now. Oh, okay, that sounds like a horrible idea. Or I can pay a coach to tell me on each rep how I'm doing. Hey, that sounds better if I'm going to learn.

Logan: 07:42 Yeah. I mean, are you familiar with the concept from Chinese medicine or Ayurveda, the pulse diagnostic?

Mike: 07:48 What exactly is that?

Logan: 07:50 Holding different points which would correspond to the different meridians, and being able to feel the difference in the pulse on those points and how that would map to things. I was just thinking about it, so it's like the most simplified version would be just counting the pulse, right, which is something doctors do that, but now our science is getting to these things. We can measure heart rate variability and I'm not sure … I don't know a whole lot about this subject. I’m certainly not a master of it by any sense of the word because that's a very deep thing. But yeah, being able to feel these different things. So, it's interesting to see if our technology continues to kind of map more of those things that ancient Chinese masters have been doing for millennia.

Mike: 08:29 Yeah, I mean, I think there is something to it at a high degree, right? I mean, if you want to go back in time and look at the history of HRV, just look up “history of heart-rate variability.” The main author is Billman, B-I-L-L-M-A-N. He does a really good summary of just the principles and everything, and my guess is that people probably figured this out hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago. Like I said, there's some data to support that and that they were feeling variability. They may not have known what it was as a concept, though. So, in theory, you can feel differences in variability possibly and that can be a marker for stress.

There’s some old thing called the Coca Pulse Test. I think it was by a chiropractor from the ’60s or ’70s maybe—I might have got that wrong—that said to try to pick up food allergies and different things, to eat a specific food and then measure if your heart rate went up or down.

I haven't seen any data that's said that is a useful thing or not, because now you get into the thing of, Oh, let's say I did that and let's say I used heart rate variability. Hmm, if I became a little bit more stressed or less stressed, is that, quote-unquote, “good or bad”? Right? I could do a biopsy of my right bicep after I did a bunch of curls, and look at the muscle fiber and go, Oh my God, that's horrible. Never do that again. The muscle’s completely destroyed. Or I could do it four days after it's healed, and like, Oh, wow, it's a little bit better.

So, I think that's where it gets messy to try to determine, Is that something that is useful or not? And, again, we always want to say it's good or bad, but physiology is kind of dynamic, so it depends upon when does it happen and what is kind of the long-term outcome of that?

Logan: 10:18 Yeah, this is where the terms “eustress” and “distress” can be useful.

Mike: 10:22 Correct.

Logan: 10:22 There are some things that are just plain bad like if I whack you in the head with a hammer, that's not really good. I mean, there's a healing response and maybe it will come back a bit stronger to be able to protect from that, but not so much like it's not a useful thing, whereas doing any sort of exercise, you're stressing the body in order for that to trigger adaptation, to trigger mechanisms within the living body to come back stronger from it. So, yeah, that's a very good point there.

And we know with our food, there's a whole thing about, oh, you shouldn't eat lectins in food, now people talking about this, and, yeah, there may be some cases where you should be avoiding or cutting down on these, but we also see that these are the plant stressors. They go in their body and stress things in order to make our body better adapt and come back healthier from doing so.

Mike: 11:08 Yeah, I would agree with that as that. Is that—I'm going to butcher this, but was it a xenohormedic response I think? Or something like that it was.

Logan: 11:15 Yeah, something like that.

Mike: 11:16 Yeah, there’s actually a technical term for it. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I like the concept of eustress and distress. To me, that's most useful and, yeah, I mean, all things being equal, I would say a marker of health is to have the most amount of metabolic flexibility you could.

All things being equal, they had this robot a while ago called EATR and it was an autonomous scavenging robot that could use all sorts of different things for fuel. To me, that's kind of the apex of what humans should be like, Oh, I can eat red meat and I'm fine. Oh, I can go eat some of these lectins and I'm fine. Right? You should be able to eat a wide variety of things and still be okay.

Again, that doesn't mean I'm only going to survive on ginger root extract the rest of my life or whatever. People get kind of crazy with one particular thing, but having a good variety of different things, we get different beneficial compounds from them, and then ideally having a response from them be pretty good. Right? You can handle fats pretty good. You're going to handle a long fast and you do good. You can handle eating two bowls of white rice and you don't end up passed out in an insulin-induced stupor under your table. It doesn't mean you want to do all of those things all the time, though, and that's where people get stuck.

Logan: 12:31 Right, so adaptability. I like the term “antifragility” because I think it really [crosstalk]--

Mike: 12:35 Yep, that’s my favorite word with that because you're getting better with stress, right? I can drop a Tupperware bowl on the kitchen floor, and it'll bounce around and not break, but it didn't get better from that impact. And so, a lot of physiologic living systems like humans, I go to the gym and I do exercise, and initially, we measure you may be the next day. You're actually a little bit worse. I'll give you a couple of days and you recover, and then you're actually a little bit better. So, you actually became better because of that appropriate amount of stress.

Logan: 13:12 Yeah, in the very first episode of this podcast, I was defining health. Most people think of it as the absence of disease and I don't think that's a very good definition. Instead, it's the great antifragility or great adaptability to stressors.

And I did a thought experiment a while back of what would ideal health actually look like? And a whole bunch of things like, of course, you need to get all the micronutrients the person needs and whatnot, but this person wouldn't be lacking in stress. They’d actually be under a whole bunch of different stressors, but with the ability to handle those stressors and come back better from them, in which case, they'd actually be getting better over time, not worse.

Mike: 13:48 Yeah, I one hundred percent agree. When I do presentations, I show a picture of—have you ever seen a huge vehicle called the Unimog?

Logan: 13:57 No, I don't think I have.

Mike: 13:59 I just saw a picture of it next to a Land Rover and it dwarfs the Land Rover, and a Land Rover is not a small vehicle. It's much bigger than a Hummer H2, and I believe they used them towards the end of World War II. So, I actually got to hang out and find warm air in Baja, and I am standing next to it and the top of the tire is just under my armpit. This is a huge vehicle, but they use it for a lot of races in Baja and across the desert because it has super-high clearance suspension and it has all these things to literally absorb and handle a massive amount of stress.

So, I always think of physiology is similar. What amounts of stress can you take on and sort of absorb, and get back to baseline or homeostasis faster? I would agree that that to me is a much better marker of health, and indirectly we have all these markers that are literally that.

What is heart rate recovery? Hey, let's stress the piss out of you with exercise and see how fast your heart rate gets back down to baseline.

What’s an oral glucose tolerance test? Oh, let's give you 80 grams of glucose and see how high you go and how fast you get back down to baseline, without going hypoglycemic on the other end, right?

What is performance? How fast can you change directions, whether that's a sprint, change of direction in a football game, changes of the direction of a heavy deadlift off the floor? Right?

So, we have all of these kinds of indirect, I would say, markers of that concept already.

Logan: 15:37 Absolutely. And, of course, there's many of them because the human body is very adaptable and can try a lot of different things out.

Mike: 15:44 Definitely.

Logan: 15:45 With the heart-rate variability, just to kind of close the loop on our idea there, so if you're observing that every day and making changes just because you have, let's say, less variability the next day, then that doesn't necessarily mean that thing is bad. It means you're more stressed. That could be stress in a good way versus a bad way.

For instance, the exercise thing, once again, the next day, if it was a really hard workout, you'd probably have a lot less heart-rate variability. That's not necessarily saying it's a bad thing. You have to look at the trends over time.

Mike: 16:15 Yeah, and that's where people would go kind of awry, like recently there's a bunch of people who have their undies in a bunch because HRV and research wasn't necessarily absolutely predictive of acute performance or even over a short multi-week training study. Again, one of the studies did show they got to the same result by using HRV versus not using HRV, and I won't go down that whole rabbit hole.

But all you have when you look at HRV is a measure of stress only on the autonomic nervous system. I would argue the autonomic nervous system, if you want to measure one thing for stress, that's a really good thing to measure because it controls a lot of stuff in the body, but, like you mentioned even with cortisol, it's not absolutely everything. All right?

A lot of people are obsessed with, Hey, what is the one metric that can predict performance? It's probably a performance, right? I mean, doing a vertical jump can get you close and some stuff for reactive strength, things of that nature, but non-performance metrics, and we know they're a real thing, but the physiology is not quite that simple like fatigue is a multifaceted thing. And everyone listening to this knows this, right?

How many people listening to this have gotten up one day like, Man, I don't feel very good? I'm supposed to go to the gym today and do heavy deadlifts? When you get there, you kind of get through your warmups, and you're like, oh, I'm feeling a little bit better. You should. You pulled a 10-pound (PR 17:40) out of nowhere. Right?

It happens. It's probably not going to happen all of the time, but you're not going to do that every single day. Right? I can take my little Jetta and drive to Cub Foods and redline it. I can get there faster, but I'm not going to be expected to do that every day and expect that the engine's going to last 250,000 miles. So, there's always a cost somewhere associated with it.

And what you said is also true. There may be some days where I want to see a worse, quote-unquote, “HRV score” the next day, right? I'm maybe trying to reach something that's a little bit higher, so I need to and impose enough stress that it may take me 24, 48, 72 hours or longer to get back to baseline from that stress.

Again, that's not inherently a bad thing. However, if I don't realize that and I don't know that, and I tried to repeat that thing again three days later, eeh, I may get away with it, but if I do that enough, it's not going to be quite so good. So, to me, my little, quote-unquote, “golden rule of HRV” is it's only telling you the status of your autonomic nervous system at that point in time when you measure it, which is now only the first thing in the morning, the measurement.

And, to me, that's still super useful, right, because I can see how much stress my body is under. The hard part is it could be from a whole bunch of different things. It could be from poor nutrition. It could be you had an accident and your dog, unfortunately, died the day before. You got in an argument with your spouse or training was harder than you expected. Right? It could be a lot of different things. All of those are going to provoke a pretty big stress response.

And so, that's the tricky part about HIV. It’s kind of trying to figure out, What are kind of the main things? What are some of the main drivers? And then, I use that to kind of autoregulate performance long term because I can look to see, okay, if let's say their lifestyle is good and not much is going on there if we just simplify it and I really start pushing them hard on training.

The first kind of cycle I do with new clients is I just push them by adding more volume each week until they tell me that they hate life and their HRV goes in the tank, because within one cycle, I have a really good idea of about how much volume and how much stress their body can handle.

And, again, this is done in an intelligent manner. I don't want huge load spikes or anything like that, but some people get up to doing five, six, seven sets of training a day and maybe training five to six days per week. Most people aren't nearly close to that high. But, by looking at HRV, that gives me an idea because I'm getting that response of their specific physiology, so I have some data to know, Okay, ooh, getting kind of close here. Ooh, might kind of go over the edge there.

And then, I'll actually use that. So, if I'm programming, say, for a powerlifter to peak for a big meet, we may take then nine or 10 weeks, push all the volume up super high. Ideally, we want to see HRV is starting to tank maybe two weeks out, and then I'll run a very long taper to make sure we have enough time to replace, kind of resolve all of that stress so that they have a little bit of super-compensation on the day that they're being tested.

Logan: 21:03 Yeah, that's really good stuff. I have a question with HRV. I imagine you've been doing this for yourself for quite a long time.

Mike: 21:09 Yeah.

Logan: 21:10 Can you do it without measuring it? Do you pretty much know where you're at?

Mike: 21:14 What's funny is I've been trying to do that for years, so I've been doing my own HRV daily for seven years. I mean, I've literally probably only missed a handful of days, and people are like, Hey, you dumbass, don't you know anything about your own body? Why the eff are you still measuring HRV?

And the answer is, most of the time, I'm pretty close, but—and I stole this quote from Simon who runs ithlete and I agree with him—10 to 20 percent of the time, I'm not even close at all. And the thing that people forget is that some stressors are unconscious.

For example, I recently was down in South Padre, Texas. We drove down, did a bunch of kiteboarding. It was super fun. Stayed in a slightly different place. And my HRV was the highest it's ever been before we left. Even traveling down, everything was looking great, and I get there. I go out and ride. It was super cold out, but not a big deal.

And then the next day—every day I took my HRV for literally the next nine days—it just was on this roller coaster, headed downhill, and I'm like, What the hell? I'm playing with different things with sleep and recovery, and training, and trying to figure it out, and it still kept going down. I'm like, This is so weird.

At the end, I was left with, huh, I wonder if it's from kiteboarding and trying to do jumps, and just massive amount of neurologic input to your eyeballs and vestibular, and that kind of stuff. We’ve changed almost everything else we can.

We stayed in a place that had two open bedrooms. I'm like, Let's just try the other bed for just the hell of it. Boom. The next day it goes up like eight points. I’m like, What? Try it again. Next day, it goes up eight points. Again, maybe it's all negative associations with one bed versus the other. Maybe it was one had kind of a foam mattress on it and it does tend to accumulate a lot more heat and things like that. I don’t know. But, within two days, I felt way better for some odd reason.

So, if I hadn't been doing HRV, what I found in the past was I would tend to just bury myself in a hole because I'm like, No, that can’t be good. You're feeling off today. There's no reason you should be off. Just train harder, you pussy. Or if I look at the number and go, Huh, okay, this is a lot lower than normal. Eeh, I feel a little off today. There's probably something going on. I don't need to necessarily figure out what it is right away, but I know, okay, I'm just going to do some music cardio today. I'm going to move my strength training until tomorrow. Right? So, yeah, it's been interesting. I'd say most of the time I'm pretty close, but there are some days where I'm super far off. It’s interesting and maddening at the same point.

Logan: 23:56 Yeah, in the next seven years, maybe you'll be able to dial it in a little bit further, but, yeah, it's interesting.

Mike: 24:02 Yeah. It's a … I don't know. And then, I go into the whole thought process of like, Oh, do I want to be conscious of all the stress I'm under? I don’t think so. That doesn't sound like a good solution either. So, yeah.

Logan: 24:14 Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. We don't, aren't aware of all this stress, like I talked about EMS. Sure, there seem to be those hypersensitive people that can notice things and some of them may be crazy as well, but the average person doesn't, but that doesn't mean it's not affecting them down to a cellular level. That can be causing things that's going on. So, there are all kinds of hidden dangers or stressors out there that may be having an impact. Who knows what was up with that bed that could have possibly been it? And it could have been something else and not even related to the bed.

Mike: 24:46 Totally. Yeah, totally. It's the analogy of the … a buddy of mine tells a story of the barking dogs in the room. The dog doesn't know why he got locked in the room. He just keeps barking, and one day the door opens and the owner lets him out. So, now he just goes, Every time I bark, then if I get stuck in a room, the door will open, right? Just the simple association.

And I have a couple of friends who are kind of very proud of how sensitive they are to things, and I'm like, Hmm, that's interesting. If I need a human guinea pig detector for stuff, assuming you're accurate, but, man, as a way if I wanted to live my life, I don't want to be that sensitive to stuff. That sounds like you kind of went a little too far in the wrong direction, in my biased [opinion].

Logan: 25:30 Being a canary in the coal mine has its drawbacks.

Mike: 25:33 Yeah, that canary is …

Logan: 25:36 Yeah. All right. There’s so much more we could discuss here, but coming up at the end time here, where would you like people to go if they like what they heard today and want to check out more about you?

Mike: 25:47 Yeah, the best place is probably just the website, which is MikeTNelson.com, M-I-K-E-T-N-E-L-S-O-N. At the top of the main page there, there'll be a way to get on the newsletter, which is free. Most of my content, similar to Logan’s, goes out over the newsletter, so that's where you'll be able to find most of it. I've got articles and a bunch of other stuff on the site.

And I do have a certification for people, especially trainers, who are looking for nutrition and recovery aspects. They can find that at FlexDiet.com, F-L-E-X-D-I-E-T [dot] com. There’ll be a way you can get on the waitlist and on the newsletter there. Usually, we release that … yeah, right now we've been doing it about quarterly per year, so it's kind of a mashup of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting, along with a bunch of other stuff.

So, those would be the two best places.

Logan: 26:38 Excellent. Thank you so much. And, like I said, Mike has a new podcast, so you want to mention -

Mike: 26:42 I do.

Logan: 26:42 - that as well. Not Another Fitness Podcast.

Mike: 26:45 Yeah, Not Another Fitness Podcast. I had a little podcast contest and I had a lot of really good ideas, but I was like, Oh, that one kind of makes sense because that’s the reason I did it, do it for a long time. But these are little daily ones. They're some daily kind of shorter concepts that are five to 15, maybe 16 minutes long, and then, I’ll be having a few more interviews probably coming out next year, if we can get a few more funds.

And, eventually, I'd like to be at the point where I can go out and fly out, and visit people and hang out with them in person, and get some good info that way, too. But, yeah, we'll see where it goes. But, right now, it's just mostly pure information as another way of trying to get better, like yourself, information out into the world, make it a better place.

Logan: 27:30 Excellent. Thank you so much, Mike, for joining me today. I hope everyone enjoyed this and as always, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Mike: 27:37 Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Logan Christopher: 00:18 Welcome everyone. Back today with another guest, my friend, Mike T. Nelson. I haven't talked to you in a little bit, but this should be a good catch-up call for us, and diving into some very interesting things. For those of you not familiar with, has a Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology. He has spent some, was it 16 years in college, so you spent?

Dr. Mike T. Nelson: 00:40 Yeah, so I’ve been staying there for a long period of time. Yeah.

Logan: 00:44 Very dedicated to understanding science and everything involved in health and fitness. We will be diving into various different areas and topics around that today. One of the main things you're most well-known for is the idea of metabolic flexibility, but that's not really a mainstream word. Could you define that for people that aren't familiar with it?

Mike: 01:07 Yeah. In fitness we have, all these people would tend to argue about if we just look at the two main fuels, fat versus carbohydrates, kind of which is the best fuel, and there's debates and disputes and all this kind of stuff, which to me doesn't make any sense because it's all like most things you could answer with—Well, it depends, and what context are you talking about?

The metabolic flexibility is—how well does your body use fat and how well does your body use carbohydrates for fuel?

And the third part is—how well and how fast can it switch back and forth between the use of fats and the use of carbohydrates?

And what I like about it is it kind of respects the actual dynamic nature of physiology. Instead of trying to say, Oh, it's a nail, so it must be a hammer, or let's try to use a screw instead and, oh, let's get the screwdriver and try to put that with the nail.

And, yeah, some of those concepts, that once you hear it, you're just kind of like, Oh, that almost makes too much sense. This can't be real.

Logan: 02:12 Right, biology is a lot more complex than many people give it credit and they're always trying to simplify it down, which inevitably leads to dumbing it down and getting to this idea of, Oh, all carbs are bad, right? Something like that or all fat is bad when really there a nuanced understanding is going to be more accurate and actually more help.

Mike: 02:33 Yeah, and that's kind of, and I'm sure you're in the same boat of, I'm always thinking about how do I tell it in a way that it makes sense to people, but not making it so simple now that it's just not even correct. It's like how far can you push that spectrum, but yet still maintain that it's correct? Because I think, in fitness, people go, exactly what you said, a little bit too far and, ooh, this is good and this is bad. And it's hard because just crazy humans want just a simple answer, right? We want to know what is “the” answer. It's probably not quite that simple with physiology.

Logan: 03:11 Right. So, let's talk about it. Take the average standard American eating, the standard American diet. Would you say they don't really have metabolic flexibility, what's going on with their diet and how that is operating for the fuel sources for them?

Mike: 03:26 Yeah, I would say, in general, they're probably more compromised in that area. We do know that if we go to the extreme of that and we look at something that's a pathology like Type 2 diabetes. So, Type 2 diabetes is kind of classically thought of as a problem with carbohydrates, and while that is true to some degree, we see that changes in how your body can process glucose.

Insulin will then go up, so your body says, Hey, we’ve got to get all this glucose out of the bloodstream. We’ve got to stuff it in some form of tissue or transfer it around and make fat out of it, or put it in muscle or stick it in the liver as glycogen. But we can't have this high amount of blood glucose folding around the blood because at some level that becomes toxic.

But most healthy people will never get to that point. They'll have other issues before that. But if you have a Type 2 diabetic, and especially if they're uncontrolled, you can see super high levels of blood glucose.

So, it is true that they do have a problem with the glucose, kind of carbohydrate end of the spectrum for many reasons, but as the disease progresses, what people may not realize is they actually started having issues with the fat end of the spectrum also. So, insulin itself can be thought of as a fuel-selector switch, which I stole from Dr. Jeff Bullock—when we have high amounts of insulin, that actually pushes your body to use more carbohydrates or increase carbohydrate oxidation. When we have lower levels of insulin, that actually pushes the body to use fats primarily as the fuel.

So, if you go back to our Type 2 diabetes friend, they start having issues with glucose, so the body says, Ha, I have a solution. No worries. We'll just keep putting out more insulin, right? We need a bigger signal, a bigger stimulus driver to get that glucose out of the bloodstream and we'll just start jamming it into a bunch of other tissue. If you do blood levels, you'll see over time as the disease progresses, they need more and more insulin to do the same job. But now because that insulin is higher, it actually prevents them or reduces their capacity to use fatty acids as a fuel.

I actually said, if we want to use fats more as a fuel, all things being equal, we actually want insulin to be lower. This high baseline level of insulin is actually preventing them from using fats as well as they could, so our Type 2 diabetes friend actually becomes very metabolically inflexible. They have a hard time at the carbohydrate end of the spectrum. They have a hard time overtime on the fat end of the spectrum, so they're getting kind of crunched from both ends. And the average American is probably somewhere on that spectrum also.

The literature is kind of across the board as to what they have a bigger issue with, but what I've seen just from testing and my view of the literature is that they're kind of coming closer and closer to becoming a Type 2 diabetic. The cutoff for that is kind of a weird arbitrary thing and I think it's better thought of more of a spectrum. Right? I tell clients it's a dimmer switch, not an on and off switch, although for some point we need a line in the sand for a diagnosis that says, Oh, yeah, you hit these markers. Now your blood glucose is 130. You definitely are a diabetic. But the reality is it's much more of a slow progression of kind of slowly turning that dimmer switch in the wrong direction.

Logan: 06:54 Yeah and they call that like syndrome X or metabolic disorder, various names over the years to indicate kind of that spectrum or that pathway that's leading to diabetes, correct?

Mike: 07:06 Yeah, and that's kind of a mess from a research standpoint. If you look back at the original proposer of that, so Gerald Reaven’s original idea was that it's primarily based off glucose and insulin, and over time you basically have to meet these five separate criteria in order to kind of, quote-unquote, “qualify” for that disease. So, by definition, yeah, if you have, I think it's three out of the five markers, yeah, you definitely have a metabolic disorder.

However, when we try to look at it from a research standpoint, we've kind of lumped up a whole bunch of stuff together, right? Which three of the five did you have? What is the main driver? It's like, in my biased opinion, I think from a research standpoint, trying to get to a better answer, it's just made a mess out of everything. But from an actual progression of these things, yep, we, unfortunately, are seen more these people in the U.S. headed in that direction.

Logan: 08:01 And one of the things that seem clear to me and I’d like your thoughts on that, carbohydrates aren't bad, but there does seem to be when you're combining high carbohydrates and high fats as we'll often find in many dessert items, that's where things can be especially problematic.

Mike: 08:17 Yeah. I would say, maybe. I mean, I guess if you would have asked me this five or seven years ago, I probably would’ve said yeah. But looking at the research, I think if you wanted to create the worst possible potential metabolic issue, I would agree that potentially very high fat and very high levels of glucose would be the route to go, and there's a very interesting study that they tried to replicate this and they compared trained individuals to untrained individuals.

And so, at first, they gave them an IV, I think, of around 80 grams of glucose, so kind of what's called an IV glucose tolerance test if you give bolus dose of 80 grams, so pretty big whopping dose of carbohydrates.

And then, they made it even more complicated. They did an infusion of what's called intralipid, which is literally just a large infusion of fat, right into the vessel, so they're purposely bypassing the oral absorption through digestion because they want to try to make this worst-case scenario and just jack up both of these to sky-high levels.

What you found was that if you were a healthy person and had done a fair amount of exercise training, your body could buffer that to a pretty good degree. And if you were untrained or the average kind of person that's attached to their couch cushion, oh boy, you were a metabolic train wreck because now you've got high levels of potentially insulin; you've got all kinds of screwed up dynamics.

To me, the biggest problem is that not only are your mechanics of the hormones and all that kind of stuff, as you just don't have a big enough engine or a big enough sink to dispose any of it, you basically just kind of overrode the whole entire system, where if you're an athlete and you've got a much bigger sink, be it muscle or liver glycogen, different places that you can actually take these things and kind of safely store them away so they don't kind of back up into the system.

The little bit related to that is that there's an old, and it’s probably five years old now, a mouse study, because I thought for a year as I'm like, Hey, we're trying to get athletes leaner. Could we change the sensitivity of insulin in the fat cell, right, in theory, to try to redirect this substrate so it doesn't get stored as body fat?

I did find eventually that they did a knockout study in mice, so they genetically engineered these mice so that they could not traffic, in this case, fat, directly into the fat cell. What they found was that these mice had horrible damage to their liver, their blood levels of triglycerides, so basically the fat backed up in the blood and caused all sorts of just horrible things to happen to the poor little guys.

So, it seems like the bigger sink we have, the better you can take those things and kind of let them flow into the fat cell, into the muscle cell, get them out of the bloodstream so they're not really kind of cause it and as much havoc there. And then, for the body composition standpoint, can we increase that kind of flow for the root both glucose, right, so using muscle glycogen, so replete and deplete, and then also through fat? Can we increase how much fat is being used on the other side, so increase what's called fatty acid oxidation?

So, I tell people, imagine you're going to go take a soak in your bathtub, right? Everyone gets all excited about measuring blood levels of ketones and glucose, and all that kind of stuff, and I think it's interesting and it definitely gives us some data. But just like if I turn the faucet on super high and then for some dumb reason I leave the drain open, if I can get enough water coming into that bathtub fast enough, I can get the level of water in there to rise. Right? So, blood glucose would just be looking at what is the level of water in my bathtub, but it doesn't tell me anything about how much water is going through that system. It's just a snapshot photograph in time.

There's some interesting data on this, too, that if you are basically pulling more energy through the system that everything starts to work a little bit better. Right? So, maybe if I have a really big faucet, I have a high caloric intake, I’d better match that with a high caloric expenditure of some kind, and if I do that, I can buffer a lot of stuff and I'm probably going to be pretty good.

If I do the inverse, even though I keep the water level of the bathtub at the same level, but I dramatically decrease how much is coming in and dramatically decrease how much is going out, I can be okay because I'm kind of in a caloric balance, but to me, it just seems like the system is a lot more fragile, for lack of a better word, at that point.

And, again, that's pretty out there and really pretty highly theoretical, but I think athletes, to answer your question, have pretty good buffering capacity, most of them, which we'll talk about for fat and carbohydrate use, and if you're combining things at a meal, assuming the caloric load is not just astronomically high, you can probably get away with it and do okay. If we take that same idea to an untrained population, we do see that they have a much, much harder time dealing with that.

Logan: 13:28 Yeah, that all makes sense, and to kind of sum it up, what you're saying here is that exercise, some sort of activity, in a sense, trumps diet. Obviously, both are important, but with the activity, you can handle less of a, let's say, quote-unquote, “good diet.”

Mike: 13:47 Yeah, and that’s one thing I've noticed, too, because I've always been fascinated by, so I did some work with some female, pretty high-level college sprinters, some of the top-10-rated sprinters in the U.S.—this was many years ago—and a guy referred me to them, and initially my thought was, Oh my God, these are very high-level collegian athletes and the cool part about track events is everything is timed, so it's like a legitimate thing. You know where you're ranked pretty easily, not as fuzzy a sport like football and things like that.

And my first thought was, Oh man, they're going to be so dialed in. I don't really know what I can do with them as NCAA regulations about supplement recommendations, that kind of stuff. And I'm like, Okay, cool, just go out. Just get four days of a diet log from them. Send it to me. We'll set up all the calls. We’ll get everything going.

I get the dialogues from them and I'm looking at it, and I'm like, What? Fast food for lunch. Fast food for dinner. Calories were super low. No green things other than green-colored M&Ms, you know?

My first thought was, This can’t be right. Were you on holiday? Did you go on vacation? And then, they're like, No, this is what I normally eat. I'm like, Really? And then, I'm left with, holy crap, they're eating, what I would say, very poor-quality food and probably even under-consuming that, but yet their performance is crazy.

So, I always like asking them, nutrition nerds’ hangout, Hey, when you work with elite athletes, how are you amazed at their nutritional intake? And, more often than not, they're like, Oh, this is just horrible. But if you're at that high level, Michael Phelps was a very big example of this, granted I think some of what he did was overblown because I know people that worked with him, but he did take in a massive amount of calories. They take in a massive amount of carbohydrates, things of that nature. But people forget that he was literally swimming most of the day, and you're in the water, which has a thermal load, things of that nature.

So, if you're a freak of the freaks and you're doing a lot of movement, you can probably get away with a lot of stuff. Right? And most you see are younger, earlier in their career, too, and, again, a lot of what we're looking at is more performance, not necessarily healthy either. So, I think if you have enough movement and your movement is good, I think you can get away buffering a lot more things than what people realize and that they get really worried about.

And the second component to that, too, is if you're consuming more calories, right? I remember once years ago, Neal Maddox was one of the top early CrossFit athletes. I went to the gym or he had trained. I was talking to his coaches and staff, and we had posted a picture or maybe he did of him eating donuts in the evening. This was probably six years ago now maybe. Everyone in CrossFit lost their mind like, Oh my God, how is this high-level athlete eat two--

Logan: 16:35 It’s not paleo.

Mike: 16:36 Yeah, it’s not paleo. He’s eating two donuts for dinner. That’s horrible. But when you talk to him, he's like, Yeah, I ate literally about 3,600 calories of vegetables and fruit, and white rice and chicken, and, quote-unquote, “good clean foods,” end quotes, and he's like, I need to get my calories to at least 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day. Otherwise, my performance sucks and I just started losing too much weight. I found if I ate a few donuts and other things like that in the evening, it was very easy for me to keep in the calories that I wanted.

But he's already got probably everything else covered, especially in micro-nutrition and everything else, because his caloric, his needs are so high. If you've got a smaller person who's eating 1,200 calories a day, man, you just don't have a lot of room for a bag of Peanut M&Ms, you know? So, kind of growth factors.

Logan: 17:31 Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I've definitely seen this myself and talked about it that diet and performance, although there's some correlation that really doesn't need to be—I mean, often people end up going both ways—but then with the whole quality, so more micro-nutrient-dense foods, fewer chemicals and toxins, and all kinds of crap, you may not need that when you're young and performing even at the Olympic level, but continuing on that diet long term, we're going to see some negatives from that. So, anyone listening to this, obviously not thinking, Oh, I can just binge on fast food as long as I perform, not quite saying that. There's going to be longer-term chronic effects from such a diet.

Mike: 18:08 Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's a funny thing because I get hate mail from both sides of like, Oh, you said to eat two Pop-Tarts. How dare you tell people to eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast. Don't you know all the carbohydrates and they're processed? And I'm like, I just said if you can't handle eating two Pop-Tarts on occasion, you may have some things related to your metabolism that you need to work on. I didn't say eat two Pop-Tarts for every single meal.

Again, it also depends on what is the context, right? If that's looking at performance and ability to buffer glucose, yeah, it might be a good marker. I mean, I agree that most of the nutritional work I do with people, it's pretty basic—whole foods. Eat vegetables. Try to get as high quality of food as you can get or afford—and then if you're doing that a vast majority of the time and your movement is good, and everything else is on point, your performance, and longevity and health, and all those things are going to be probably pretty good.

And the other experiment that it's hard, I've noticed, with more elite athletes who may not have the greatest nutrition is, subconsciously, they're like, Hey, I'm already performing at this level eating what I’m eating. Why should I bother? And it's almost hard from a psychological standpoint to be like, Maybe you could be 2 percent better, which can be the difference between first place and fifth place where you're at now. We won't know until we run this experiment and try some of these other things to see if it improves.

Sometimes that's a hard sell, not always. I mean, even just the other day, a very elite athlete—I won't say his name or where he works, but he's in baseball—and we did some testing and his mercury levels were pretty crazy high. Again, I'm not trying to be his physician or anything like that. We just thought it was interesting to see.

So, I followed up. I didn't have any dietary logs at that point. I said, “Hey, here's what we found. This is kind of interesting.” His coach was like, Yeah, he eats high amounts of seafood all the time. We've had other tests in the past that have confirmed the same thing and he doesn't want to change.

But in the same athlete, in other aspects, he's very amenable to any type of change. A lot of times I think we forget, especially when we talk more about elite athletes that they're humans, too, and a lot of times are not that different from what we think they would be.

Logan: 20:31 Yeah, absolutely. I want to take this conversation into fasting. That's something I've been doing for a long time and I definitely feel it's one of the biggest keys to building this metabolic flexibility.

Mike: 20:44 I agree.

Logan: 20:45 It's interesting. There's some research, but really I don't feel like there's as much research as should be on this thing and that's probably because it's a free thing. There's no money in that I think that you can't market even supplements for fasting or whatnot, just it's a free thing anyone can do, but it's amazingly powerful.

Mike: 21:00 Yeah, I would agree with that.

Logan: 21:01 How does it play into, how do you see it helping increase our metabolic flexibility?

Mike: 21:07 Yeah, so how I got into fasting is, man, probably almost 12 years ago now, and even back then, I mean, fasting has been around for a long time. You can pull up all sorts of different religious texts of all sorts of mentions of fasting going back thousands of years. It’s not like it’s a new concept per se, but when you've been around in health and fitness for many decades now, a couple of decades, and you see the same trends kind of come and go, and fasting is one of those, other than the crazy detox things, which we'll kind of not consider, fasting for now. It hasn't really ever been that popular up until recently.

How I got into it was, I'm looking at metabolic flexibility and I'm like, Okay, so how do we increase the body's ability to use fat as a fuel? Of course, we can do exercise, but I'm like, But what about on the nutrition side? And the more I kept looking at stuff, the more I'm like, Hmm, I think insulin is probably one of the key hormones. Of course, it's not the only hormone, but one of the keys and insulin is nice because it's under a fair amount of dietary control. Right? Growth hormone, testosterone is very indirectly, very loosely correlated, but insulin is very much directly correlated.

Okay, so if I want to increase the use of fat, I probably want to get the low levels of insulin. Okay, I can not eat some proteins; some proteins are insulinogenic. I can reduce carbohydrates. Fat doesn't really have any insulin release per se, but no one's going to sit around and just do shots of olive oil or something like that, which just seems kind of crazy. I guess they would … now people put all sorts of stuff in their coffee, so it's close, but--

Logan: 22:45 I have drunk it straight from an olive oil bottle, so.

Mike: 22:47 Yeah, I have an occasion, too, when I was bulking once, but, yeah. So, I'm like, Oh, fasting. Oh, so what happens the longer someone's fasting? In healthy individuals, in around 12 to 18-ish hours, maybe a little longer, your basal levels, so your fasting insulin levels get to be the lowest that they're going to get, so it’s this little curve that goes down and then it just kind of flattens out. So, I'm like, Oh.

So, after that point and whatever metabolic stimulus low levels of insulin have, which is, again, debatable, but whatever they are, they would be maximized once that insulin hits that plateau at that low level. So, I started looking at fasting as a way to increase the body's ability to use fat.

Literally, right around that same time, a buddy of mine says, he's like, Hey, I've been doing intermittent fasting. I'm like, really? And at this time, I mean, 12-plus years ago, I was convinced that, oh my God, all your muscles are going to fall off your body because I've been told you needed a certain amount of protein and can cite all the protein studies. And he’s like, No, it's been good. My performance hasn't been dropping. I've been doing about one 24-hour fast per week, which was from actually Brad Pilon, Eat Stop Eat, which was the first one I read on that. He was [crosstalk]--

Logan: 23:59 Oh, it goes back further. Paul Bragg talked about that. That's how I -

Mike: 24:02 Oh, yeah.

Logan: 24:03 - originally got into and I've been doing that now a couple of years. I did it years back. But that's a good cycle.

Mike: 24:09 Yeah, I agree, and you can go back to a lot of the old-timers before that and they would do cycles of fasting and longer periods of not eating, and all sorts of stuff, so, yeah.

So, I was looking at it and he was like, Yeah, it's been good, and eventually I went back and looked at all the literature. I'm like, I should try this. I think there may be something to this. I was doing some training in Arizona and decided to do it. I made it to about noon the next day, so I went from 08:00 p.m. to about noon the next day and ran across the street to a Chinese buffet, which I was there for about two hours. I'm like, Oh, this fasting thing, this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. I knew it was stupid, right?

And then, I tried it again at another training down in Arizona by a couple of months later. The same thing happened and then I realized, I'm like, Oh, oh, I'm such an idiot, because, at the time when I was awake, I was used to eating every two to three hours. I had been doing that for about four to five years.

And I’m like, Whoa, that would be like someone coming into my gym and being like, Oh, hey, you've never deadlifted before. Let's just put 405 on it and if it doesn't work, I'll just yell at you to try harder. Unless you're like Andy Bolton or something like that when you first started training—I think he pulled 500 or something obscene—it's probably not going to happen. Right? But I can put 95 pounds on with bumpers. I could do 135. I could do 225. I could put it to whatever I want that's scaled to whatever your capacity is.

Then I’m like, Oh, I could do the same thing with fasting and make sure you ever run-in period and it's not so hard.

So, I took six to eight weeks and basically just took one day per week, usually Monday or Tuesday, and then just extended the fast each week by about a couple of hours.

What I found was after about six to eight weeks, it was pretty easy to go 19 to 24 hours and it wasn't too bad. And I started doing it with clients and my first thought was, Oh, it’s going to be a disaster. It's not going to work, and it surprisingly worked pretty good. I found if they had a good run in period. It was fine.

And I tried everything from a 500-calorie meal per day or just protein-only and all sorts of other different modifications, and I think, to my shock, just fasting where you're not consuming anything that has calories for a set period of time was the easiest from even a compliance standpoint, which I think some of it has to do with a little bit of black and white.

I mean, even now, as a recording, it just so happened that today was the day that I ended up doing a longer fast, so the last time I had was dinner last night, probably around 08:30 and I'm going to have dinner probably a little bit after we've finished this call in a couple of hours. But, even then, my wife asked me, “Oh, well, don't you want something to eat now before the podcast?” and I'm like, No, because one thing I did find is I like having a meal and everything already prepared of what I'm going to eat because, once I start eating, there is a tendency to just eat lots of weird things that I wouldn’t normally eat. So, as long as I sit down and have kind of a normal meal that I would have, I find that it works pretty good. Therefore, fasting was a way to increase the kind of the metabolic stimulus to upregulate the body's use of fats.

Logan: 27:22 Yeah, absolutely, because the body goes into a mode where it is using fat just because you're not eating every few hours to replenish the glucose and everything going on. Along with this, I’m curious, have you explored doing longer fasts at all as well?

Mike: 27:38 I have a little bit. I know you can comment on that because I believe you've done some of that.

Logan: 27:43 Yeah.

Mike: 27:43 It's been on my radar for a while. I mean, the longest I've ever done was almost two days and it wasn't too bad. I mean, I broke down 28 hours into it and had a fiber supplement before I went to bed because I was just really stupid hungry, but, surprisingly, the next day, once I woke up, I was pretty good.

I have on my list at some point to do a three-day just water-only fast and possibly a seven-day one. Again, if people have medical conditions, obviously, talk to their physician. All that kind of standard things apply. But I know a fair amount of people who have done it and that seems to be not too bad, and there are different versions of that—I mean, Valter Longo has his FMD version of Fasting Mimicking Diet and a bunch of other stuff in between—but there's not a lot of direct studies on it.

But I think you could make an argument that if your main goal is health and longevity, and maybe reducing your risk of cancer—again, I'm not a cancer researcher—that a three- to seven-day water fast quarterly might be useful. I think that's what Peter Attia does. I know I've talked to Dr. Dom D'Agostino about it, too.

But what was your experience?

Logan: 28:52 Yeah, I've done a few longer, my longest being about seven days and that was kind of a mixed-up plate. There really is all kinds of different fasting from water fasting, like one of the last day I ease back in with bone broth, which was really nice, so you have different types.

And it's interesting because different types are going to highlight certain benefits or downplay other ones. You see those within 24 hours or even less than that, the growth hormone spurting up, but it seems the autophagy, the recycling of the cells, that really kicks in a bit longer. It's probably starting to ramp up, but I think given that longer time period where we may see those cancer benefits. But, as you said, there's not a lot of research on this, just a lot of anecdotal evidence or people pointing to how it may be working. So, it is very fascinating.

But one of the things that's interesting is you do this for a while or you're doing some of the longer ones—it's like training, right?—so, once you've done a seven-day fast, that's the 405-pound deadlift. Then -

Mike: 29:49 Yeah.

Logan: 29:49 - lifting 95 pounds at 24-hour fast feels like nothing, and it's honestly like, oh, I'm not even hungry all day. It's so easy to slip into that, which is a good sign of metabolic flexibility having been built up.

Mike: 30:01 Yeah, I agree with that, and that's why I picked for most clients doing one 19- to 24-hour fast, working them up to that. I don't think most clients need to go much beyond that unless there are really specific things they're working on.

But even just that shorter distance, which is not a seven-day one at all, the biggest thing that was a surprise to me and clients was that, Oh, oh, you mean I don't have to eat? If I'm somewhere like the airport where the food is horrible and I have to pay through the nose at LAX for this horrible food, maybe I just won't eat. Oh, and I can function. I'm going to be okay. I'm not going to be face down on the guy in front of me on the plane, you know?

So, I think just realizing that you can do it, and obviously, you want to build up to that just like anything else, but what I’ve found is that that's kind of a very freeing thought process, too.

Logan: 30:53 Yeah, traveling is one of the extra times when I tend to fast as well for those exact reasons. It's just more convenient and it's like, Okay, what do I want to eat? This fast food or that fast food? There's no good quality food at most airports, so I find that quite useful.

Thank you for listening. We'll be back with Dr. Mike T. Nelson next week to talk about stress, adaptability, and heart-rate variability.

Get to the bottom of what's truly healthy in this crazy complex world so you can take back what is rightfully yours. Welcome to the health sovereign podcast. This is your host Logan Christopher.

00:19 Welcome back. I'm loading CRISPR and this is the health sovereign podcast and today we are covering the final points in the health sovereign creed number 15 and 16 how do you like this creed? Are you going to live by it? Are you going to strive to, it's not as simple like yes or no type thing, but steps along the journey with these two final points today. One somewhat similar to the last one. Then definitely a big stand on the final point. Anyway, let's dive in. Point number 15 I recognize that other large industries have track records of criminal and harmful activity in releasing manmade, dangerous chemicals into the environment. I will aim to educate myself on such actions and reduce the support of such companies for the health of all. So when I'm saying other large industries, so beyond big pharma, we went into that clearly in point number 14 that they have criminal track records of harmful activity.

01:21 But so do so many other big industries doing the same sort of thing. So we all know about tobacco and how it causes lung and other forms of cancer. Right? Everyone knows about this. Everyone is aware that the CEOs of tobacco companies straight up lied under oath saying they were not aware of such effects that they purposefully muddied the scientific waters, hired PR people, did campaigns, formed AstroTurf organizations, did all kinds of stuff in order for the public not to recognize the scientific fact so that they could continue to profit. Everyone knows that. Right. Well recognized. Do you think that is the only industry that has ever occurred in, are you so naive or does it occur in pretty much every single big industry out there? The same sort of tactics sometimes called the big tobacco playbook. The truth is people were doing it before tobacco.

02:27 That's just the well-known industry case where it seems so obvious now, but it wasn't necessarily obvious to people back before all of that happened. So we covered some of the stuff regarding the pharmaceutical companies in the previous episode with point number 14 but let's talk about some other people here. Let's take Monsanto for example. One of the least trusted companies out there, well they're not their own company now. They were bought out by Bayer and Bayer is a pharmaceutical company. They have these people operate in the same sort of circles, things that happen. So for a long time lots of people have brought up issues around genetically modified organisms and all the Monsanto scientists and people that they may incentivize and brow say it's completely safe and they'll run trials that show this. But once again, how you set up a study dictates the results you get for the large part, not how sound should be done, but how science is being done and with their many pesticides.

03:31 I understand drug companies and chemical companies are largely the same thing. A lot of the stuff comes from the same places. So Monsanto right now they are beginning to lose lawsuits over Roundup and the sex or Bayer who just bought them out. Cause it seems like there could be a whole lot of these, some big ones in news. Just the first couple, but yeah, there are quite a few hundred more in the pipeline. I do believe so. Losing lawsuits saying the jury is deciding, judges are deciding that their chemicals cause cancer. Now it's mostly in people that are like spraying Roundup and have lots of exposure to it, but if it's poisonous to people it's poisonous to people. Those matters. Sure. But once again, I think we addressed this before, this idea of reductionism with understanding our microbiome, the bacteria and other components of that. All of the original science was saying like, Oh this Roundup, these pesticides do not affect humans, but they affect bacteria and what are we largely made of?

04:40 Oh bacteria, the chicken meat pathway. Certain things that plants have and bacteria have that humans do not have. So they're losing lawsuits over this and I do hope that continues. I do think it will continue. That's one company. Monsanto, let's look at some others. Dupont and three M. Just recently this was on Netflix documentary. I had not really heard much about this case before, but I would recommend watching this. It's called the devil we know and is about DuPont and three M's production and cover-up of the harmful effects of Teflon. Yes, the nonstick coating on your pants. Do you still use Teflon? I sure don't because I'm aware of this and now you are about to be as well. How [inaudible] I guess it's fine if it is just being staying on there. But these pants scratch up over time. Little flakes of it getting there.

05:38 What they're seeing in the town where they produced it because they were just dumping this chemical into the water. That birth defects increased in humans and animals. Lots of farmers lost like their whole flock of animals because of it being in the water supply and they hit this up. They said it was safe. Are you seeing the pattern yet? This is what these sorts of companies do. It's unfortunate, and I'm not saying every single company out there does this, but if we look around, wow, so many companies do this. Think you need to understand that this point marketing, so I'm involved in marketing, marketing for my company, legendary strength telling people about fitness stuff. I do marketing and direct response form of it. Same with lost empire herbs, send out lots of emails and information and we have ads running in different places like marketing is not necessarily a bad thing.

06:27 How are you going to get people to find you? The thing is at this higher level what companies seem to do, what industries that taught people to do. There's like a different level of marketing where is really about propaganda and controlling the worldview of the masses. This higher-order thing, I mean think about say Coca-Cola. Oh we can use them as an example to Coca-Cola, other companies and the whole industry saying that sugar is not a problem. Sugar is not causing obesity. Sugar is not causing diabetes. Really come on and they'll come out with their own science that says, so if you look at, I just saw this recently, the science saying that sugar does not cause ill effects versus science that says the sugar that does cause ill effects. If we look at the industry funding or tie-ins of these different ones, it's almost 90% or over 90% of the stuff that says trigger does not have ill health effects was tied to the industry.

07:28 All the science that was not tied to the industry, 95% of that said there were negative health effects to it. This is how science actually operates in our world, not how it should not the ideal of science, but how it actually operates in reality. This is what all these big companies, these harmful criminal companies are doing. Also find science should be a crime and with a stiff penalty back to DuPont and 3m and Teflon, so all kinds of birth defects, all kinds of things. They denied it. They said the science was safe. They did all kinds of different things and eventually, they were, I think there are multiple causes, but in a big one they had to pay out $671 million. What was very cool was that the people, instead of just taking all that money, even though they had been harmed and deserved it, they took a large chunk of that and did a study showing real good science, showing completely that this was having some devastating effects and that it was just being spread in the environment.

08:32 That's a thing. It'd be nice. Okay. Hef lawn, like if you want to use it, that is your choice, but it's not just about you. You then wash the Teflon pan. Those flakes are going into your pipes and going into the water treatment plants or just getting dumped, who knows exactly where and how all these things get spread out. And of course, the company themselves just dumping tons of this, the byproducts of that production everywhere. Ecology, the bigger picture. We have to see this. So if it was just your choice, find, do whatever you want. Unfortunately, it's not just you. So we need to be aware of these things. So as I said, we can reduce the support of such companies for the health of all. Yeah. Instead of Teflon pans, get a cast iron pan. Yeah, you may be consuming more iron from doing so, but that's generally not a problem.

09:21 More of a problem for guys and women because women bleed monthly. Guys, you can do what is known as well. You can give blood or there's just the therapeutic phlebotomy, something like that. Forgetting the exact term right now, but just get rid of blood essentially. And we can reduce our iron supply that way. Cast iron overall much safer. Oh, imagine that. Something that has been used for hundreds of years. Sure. They cooked another thing, ceramics and, but iron has been used for a long, long time with not too bad of effects. But we come out with this [inaudible] logical intervention, Hey, things don't stick to it. So it's more convenient. And so much of our technology is about convenience and we find there are worse health effects from doing so. So here's the thing, this chemical specifically in the Teflon called C eight finally DuPont 3m, they said, okay, we're not going to do this, but DuPont, it's like, Nope, we're going to continue.

10:18 I mean, Teflon is still out there, right? We're going to just replace it with this other chemical called gen X. This other chemical probably has just as bad of the effects. We see this in the plastic industry. Everyone is looking for bottles and plastics that say BPA free now, right? This phenol a having some horrible estrogenic, you know, estrogenic effects in the body, horrible, horrible stuff and this was banned from baby bottles and stuff like that. But what is happening, unfortunately in many cases, not all, but in many, they are simply replacing it with BPS or BPF other bisphenols that likely have the exact same type of effects, maybe a little bit better, maybe a little bit worse. Even. This is what these industries do. Track records, look at history, look at many different examples and you can see the bigger picture of what is being done.

11:13 We will be going deeper on these topics. I feel like if everyone understood what is sometimes called the tobacco playbook, tobacco industry playbook, all these different ways that science is misled, that misinformation is purposely spread out there. So you have to understand this, that if people are willing to put profit over people's lives and that is ultimately what it comes down to in this are such people going to have any sort of problem with lying? No, they're not there. You're going to straight-up lie to your face lied to in media interviews and PR pieces, all kinds of places. They will lie, lie, lie because well a lot of people at the top of these industries, unfortunately, seem to be, I can't say for sure but if we look at behavior sociopath's psychopaths, we have this idea of the psychopath is the serial killer who goes and hunts people and sure that seems to be the case once in a while but think about this if you really wanted to cause a lot of harm is killing people one by one.

12:22 The best way to do it if you are in power dynamics, which these people seem to be and money is a good surrogate for that, but you can cause a lot of harm. There might be some sick people that actually enjoy the process knowing what they're doing here. Well, there are better ways to do that. Then being a serial killer or what we commonly think of as a serial killer, but you could look at this industry here. It's people making these decisions. Are they not serial killers? Far more successful than the biggest mass shooters of the mall. It seems to be the case. Once again, I look at all these different industries, see the same tactics, the same strategies being used, often the same PR companies. We can see the connections between these, the people that sit on the board of directors on one pharmaceutical company, maybe on a chemical company over here or a financial company over there.

13:13 See the bigger picture, see the pattern, and you can begin to break free and that's what it comes down to. So I'll aim to educate myself. That's the first basic. Got it. Understand any of this stuff is hard. There's so much stuff going on. Did you know that BPA is on Thermo receipts? So the receipts you get at a checkout, the BPA is on there oftentimes, and it'll just come off into your skin. If you don't know that, you may think it's just paper but it's not, so you need lots of education and that's something I'm hoping to bring you here on the health sovereign podcast. I hope I'm succeeding in that, but many other places as well. Aim to educate myself on such actions and reduce the support of companies for the health of all. It's a hard thing. We can't just kind of off.

13:58 You might be able to like pharmaceuticals. I am committed to not using a single pharmaceutical drug unless it is critically important for me. Again necessarily make that decision for other people, but that can do that myself. But what about plastics? Right. There's plastic everywhere. You can't get around this world without plastic, but you can certainly reduce your plastic use in the kitchen. I tried to use as little plastics as possible and yeah, you can get BPA free. You can even find some stuff that says all the biz females free, but can you get rid of it completely? You can do things like use glass instead of plastic. Can't get rid of it completely, but aim to reduce. I buy organic food as much as possible everywhere I possibly can. I support the people making the right kind of thing, even if it's industrial organic, and certainly, we see some of these tactics and things bled into that.

14:56 So local small farmers tend to be better, but even there this better. So aim to reduce, do the best you can and keep making steps towards doing better and better for your health and for the health of all. Because if almost no one supports pesticide use, those companies are no longer making money, no longer spraying this stuff, and that's one way we can tip the system Fords, greater health, greater life. Point number 16 I recognize that we all must be able to make our own medical choices for ourselves and our families. I will stand up against all medical totalitarianism. There's a reason I end on this point. Ultimately, this is what health sovereignty is about. I control, I make choices about my own health and because my baby, my children, until a certain age cannot make choices for themselves. I along with my wife, we must make choices for our family.

16:03 We are health sovereign, sovereign, right? If we are not able to make these, if the government makes them for us, well that is a slippery slope. You want the government deciding what is right for your health. When we see these kinds of behaviors going on with big companies, and this is something I didn't even touch in the creed, the revolving door, how a top CEO or a chief executive of some type or president or whatnot of a company will go and then join the regulatory agency that regulates that company. There are problems here and if this is the kind of government we have going on, cronyism, not just pure capitalism, but cronyism or which fortunately it seems capitalism always descends to do. We trust a government to make choices for us. I wish I could say, yes, our government is amazing, but let me ask, do you trust your government?

16:59 Everything going on in all these other areas. You trust your government, you think they have a right to make medical choices for us, especially here in the so-called land of the free, I mean our founding fathers still flawed people, but Holy crap. The foresight. They had the system they set up. Now that system is being systematically dismantled. People in these industries in related fields are doing a very good job of that, dismantling this system of checks and balances of separation of powers because the founding fathers saw that any power will lead towards totalitarianism and so that's a strong word, medical, totalitarianism. But for a doctor to say that you cannot make this choice regarding your health, I think that is wrong and it doesn't matter what that choice is because it is my choice to make. So examples of this cancer, a child gets cancer and they are saying you have to do conventional Western medical treatment for this cancer to not do so.

18:03 You are endangering that child. We will throw child protective custody at you. We will do all kinds of things because you are not making the right choice. Oh, that is harsh. Like this is bad. Now if your child has cancer and the government is dictating how you treat it when we can look at cancer treatment and see it's not the best thing in the world, here's the thing. It is not equal because if the people decide to do alternative medical treatment and the child has success, that's great. No one will ever hear the damn word about such things. If they do alternative medical treatment and the child dies, the parents may be sued or thrown in jail for child endangerment, but if the child does conventional treatment and survives, great. Once again, won't hear anything of it. If the child dies, well here, we also will not hear anything of it, but we know chemotherapy and radiation caused cancer themselves.

19:04 You know down the line likely to come back that it can weaken them. The immune system causes other sorts of problems. They may be the most advanced technological medicine that we have that doesn't necessarily make it the best and I am arguing the parents have the right to decide there, but that's the difference between the two. Conventional fails won't hear anything about it. Alternative fails. Oh, that's going to get in the media. Why? Because it plays to the story that they want to tell that this stuff is wrong, that it's hogwash and you will be punished if you fail. You may think that's a conspiracy, but no, once again, we can see this play out. So here's the thing, I'm going to flip this. Parents feeding their baby a vegan or restricted diet. I do not agree with this. I do not think it is right, not scientifically, but naturally just going back in time.

20:02 Nature, the statistical significance of nature. There is no such thing as a vegan. People that have survived long term. People are experimenting with it now. Good luck to them. Vegetarians, they have done that like in India, but they used animal products. So feeding a baby vegan food and exclusively vegan food, even without mother's milk, then they're going to be lacking in certain nutrients. But and this is hard to say, should the government be able to step in and do that? But here's a thing that kind of a dichotomy here too. Oh, you can feel feed your baby food full of chemicals, but you can't try to be healthier and feed them vegan food. You can do all kinds of different crap to your baby as long as it is within the conventional worldview. But you can't do this experiment once again, don't believe babies should be vegan at all.

20:56 If you want to do that as an adult, all the more power to you and I think a lot of vegans are going to be far healthier than standard American diet or standard worldwide diet. Now fast food and all that crap. Absolutely though I think they a more ideal diet once again because of looking in the past, I think when the best works on nutrition are Western aid prices, nutrition, and physical degeneration because he looked at all these people across the world and they had all kinds of diets but some commonalities. That all-natural food, minimally processed, but they all had some sort of animal products in them. Whether this was dairy and certain European cultures, all kinds of different meats, seafood, all kinds of different things. No one was vegan, so it is a bit of an experiment. But should the government be allowed to say, you cannot do this because say maybe they don't make it illegal, but then like in Belgium there with the case of this, they, and it was like worse than vegan.

21:52 That's super restricted, but this is the media saying it. So one-sided story for sure. Yeah, they convicted the parents of child abuse or neglect or something along those lines for it. So maybe that should be on the table, but I don't think you should have your kid taken away if you don't want to do chemo. And there's another area where this medical totalitarianism is coming up becoming a much bigger thing. And here's the thing. I'm not even supposed to talk about this subject. You're going to have to read between the lines because I'm not yet ready to talk about this subject for these very reasons but the thing where it's government and saying in insane, you have to do this highly technological intervention because it is completely safe and effective. What have I said before? These interventions tend not to be as safe as they say and tend to be not as effective as they say.

22:45 But I'm not allowed to talk about this because I am deemed to spread misinformation. Should I even mention stuff that's even on government websites? It's all lumped in together. This is how you control the worldview. So this is why I stand up against medical totalitarianism. This is part of the reason why I titled this podcast, the health sovereign podcast. We need education. We need to become aware of what is going on. Not just like, Oh, you should take this B vitamin simple stuff like that. We need the bigger picture for us to truly be sovereign in our health because the worldview is closing down in on around us. We have this amazing tool of the internet, but we're seeing censorship spread across big platforms available online. So where's the world going? Well, these people, top of industries, right? There are smart people, very smart people.

23:40 They may be sociopathic, but they certainly seem to be intelligent and able to think far ahead in the future. So where is the future going? It's going towards more of the government deciding what is right for you, your body, your health, your children's health. That is where we are going in the future. Unless people wake up and begin to make these decisions themselves and stop the things that are happening that allow them to take such measures that unfortunately is the way the world is working right now, but I do have hope. I am optimistic, you know, going through some of this information. Definitely do get pessimistic from time to time and there's good reason to believe like, Oh crap, we are in for it, but at the same time can easily flip to optimism. Ultimately you do have the power of yourself if you do have the responsibility yourself and by listening to things such as this, listening to the many great guests I've just started to have on, but so many more coming, I think we can really get to a better place of understanding health, of understanding sovereignty and taking that not just in health but really everywhere because the bigger picture of health is much bigger than just having to do with your own personal health.

25:00 That is what it comes down to. Once again, that is the health and sovereign creed that's [email protected] if you want to download a copy of yourself. Here's the thing about the creed. I would love to hear your feedback. I feel this is long-winded. It's been a fun exercise, especially recording these episodes, not just reading it in the first place, but I feel it can be distilled down to a smaller essence and really to get to a place where people might want to sign it or agree to it and really build a movement around this. So I always figured with this first version, just going to brain dump, put it out there, see how it goes, but I would love to hear your feedback. Are you all for it or are some of these points like too crazy for you? I want to hear your thoughts.

25:43 You can email me at Logan at Lost Empire. Herbs.Com you can leave comments on the health, sovereign.com website, all kinds of other places. And once again, iTunes reviews really helps out spreads this message to more people. And with sovereignty, we need a collective of sovereign individuals to really start transforming things for health and otherwise. I hope you've enjoyed this. Thank you so much for listening and please head on over to lost empire, herbs.com a lot more information there. Even around a lot of these topics is, I've been writing about it for a while, but a lot of information on herbs. I do think urbanism has always been the people's medicine. They took that away from us to the point where people don't even recognize herbs anymore. That's a weird word. They don't know how to use these things. They know nothing about it. They were successful in doing this.

26:34 Even though I hate the things they don't. I do give some respect for how they have controlled this system to some degree. It's kind of on inspiring to be honest, but we can take it back and I think urbalism is a great way to do so. Learn how you can work on little things yourself, improve your performance through the use of herbs. We have good supply there, few different great herbs available. There's much more out there, but it's a good place to get started with to check it out. That's lost empire herbs.com thank you. And I'll be back next week.

Logan Christopher: 00:19 Welcome back, and in a moment we will be joining back into the conversation with Perry Marshall, author of Evolution 2.0. If you missed last week's episode, you want to make sure you listen to that first for the understanding of DNA, what we really understand about it these days, which is far different from the kind of high school learning most people got, and what Perry calls “Evolution 2.0,” how evolution is actually working.

This is good background for what we're going to get into today and it leads in because science knows this stuff. Yet still, most people are caught up in this neo-Darwinist mindset. So, why does science take sometimes 200 years to correct problems? Let's dive in.

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Logan: 01:26 So, we talked about this with Barbara McClintock, them not accepting her work, and she just kind of put her head down and continued working on it, and 40 years later or so she was recognized for it. But we see this as a pattern in science over and over again—and one of the longest things we can talk about or have been talking about is Lamarckism, which is kind of a different word for epigenetic saying that inherited traits will get passed on and that mainstream is still not quite accepted or most people aren't aware of this. It's been some 200 years since Mark wrote that originally, right?

Perry Marshall: 02:01 Yes. So, Lamarck said, if an organism learns or adapts to something in its life, in its environment, it will pass that onto its offspring in those in the early 1800s. And Charles Darwin accepted that.

Now, of course, Charles Darwin didn't know anything about genetics, and Mendel and his genetics only came along at the very end of Darwin's life, but around the beginning of the 20th century, Lamarck’s idea was soundly rejected. They said that is ridiculous. Not true. Oh, silly guy, well-intentioned, but ridiculously wrong.

This is kind of what tipped me off. Lamarck would be derided in ways that … Look, there's a gazillion theories that turned out to be wrong. Very seldom do we just mock and people who had the theory, you know what I'm saying? Come on. But the people would mock an insult Lamarck, and then, within the last 20 years, we have found out that he was right all along. In fact, we don't even know how right he was. This is huge. Huge. Epigenetics is just growing by leaps and bounds.

Logan, in business we talk about star businesses and growing markets. Man, epigenetics is a growing market, for sure. And so, it took literally 200 years for that guy to be vindicated, and in evolutionary biology, in particular, I have seen a tendency for obsolete theories to last a long, long time, and I think there is a larger systemic problem in the way that we actually do science. I think we have systemic problems with the way the publishing system works, the way the peer-review system works, the way the grant system works, and we need to do some work in those areas.

Logan: 04:10 Yeah, absolutely. I 100 percent agree with you. One of the things you described in your book is an earlier case of this same. It's really a pattern that we see in science, and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing the guy's name right, but Semmelweis.

Perry: 04:25 Oh yeah.

Logan: 04:28 Semmelweis reflex and this was the guy that through experimentation figured out that women were dying in one hospital a lot more than other one, and basically it was because this was before we knew about bacteria or microbes and doctors were not washing their hands, and they would go from an autopsy to delivering a baby and a lot of people ended up dying this way.

So, he had this theory. He kind of proved it out, if they washed their hands with chlorine, essentially, then the death rate went down. But he just got laughed at to the point where he ended up in a mental institution as an alcoholic and then died a bit later, and the doctors laughed at him because they did not understand the mechanism of how this happened. So, they laughed at this idea of cadaverous particles transferring from one place to another. But we see this again and again.

For example, going on right now, most people don't recognize that electromagnetic frequencies, there's problems with EMFs causing damage. For a long time, they were saying, no, this can't possibly do because we don't know the mechanism of it. Lo and behold, I forget how recently this was, but Dr. Martin Pall came out and he provided a mechanism, how it changed up the voltage-gated calcium channels in the body.

So, one of the things you mention in your book is the science should not be so concerned with how at least in the beginning. Right? If you can't explain why something works, that doesn't really matter if you see that it is working. Yet, oftentimes, things are thrown out because it doesn't fit the paradigm of the scientists in question.

Perry: 05:57 Yes, what we can observe is always far ahead of what we know how to explain, and there is a persistent tendency to look at things that we can't explain and just pretend that they don't exist. And this is true in psychic phenomena. This is true with evolutionary mechanisms. It's even true in dark matter. We still don't know how to detect dark matter in the universe.

Dark matter is a postulated explanation for why the universe seems to be expanding at certain rates. It's like it's inserted in there to make the math work. And you know what? That's fine as long as you tell everybody what you're doing while we don't know what's making this happen, but it acts like a different form of matter with some other characteristics. So, we're going to put that in as a placeholder until we figure it out until later.

Logan: 06:57 Right, and that’s 90 percent of the universe or something like that, dark matter [crosstalk].

Perry: 07:01 That’s what they're saying right now and it could be completely wrong 40 years from now, but -

Logan: 07:06 It probably is. That’s right.

Perry: 07:06 - that's where we're at, right. Or string theory. From what I'm told, string theory is starting to get tough sledding now. There’s a growing consensus that it's not actually right, but it seems like it's been fairly represented as well. This is one possible explanation. I don't think most people were made to believe that it was definitely the explanation. And so, okay, that's fair.

So, I had a conversation with a physicist the other day and I said I was referring to this problem of old models hanging on way too long and science being too politicized, and I said, “How bad is this problem on a scale of one to 10?”

He said, “Well, it depends on what field you're in.” He said, if you're in physics, it's probably a three. And he said, in biology, it's probably an eight.

And I said, “Why is it a much worse problem in biology than it is in physics?”

And he said, “I think it's because the foundations of physics are pretty well agreed upon and understood. Nobody's arguing too much about the real core, what really makes physics tick.” He said, “We still don't have a foundation set of principles for biology, even though people pretend that we do. We don't know what makes biology tick. We don't know why biological things know how to heal themselves and non-biological things don't.”

Erwin Schrodinger, in the 1940s, he called it negative entropy. He said organisms turn chaos into order instead of just order in the chaos. And he said they don't appear to be violating any laws of physics, but we don't know how they do it.

Well, guess what? The same is true now. We still haven't figured it out. That is exactly what my prize is about. How do you reverse entropy? And I don't mean thermodynamic entropy. I mean how do you turn chaos into order with information? Because that's exactly what biology does.

Logan: 09:19 And, too, what you're saying as far as the program, I'd say in health and medicine, the problem seems to be a 10, unfortunately. And I think there's probably two parts to this with you get more of the hard sciences, right? So, you talked about there's this concept of physics envy, right? So, biologists were jealous of physics because physics is so exact. You do the math and things will work. That doesn't happen in biology.

So, really it does seem we need to separate out different sciences and recognize that they're different. Some follow more linear cause-effect things, while other things are much more vast, complex systems that we cannot get there. But then, there's also the profit that gets in there.

Just recently I was doing some research on the opioid crisis that's going on. I haven't really dug into that and know you have a personal story. Someone you worked with had some problems of how the opioids ended up destroying him. So, what I found -

Perry: 10:16 Yeah.

Logan: 10:16 - really interesting here is, a) basically, it was a five-sentence letter, got published in a journal that talked about, Oh, in our hospital we saw this many patients on opioids and only a few of them were addicted. So, this wasn't even a study. It was just some numbers thrown on there. Yet, this paper then got cited 608 times over 70 percent -

Perry: 10:38 Wow.

Logan: 10:39 - of which were positive, meaning that they were using this, and I have to think it's intention[al]. I think there are some doctors that just got hoodwinked. It's hard to get to the bottom of the swamp in science, but some of them were and definitely, the companies behind this were using it intentionally telling their salesman to say, Oh yeah, the addiction rate is less than 1 percent, so this falsifying –

Perry: 10:58 [crosstalk]

Logan: 10:58 - of science was used in order to create this thing, which, as we see many years later, blows up, a lot of people dying, all kinds of problems from it. So, science is tough.

Perry: 11:11 Science is tough. Maybe if I could play devil's advocate a little bit, sometimes it does take 200 years to figure out if a theory is right or wrong. Sometimes it just does.

Now, I think I was giving a talk one time in the UK and somebody said to me … I was talking about Lamarckism and epigenetics, and the guy says, “Oh yeah, my dad's a farmer. He could have told you that learned characteristics are passed to offspring decades in. He knew that a long time ago.”

So, this is another pitfall, let's say. It’s that people get so narrowly into their specialties and into the dogmas of a particular sub-profession that they don't even leave their office and go walk around. What would happen if you went and talked to a farmer? What could a farmer tell you if you asked him the right questions? And, of course, a molecular biologist and a farmer speak two completely different languages, but that is precisely the need, to cross-disciplinary boundaries and have conversations that don't normally happen, because an outsider can see a flaw much easier than you. Right?

It's the old proverb that Jesus said. You fool, take the log out of your own eye and then you will be able to see the speck in your brother's eye. And we're all guilty of it. I'm not pretending to be immune to this.

Logan: 12:47 I agree with that and it does seem like it's more important. We can't have 200 years longer of us not understanding this stuff about DNA, as we begin to amp up the genetic engineering that's going on.

I was just poking around. Some of the things that they've done is they were editing rabbits to get leaner, and somehow in doing this, they ended up with larger tongues. They were editing pigs for the same reason and they grew an extra vertebra.

And then, even with CRISPR, which has been described as, oh, you can change single base pairs in the DNA, they're finding that outside DNA is getting in. So, Stuart Newman from a New York Medical College, cell biologist, a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, he said, “I have little doubt E. coli DNA has been inadvertently incorporated into many CRISPR targets, and it is likely to cause problems, as it has in the horned cattle.” So, cattle, they edit them to get rid of the horns and they're finding all this errant DNA that should not be there. So, as we are doing this stuff, it seems if we don't correct, we might just cause some big problems.

Perry: 13:58 So, people have this idea that an organism is … DNA is like a blueprint for a factory. It's like, okay, so these are the instructions for the HVAC system and these here are the instructions for the water cooler. And these are the instructions for … It doesn't exactly work that way. In biology, genes are part of networks and one gene can be used by dozens or hundreds of different systems in the body in different ways.

Okay, here's a crude analogy. You're reading a novel and the word she could refer to somebody who is named 14 pages ago and you know who they're talking about because of the context, and the context is 64 different things. That's kind of how genes work, and so it's not at all surprising that if you modify genes in order to get leaner rabbits that all of a sudden you'd get a fatter tongue, or that if you edited the DNA in order to get a certain change in a pig, you would get an extra vertebra.

It's because nobody understands the genetic protocol. It would be like if Microsoft had some programming language that was proprietary, and we only understood 5 percent of it and the rest of it was a complete mystery. That is where we're at with genetics, and so we're a bull in the china shop. I'm not seeing … We can't put the genie back in the bottle.

You can buy a CRISPR gene-editing kit on Amazon for $169. Whether that's a good idea or not, it's not going to change. So, we’d better darn well have a lot of respect for biology and we’d better understand, hey, people, we barely understand this at all and we can make some horrific, horrific, irreversible mistakes if the wrong people get careless with us.

Logan: 16:08 Yeah, I agree. It seems with kind of with science it's often going to sound like an arrogant path of thinking. We know a lot more than we know. For instance, with junk DNA, you mentioned just labeling it junk when we clearly do not understand its role or what it possibly does. It’s like, Oh, that's all junk.

I mean, the real reason is they didn't understand it, but they had their theories. Neo-Darwinism. Oh, it's just random leftover stuff from random mutations, was the idea. But what if you carry this arrogance forward—I'm just reminded of this quote I heard from a guy, Daniel Schmachtenberger, recently. As we begin to have the power of the gods, say, with genetics, with nanotechnology, AI, even without the real artificial intelligence, just machine learning and that's going to revolutionize things, so as we begin to have the power of the gods, we need to have the wisdom of the gods to handle that or else for somewhat screwed.

Perry: 17:03 You're exactly right. And you know what? I think the key to all of this is skin in the game. The reason that every single one of us is willing to get in a taxi with a complete stranger is, if the taxi crashes, the other guys in the car with us, right?

Perry: 17:22 Yup.

Perry: 17:22 Okay. You imagine getting in a taxi or an Uber and there was a laptop sitting there. There was nobody in the driver's seat and there were these ears and cams attached to the steering wheel, and some guy in India looked at you through the screen and said, Hello, my name is Pradesh and I am going to be driving your taxi today. You and get out. You're like, Well, you can crash me and you're sitting in your comfortable office in Hyderabad. Right?

You know what I like to say. There are still a few people out there that say that the 97 percent of our DNA is junk. You know what I say to them? I say I’ll tell you what, I'll buy you a plane ticket to Thailand and we'll use a CRISPR gene-editing experiment, and you tell me which of your DNA I am allowed to delete. I've never gotten a taker. They always back down a little bit. Or your children. Let me. Are you getting ready to conceive? Let's take those embryos and delete the junk DNA. How's that? Right?

A lot of these people, they don't even believe it. They're happy for somebody else to take the risk, but they're not going to take the risk, and this is a signature of bureaucracies where the buck just gets passed on to other people. We'll let the taxpayers bear this burden. We'll let somebody else pay for it. No. No. You’ve got to pay for you. You use your own money.

And so, I think if the people doing CRISPR experiments, if we can hold to the standard that they bear the consequences of whatever mistakes they make personally, then I think we're going to have a whole lot fewer mistakes.

Logan: 19:07 So, what would you recommend? We've kind of established here that there are issues with science and there's numerous ones, ones we haven't even talked about here that make it so false theories. Fifty percent of our science is wrong. We just don't know what 50 percent it is.

Perry: 19:22 Right.

Logan: 19:24 And, yeah, 50 percent in the studies--

Perry: 19:25 It’s like advertising.

Logan: 19:26 Yeah. So, with that in mind, what can the average person do? Because to actually get to the bottom of something, I mean, most people aren't reading science papers like you and I happened to be. So, what can the average person do with that in mind, knowing that so much of the science is wrong and leading us down wrong paths?

Perry: 19:48 If you have listened to this conversation, and if you found it interesting and you want to know more, I would suggest that you read the people that I have found illuminating.

I'll tell you a quick story. Three years ago, I went to a conference in London at the Royal Society. It was a meeting about all of the new theories of evolution. It was fascinating. And I met a guy named John Hands who wrote a book called Cosmosapiens. Cosmosapiens by John Hands. It is a 700-page book. It starts, literally, with the birth of the universe and it goes all the way through 14 billion years to the future of consciousness, and the question of consciousness and humans, and all of these different things. And he and I had never had any form of contact, and he's got a whole section in his book on evolution. He came to virtually identical conclusions about evolution as I did.

There's another guy named Bill Miller who is a radiologist who has written books about evolution. Came to nearly identical conclusions.

Denis Noble, who's one of my prize judges, is a physiologist. Came to nearly identical conclusions.

You know what’s funny about all these people? They're all outsiders. So, I was an electrical engineer. John Hands is, essentially, let's call him a historian. Denis Noble is a physiologist. James Shapiro got his bachelor's degree in English at Harvard University before getting a genetics degree at Cambridge and has been a Renegade in evolution for the last 40 years. All of these people came to nearly identical conclusions because the biology profession was not allowed to tell any of us what to think.

So, first of all, I want you to notice the general pattern here of interdisciplinary explainers, people who go outside of their normal profession and they try to understand other professions under a common rubric of principles.

And then, I want to specifically say that if you want to go read books about this that are, that can be trusted, read John Hands. Read my work. Read Denis Noble. Read Jim Shapiro. Read Bill Miller; William Miller is actually how he's authored on Amazon. And you'll see this remarkable consilience.

And then, I imagine you've probably … I know you're familiar with the Paul Stamets interview on Joe Rogan. You realize he says almost the same thing I'm saying, except he's coming from mycelium in mushrooms, but yet their overall biology is almost identical.

And I just got off the phone an hour ago with Joel Salatin. I don't know if you know who he is. He's like a renegade agriculture guy.

Logan: 22:58 Yeah.

Perry: 23:59 Almost has an identical view of biology as all of the other guys that I just talked about.

And so, I see a convergence of thinking across a whole bunch of fields where we might disagree about little details, but what everybody seems to agree on is that nature is self-aware and nature itself is intelligent down to the cellular level that--

Bonnie Bassler, his Ted talk called How Bacteria “Talk”. Everybody should watch that. Go to YouTube and type in “how bacteria talk” and watch this Ted talk by Bonnie Bassler. There are themes they keep coming up over and over and over again.

And so, if you start thinking of your body as a living thing that has some form of self-awareness kind of like your dog does, rather than thinking of it as a mechanical machine, machines, if you're ball-bearings in your bicycle stop working, they don't heal, and when you talk to them, they don't respond. See, living things are an entirely different matter. We don't know what makes it tick, but we don't have to know to understand that it does.

And so, I think there's a return to more traditional views of nature that long predate Darwin or the industrial revolution, or modern agriculture, and I think this is extremely important.

Logan: 24:28 Yeah, absolutely. I think that's good, that idea of looking for the outsiders. So, if you want to generalize this to other topics, instead of listening to doctors for your health, which obviously they have their place, but listen to outsiders like myself. That's might help you out.

Perry: 24:44 Yeah. That is why I have a regular doctor. I always also have a Chinese medicine doctor. I go to the Chinese--

Logan: 24:50 Yeah. I like that. You get [crosstalk] advisory have like multiple people with different perspectives for health issues.

Perry: 24:57 Yes. Now when you have people with multiple perspectives, of course, it's hard for them all to talk to each other. Right? The easiest thing is they all went to the same school and they all got the same degree, and they all bang the same drum and they all get along great. Okay, yeah, but they all have blind spots. Right? And so, there's more work in a plurality of perspectives.

But I think as a general life philosophy, Logan, you've said to me, one of my goals in life is to be a Renaissance man. Well, that's what a Renaissance man does. A Renaissance man goes, and you do this—I mean, this is why we’re talking—you go around to all kinds of different fields and you say, I'm in a room full of chiropractors right now. What can I learn from them? And I'm in a room full of real estate agents. What can I learn from them? I'm in a room full of hedge-fund managers. What can I learn from them? You can learn from everybody and then you start cross-pollinating the things you learned from other disciplines. You will know things that literally no one on earth knows, and that's a really special thing.

Logan: 25:58 Yeah. Excellent. Well, we're coming up on the end time here. Perry, where would you like people to go to find out more?

Perry: 26:05 I would like you to go to evo2.org and subscribe to our podcast or in all the major podcasting channels, and you can get three free chapters of Evolution. 2.0 at evo2.org, E-V-O 2 [dot] org.

And, boy, if this conversation stimulated your thinking, I want you to know there is so much more to learn. It is so fascinating and nature is not this blind, vicious, selfish machine. Nature is cooperative. Nature is symbiotic. Nature is self-aware. Nature is self-modifying and we are. And I think as we embrace these things, we are going to be sick less often. We're going to live longer. We are going to make technologies that are more harmonious with the planet.

So, Logan, I really appreciate what you're doing. I'm one of your customers. I buy stuff from you. Thank you for doing what you're doing, and I hope people keep listening to your podcasts.

Logan: 27:13 Thank you very much, Perry. And let me say I've read Perry's Evolution 2.0 book two times now. I've listened to every episode of his podcast. It's one I regularly listen to, so highly recommended to check it out.

Thanks, everyone for listening, and thank you, Perry.

Perry: 26:25 Thank you.

Logan Christopher: 00:18 Welcome everyone. Very excited about the call today. Today, I have with me Perry Marshall, and Perry is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world, and it is through a mastermind he runs that I've gotten to know him this past year.

But we're not talking business today. Instead, at London’s Royal Society, he announced the world's largest science research challenge, the $10 million Evolution 2.0 Prize, staffed by judges from Harvard, Oxford, and MIT. He aims to solve the number one mystery in Artificial Intelligence and life itself.

The prize boils down to this: DNA is a code, not like a code, but a code. We do not know how this code came to be. If you believe in God, that's not good enough because it doesn't show how. If you don't believe in God, thinking it was a happy chemical accident, this also does not show how.

So, Perry, you're offering a $10 million to the person or people who can create a code from scratch. Is that all correct there? Anything you want to add?

Perry Marshall: 01:16 That is correct, and this is arguably the most fundamental question in science that can be precisely defined. It's right up there with, Where did the big bang come from? I think that's harder to get your arms around. What creates universes? I don't know. I don't know how to create a universe, but one thing that I do know is the cells in my body are creating code all the time, and living things create codes all the time and humans create codes all the time, and creating codes requires intentionality.

And so, this is really a search for the origin of intentionality. And if we figure this out, there's no telling what that would unlock. It would surely help us a great deal with cancer, and disease and aging, and all kinds of practical aspects of biology. I think it would also create a completely different kind of artificial intelligence. I don't really think our current AI is intelligent at all. It's just robots.

And so, this is very deep. It crosses into philosophical and religious questions, and so it's as deep in the swamp as I know how to dive. And so we're here talking about, What does this have to do with health and fitness, and exercise and probably philosophical stuff, too? And you're into all that stuff.

Logan: 02:48 Yeah.

Perry: 02:48 So, you're going to be very comfortable with this and I'm glad people have decided to listen to us today.

Logan: 02:54 Yeah, I have to say it's really … when you launched your Evolution 2.0, which I highly recommend people go out and read, that kind of drew me back into your world because I had seen the marketing stuff before, but I thought this was really interesting as I've gotten to health, and recognizing the importance of … Because, really, what we're talking about with Evolution 2.0 is kind of the foundations of biology and so many people are going around with this really simplistic version, the neo-Darwinist version of how things evolved, and it turns out to be wholly inaccurate.

Perry: 03:29 It is in fact what most people think of as evolution and the explanations that you're normally given is at least 25 years out of date, but the actual science has leaped far ahead. In fact, I hardly even know any evolutionary biologists that are even willing to defend the version that's in most people's heads now. It is literally that obsolete.

And, now, why should we care about this? You might think that this is just like people arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pen or it's some kind of academic ivory tower thing. No, because, Logan, we’re in business and in business or even in just at the bar, if somebody uses the word Darwinian, okay, what they usually are referring to is this grim, depressing elimination of the stupid and undeserving, or you just couldn't make it in that vicious competition out there, and it's very oriented towards just blind bloody competition. And that is not how nature operates and that isn't really how evolution happens.

Yes, there's an element of truth to it, but at the core it's misleading. And, well, it helps. It helped Hitler, his ideology. It helped Lenin and Stalin, and Mao. It's been horrendously disastrous and it's just not helpful. It shapes agriculture. It shapes nutrition. It shapes everything. And so, if we have a different understanding of evolution in biology, there's hardly any human endeavor that it won't touch. This is a very important conversation.

Logan: 05:30 Yeah, it's foundational and that's why I kind of gravitated to your work here because you’ve got to understand these foundational principles of how cells and DNA actually works if you really want to understand greater capacities of health that are available.

So, for instance, one of the things that's a holdover of that whole viewpoint is genetic determinism. Now, most people recognize it’s not fully determined by your genes at this point, but it wasn't even 20 years ago. And still, there's elements of this that are in there that's all about the genetics, and once we figured out genetics, it's always five to 10 years off down the road we'll figure this out and we'll be able to cure all disease. Right?

Perry: 06:09 That was the promise of the human genome project and it has never delivered on that. Now, I'm not going to suggest for a nanosecond that it hasn't been worth doing or anything like that. Okay? But, 20 years ago, it was like, We're going to figure out all of these diseases and we're going to be able to predict. We're going to be able to sequence people's DNA and predict what kind of person we're going to get from this.

And what we now know is that DNA does not completely determine even your physiologies, much less your attitudes and your inclinations and all of that stuff. And, even if we did or even to the extent that it might, we are probably many decades, if not hundreds of years from unraveling the details of how the genetic language is really structured. I mean, I would say, at most, we understand about 5 percent of it right now. And so, that project made a lot of promises that it wasn't able to deliver on.

Logan: 07:18 Yeah. So, I want to talk about the five blades of the Swiss army knife that make up what you cover in Evolution 2.0—these are transposition, epigenetics, horizontal gene transfer, symbiosis, and gene duplication.

And for our purposes here, symbiosis and gene duplication are very important for evolution, but they happen once in a great while, so not necessarily the subjects I want to cover here. And then, horizontal gene transfer, this kind of seems to be outside of our control, but for people's health today and also the health of generations like our kids, it seems that the epigenetics and transposition are the two kind of relevant blades. Is that right?

Perry: 07:59 Yeah, I think that's accurate. And what you're referring to is that cells have a tool kit for re-engineering themselves. We used to believe that you had these genes and the genes made the organism and the information flowed one way. It flowed from the gene to the organism. And we now know that that assumption was spectacularly wrong because organisms modify their own genetics, too.

In fact, the Nobel Prize, which was just announced maybe a month ago, for 2019, was for research showing that cells reprogram their DNA based on oxygen levels in the atmosphere. That just simply by getting on your bike and consuming a lot of oxygen can cause genetic changes in your cells in real-time, and this is a complete a reversal of a hundred years of assumptions.

Logan: 09:02 Right. So, one of my questions on that, and many people I've heard about epigenetics and I do have some questions there, but not as many people are aware of transposons or transposition, but is my understanding of this correct that, basically, with this, there is real time-editing of the genetic sequence itself, not just things turning on and off?

Perry: 09:23 Yeah, that's right. The person who discovered transposition was Barbara McClintock. This was before we actually understood the genetic code or the real nature of DNA. I mean, we knew that there was this genetic material and chromosomes and stuff, and they could look at all that. They didn't really understand what it was.

And Barbara was this renegade scientist who fought like a hacker, and she was like, What happens if I start hitting these corn chromosomes with x-rays, controlled amounts of radiation? What happens if I break these chromosomes? And she had this idea of what she thought would happen and the plant completely threw a curveball.

The plant went and it got parts of its genome from other chromosomes and it basically copy-pasted bits of code into a damaged chromosome to repair the damage that was there. It would be sort of like, Logan if I gave you a mystery novel and page 168 was ripped out, and I said, Hey, Logan, read everything before the ripped out page and everything after the ripped out page, and see if you can fill in what's missing.

This is essentially what these cells did. And so, you could think of it like adjectives and adverbs being moved around in order to make sentences make sense, and then you fill in the missing page, and nobody can tell that anything was missing. And then, the plant went on to reproduce, even though she had destroyed a critical part of it.

And this was so extraordinary that nobody believed her for 20 years. They basically laughed her out of the place, but some people believed in what she was doing. She kept her funding and she kept going on, and so, the discovery was made in the ’40s. She started publishing the research in the ’50s. In 1983, she won the Nobel Prize.

And so, there is a whole bunch of stuff in the human genome that we don't understand. In fact, up until about five to 10 years ago, it was very popular to proclaim that more than 90 percent of your genome was junk DNA. Well, that was an absurd and preposterous proposition made by bureaucrats who were not doing their jobs as scientists, and finding out why this is really there and what it really does.

And, right now, the hottest genetics research is in what is commonly called the “dark matter of the genome.” So, there's all this stuff that doesn't code for proteins. Well, what does it do? And so, the answers to these questions are going to hugely shape health care, cancer research, immunization, viruses, all of these fields. And so, I think we are just at the very, very beginning of genetics. I don't even consider it a mature field.

Logan: 12:35 Right. Yeah, me neither. With the transposons, are you aware of any research? That was when she was irradiating the chromosomes and causing damage they were able to fix via this mechanism. Is that being done when there isn't damaged DNA? Are you aware of anything like that where the -

Perry: 12:52 Oh, yes.

Logan: 12:52 - DNA is shifting all around for other reasons?

Perry: 12:55 Yes. There's a huge literature on transposable elements and there are textbooks going back 30 years. And so, transposable element events can be triggered by all kinds of things. Now, I didn't study up on this, but just before I jumped on the call and if you wanted a detailed accounting of, okay, so tell me exactly what triggers a transposon event other than damage? I would have to go look that up, but there's a huge body of literature on this.

And I will add, there is a school of thought among some biologists that transposons are basically just viruses in the human genome that are jumping around and they're not really of much help, and, first of all, that's just a variation on the junk DNA theory. It's inherently antiscientific. It's based on not understanding what it does. It's not based on solid conclusions based on knowledge, and they're just a lot of questions that we still have, but this is very hot and any biologist who is up on the stuff knows that this is a major evolutionary part of the toolkit.

Logan: 14:15 Yeah, I just want people to think about that for a moment. Just imagine your sequence, based on these transposable elements, can shift around the code. So, our code is not static. It is changeable even within a living organism, not just passing down with random mutations or nonrandom mutations to the next generation.

Perry: 14:36 It's like an M. C. Escher, drawing the hand that is drawing a hand. It's really mind-bending like, Okay, so the genome has instructions for building the cell, but then the cell can modify its own genome, and then pass those modifications onto its offspring.

So, that leads to a question like, What is actually going on here? And Barbara McClintock in her Nobel Prize paper, she said a goal for the 21st century would be to find out what the cell knows about itself. I think that is the most profound question that anybody has asked in biology and I think that is the question—what does a cell know about itself?

Logan: 15:22 Yeah. On that note, I wanted to read this quote, and it's kind of a long one, so bear with me here. This is one of my favorite authors, Stephen Harrod Buhner. He says:

“Every living organisms has to have a means to perceive informational inflows in order to survive; every living organism possesses mechanisms to do so … Because all life-forms, irrespective of their nature, must, to survive, have a sense of not me, they all have a sense of self, they are in fact self-aware. Because all life-forms, irrespective of their nature, must, to survive, be able to analyze the nature of the not me that approaches them and, further, must be able to determine its intent, and further, be able to craft a response to that intent, all life-forms are, by definition, intelligent. Because all life-forms have to be able to determine the intent of the not me that approaches them, they also have to be able to determine meaning. In other words, all living organisms can not only produce data, they also engage in a search for meaning, an analysis that runs much deeper than linear cause and effect. Thus, three capacities—self-awareness, intelligence, and the search for meaning that have (erroneously) been ascribed as belonging only to human beings, are in fact general conditions for every living organism.”

Perry: 16:34 That is, bingo, absolutely right. In fact, you don't even have life at all until you have a boundary between what is the living thing and everything outside, which means inherently you need an immune system. Every cell is deciding, I'm going to let these things inside and I'm going to keep these other things out. It's just like a castle with guards.

So, everything you just read, Logan, is intrinsic to all living things. So, yes, all living things are intelligent. This is exactly what evolutionary biology has been very slow to accept, as it opens a huge Pandora's Box of questions that a lot of people just, frankly, don't want to deal with, but they're right here in front of us. I mean, the problems are here. The questions are here. So, what do we do about it?

Logan: 17:30 Right? Yeah, so seeing that all living things, we can take this down to single cellular organisms, say, this bacteria or fungi, or all kinds of different things—not fungi. Those are multicellular, in general. I think there are some single ones.

Anyway, so with that understanding that every cell within your body is a living organism that has intelligence, self-awareness and this search for meaning, so it's able to interact and it comes together to create us. But we have to understand that it's not all top-down direction. Our conscious mind is not controlling our heart rate or our liver detoxes things, all these things going on. It's the body's own intelligence that really does these things, and if we think it's all just random and doesn't have any purpose, then our health kind of goes along with those same lines. That's why I feel this work is important.

Perry: 18:20 Yeah, that whole random accidental copying errors, natural selection, the survival of the fittest narrative, it's depressing. It's disempowering. Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, says that we are just “lumbering robots” driven by our selfish genes. That is so wrong and it is so depressing, and I truly believe that that viewpoint is one of the biggest mistakes in the history of science.

So, what does physiology and genetics actually tell us? It tells us that even just the oxygen levels in your activity levels cause changes in your DNA. We know that what you eat and how you exercise, and whether you smoke or not, and what kind of habits that you have directly affected your offspring.

Let me give you two examples of this. Extremely practical. I have a friend named John Torday. He is a pediatric toxicologist at UCLA, and what that means is he has been studying the effects of secondhand smoke on children for 30 years. There are 300 effects of secondhand smoke on children—secondhand smoke being defined as smoke where you weren't smoking the cigarettes. Somebody else was. Okay?—so there's 300 effects of secondhand smoke.

The number one most severe effect is asthma in girls caused by a smoking grandmother and it is passed on epigenetically. And the grandmother could be dead. The grandmother could have never met the granddaughter. The granddaughter could have never been in a room with a smoker. But here's what happened: a woman smoked cigarettes. Her body makes epigenetic changes to deal with the toxins in the cigarettes. Those epigenetic changes get passed to her daughter, which gets amplified when it's passed to the granddaughter because it goes through the egg—it goes through the females—and a granddaughter inherits asthma from her grandmother. Okay? This is real.

John sent me another study where they took fruit flies and they ratcheted up the oxygen levels. So, normal oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is 23 percent. They took fruit flies and they started increasing the oxygen levels, and in 13 generations, because of epigenetic changes, they got fruit flies to adapt to 90 percent oxygen. In 13 generations.

Now, what I just told you, this would have been laughed out of science classrooms 20 years ago. It is now known to be true. And so, so we don't even know the extent. If you smoke, if you drink too much, if you watch too much TV, if you exercise, if you don't exercise, we don't even know the extent to which these changes get passed to offspring, but we know that they do to some degree.

And this is why, if you go to Madagascar, you will find species you don't find anywhere else, and it's not just because of mutation and selection. It's because every generation of animals is adjusting its genome and its genetics to whatever environment it's in. It's constantly fine-tuning all the time.

And so, the fact that most people have never even heard about this, it just tells you we are light years away from fully understanding the complexity and the depth of our own bodies. It is utterly remarkable. It is beyond most people's imagination how sophisticated this is.

Logan: 22:37 Makes me curious because I was born, you might say, genetically, I'm not strong or athletic. I was not good at sports or anything for a long time, but then I got into this and kind of built those traits. So, I wonder how much of that is passed on to my daughter. Is she going to be stronger than average epigenetically because of the weights that I've lifted? And I'm not aware how much research has really looked into more, say, the positive sides of these, especially in humans. Very curious about that.

Perry: 23:06 I happen to know that most research on this topic is not even getting funded yet. I know of a grad student in the UK who is working on a Ph.D. dissertation about this, who can't get $10,000 to do very basic research around these most fundamental questions. What we're talking about, Logan is there's tons of scientific literature about it. There's more than enough, but it is still outside the purview of mainstream thinking in biology.

And so, it's kind of funny because, as an outsider, you can come into a profession and you can look around, and you can go, Wow, why aren’t these people over here talking to those guys over there? We're here now and we're talking about it, and it deserves attention.

And so, Logan, I'm kind of like you. I'm not an athletic guy. About 15 years ago, I started taking Taekwondo, and I remember how in the first few weeks it just felt ridiculously awkward for me to just do those moves and steps and kicks and punches. And then, I don’t know, after a couple of months, it started to feel a little normal, and I do not know, but you kind of have to wonder if your body is literally reprogramming itself on a cellular level in order to learn to do all that stuff. And then, what you said, does this get passed on to your kids? It might. There's a reason to believe that it does.

Logan: 24:42 Right. Yeah, because definitely there's going to be the myelination of the nervous pathways for that. But, yeah, how much of epigenetics is happening, genes turning on and off, or even transposable elements that are actually recoding you to be better at martial arts? Very interesting to think about and, as you said, a place we have not really explored at all in our science. It's also, on the flip side, dangerous.

This is another quote, much shorter one here, but this one has stuck with me since I came across it. When the top BPA researchers out there, Bisphenol-A, which is in many different plastics, although that is being kind of phased out but often just changed out for BPS or BPF, other types. But what he says about this is:

“A poison kills you. A chemical like BPA reprograms your cells and ends up causing a disease in your grandchild that kills him.”

So, what he's talking about there is the epigenetic stuff and understanding the chemicals around, and that they're causing these epigenetic type of changes. It does lead me to sometimes think, Have we already screwed ourselves over as a species and not quite even realize it? What are your thoughts there?

Perry: 25:47 Look, all of these questions scare me. I guess what I would say is there's a positive side to it as well, and the positive side is that, okay, maybe your parents did or I'm sure all of our ancestors did a bunch of stupid things, and all of our ancestors have passed things along to us, both genetically and otherwise, that are not very good. We can all agree on that.

The good part is the plasticity of our genome, of our DNA, of our programming. We can change it, at least to a degree. You are not a slave to your genes. You are not a robot. You have free choice. You have free will. You're not just a lumbering robot driven by yourself as genes. In fact, if you tried to tell people you were, it would make ridiculous consequences in your life. It's like if you're late for work and you go, Well, I'm sorry, Sir, but my genes just programmed me to be late. It’s really hard for me to get out of bed … Well, we're going to get somebody in here who can get out of bed. Right?

There's really no point in crying over spilled milk. We have choices. We can make changes. Perry Marshall can go to Taekwondo and learn to be coordinated, even though I tend to be a klutz. There's nobody stopping me except my own inertia. And so, I think that life itself is a triumph of the will over inertia and I think it's all very positive. Logan, this is what your whole business is about, right? I mean, you wouldn't be here if you didn't believe that.

Logan: 27:35 Yep, absolutely.

Thank you so much. We will be back in the next episode with Perry Marshall once again to dive into why science taking 200 years to correct a problem is a big problem. So, stay tuned.

You want to take this mind and apply it to your health one-on-one? Learn how to activate your superpower level of health with a systems approach and finally understand why your health may not be where you want it to be, despite or perhaps because of living in the information age. I've got limited spots available in my coaching program. Find out more and apply at virtuousvitality.com.

00:19 Are you enjoying the interviews and specifically the interview format since trying to do about half-hour per episode here, but definitely, I'm getting someone on the phone. I figured it might as well go longer than half an hour, but I like deep dives and by splitting up the topics as we've been doing the last couple of episodes and interviews I feel we can go deeper on a single subject and surrounding stuff around that. But I'd like to hear from you how do you enjoy this process or this format and if so I'll keep doing it. I already have a few others recorded so there'll be like this for the next few, but then who knows who may change it up and still have some more fun stuff to play with in the future. Getting multiple people on and having more debate status perhaps. We'll see what is coming down the pipeline for now.

01:12 We are going to be doing the second to last episode on the health sovereign creed. Today we'll be covering points 13 and 14. These are some big ones, some fun ones and the next time, well I guess we'll have another interview after this, but after that, we'll be wrapping up. Once again, if you haven't checked it out yourself, you can head on over to health sovereign.com and you can find the creed there. You can download it in PDF form if you want to see this for yourself. So let's dive in point 13 I recognize that all of Western medicine was built on a flawed and incomplete model of reductionistic materialism while useful in certain contexts. The flaw is that this one way of seeing the world to the exclusion of all others, it misses the worldviews of psychology, spirituality, holistic or systems thinking, even cultural effects.

02:08 I recognize that all of these are important when it comes who health, where to start here reductionism. This is for the most part how science is based. There is complexity science and different branches and related things to this that do try to see the bigger picture while taking the scientific method into this. But for the most part, our science has been and still is focused on reductionism. So what is that? Well first science itself is kind of a method of exploring through observation how the world works. It has delivered pens of advancements. Even though there are problems with science, some of which we'll be talking about right here. It's still is a very helpful tool or going about the world. I'm not anti-science, I am anti-bad science and that's another issue which we'll touch on in the next point. But anyway, even if it's good science, good reductionist science, there's still a flaw with that.

03:14 So reductionism is this idea of reducing any sort of system, anything down to its component parts in which to understand how that thing works. So with the human body, we reduce it down to the organ systems, then the organs, then the different pathways and the cells themselves. Then we further reduce it down from there. The components of the cells and the DNA. And from that, we've gotten to this idea that DNA is responsible for life and is everything in life. And I'm not saying DNA is not important, but DNA codes for proteins, it really does not explain how a cell works or how a human works and does such things as play music, fall in love, have babies. It does not explain all these. So reducing things down does not get us to the ultimate answers. I mean we can further subdivide, we can just, you know, DNA and the components of cells are all made of atoms or molecules.

04:17 And then Adam's and we can break down the atoms into protons, electrons and neutrons and we can break these further down into corks and by some theories, the corks are then just superstrings and this stuff does not really tell us what it means to be healthy. So reducing down, it definitely has its uses by looking into the cellular function, by looking into how these systems interact. We have absolutely found interesting, helpful things, but in many cases, we have also lost the forest for the trees. When you reduce something down, it is hard to still understand the big picture. So recently I did a deeper dive on hormones than I've done before, specifically around estrogen for men, sex hormone-binding globulin and dihydrotestosterone or DHT with the hormone system. It's very, very complex and there are basically hundreds of different hormones, even just when this within the sex hormone system, but you can't really say a system because cortisol is very closely related to these but not necessarily thought of as a sex hormone.

05:22 So there are relationships between here and that's part of the things that reductionism loses, but even with the best sign, because you can always reduce down further and in so many of these areas we know so little. So those are some of the issues around reductionism. So trying to understand health by understanding the hormones, good thing worth doing, reducing it down to these individual items. And then let's say getting a blood test and saying, Oh, this number is too high, this number is too low, let's just add some of that hormone back in. That is a problematic model because one, we're not even measuring like 50 different other things that actually might matter. Let me one issue. Secondly, who's to say that this is too hard. This is too low for this person because this Western model tries to look at everybody as the same and we know that simply is not true.

06:19 What is a good level of a certain hormone for one person may be a disastrous level for another person. So that's a little bit about reductionism. Then we have materialism. Materialism is saying that the material, the things in life essentially is all that there is that it's all physical reality and nothing else, and this is a philosophy, but most people that are wrapped up in this philosophy do not recognize it as a philosophy. They think of it as how the world works. That tends to be how most people and most philosophies tend to think of things, right is from recognizing that there are so many different philosophies and kind of seeing across the world that we can begin to step back and realize like, Oh one philosophy versus another really dictates how you see and operate in the world. But with materialism, we have so much ideas that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain.

07:16 Well that consciousness is in the brain period. This alone is problematic and not saying that the brain is not important. It does seem to be quite important in the vast majority of cases here, but just because we see some correlates on a brain scan mapping to what a person is thinking about where their mind does not necessarily mean that the brain equals mind. I like the term brain-mind interface. There is definitely a correlation between these two, an interface between these two, but one thing affects the other. How you think affects and can change your physical brain structure in time. Keep thinking the same kind of thoughts and your body, your whole neurology. So not just the brain but the rest of the nervous system and the body will follow and at the same time, we can do things to the body. Whether this is movement or taking certain nutrients and these in turn actually affect the brain structure itself.

08:18 The nervous system which then affects our thinking. This goes both ways. One of the things with reductionist materialism is we tend to think in terms of linear cause and effect. This X happens which causes Y but most of life does not operate so simply. The reason the health science has got kind of wrapped into this model a part of the reason is there are many different factors is essentially like physics, envy, physics. When the hard sciences they are having such great success. Once we figured Newton and kind of the laws that came from that, this is where the enlightenment happened and we had this rapid rise in technology. We could predict things and get great results. A lot of cool things happen from that. Other sciences were jealous of how exact physics were and they tried to fit a square peg into a round hole essentially.

09:18 That is part of the problem because well we need a round peg going into a round hole. So with biology, it really does take complexity sciences. It does take looking at complex systems to see that cause and effect is not linear. It may be bi-directional, it may be tied into 50 different things to where it becomes hard to even say what causes some sort of effects. It can become that difficult both for trying to reduce it down with really trying to peg down what causes one thing. And in doing so we often make a lot of false assumptions or we make assumptions what's later turned out to be false just through more scientific process through learning. So all of this is not to say it's not useful. I mean the material is stick philosophy. I think that has failed and we can look at near-death research and if you actually look at that, we see that there are times when the brain is completely dead, but people are still having conscious experiences.

10:19 We know that materialism does not seem to work with such things as remote viewing, which is extremely well studied and researched, showing that there's non-local effects and that can't be explained with really a materialist philosophy. So there it's been falsified in number of ways, but getting back to what we're talking about, so if we look at the world through this reductionist and materialist philosophy and we see how the world works and what I'm saying here is Western medicine was built upon these shaky foundations, these incomplete foundations. What was not included in these foundational viewpoints was first psychology. Now everyone knows that. How you think, how you feel affects your physical body and vice versa. That's pretty well established at this point. But for how many years was there a clear mind-body divide? We talked about the mind and body and I talked about this, I think it was back in points three.

11:23 It's a system. They're not really separate things. It is intimately tied together, but in our language, in order to talk about these things, we split them up, but mind, body, spirit, all assist them and we know that they affect other things. So for a long time, doctors did not recognize because they came from this philosophy without even recognizing as a philosophy, this foundation of reductionism and materialism that how you think actually changes the physical body outcomes. So that was a whole missing worldview that is certainly much better integrated. Now we recognize the mind, I mean placebos, which we talked about earlier as well. This is the mind having some sort of effect on the body because of the expectation of something happen. We can send this little further to spirituality. So I was saying mind, body, spirit, all of this work together with a materialist philosophy.

12:17 You don't recognize spirit as all, it's not a thing. You can't cut open the body. We can never have successfully found the soul somewhere in the body. Therefore it does not exist. That is how a material list looks at such a thing. Not recognizing that there is things operating that work differently than what seems to be happening in the material world. So this whole spiritual health aspect, how that plays into everything is not even recognized by some people, but fully recognized by other people and utilize and leading to good effects. So that's another missing part of the dominant worldview in Western medicine. It's going back to that division of power. Like you can have your spirituality, but this doesn't matter at all for the cancer or the depression that you're having is essentially what people wrapped up in this mindset will say in holistic or systems thinking.

13:11 So touch on this, that complexity sciences, recognizing how biology works and even beyond it, right? So in the one the earlier episodes was talking about how we interact with the environment and we can actually see from a systems viewpoint how we are part of the environment. The environment is part of us, there is relationship between them. And there is feedback loops between these different things that cause certain effects that are very complicated. So when we reduce things down, we try to get to this linear and reductionist paradigm. But that is not how life works. That is not how biology works. It's a very complex system. And without understanding all these parts and relationships and processes, it tends to be a very flawed way of looking at things and even cultural effects. So one of the areas that science has begun to recognize is that the social effects on health are huge.

14:12 The people we interact with, I mean we share bacteria with them. There's all kinds of different things. But if you, all your friends are obese, chances are you're going to be obese. So there are these social effects. There are cultural effects that we're only beginning to understand because once again, this is not a reductionist thing. The doctors of old would say that you know, it has to do with this chemical pathway. So let's take this drug. Then, your relationship with your mother or your husband or wife or children doesn't matter at all for your health. We know that is not true now. So we have to see all these things and it's difficult to see all these different things. Very, I mean, that's the name of complexity science, right? But all these different aspects affecting each other. Again, the main point here is our whole Western medical model is built on the foundation of reductionism and materialism.

15:08 So it disregarded all these other effects for a long time and they're beginning to come back into it. But still, so much of that momentum over the decades, over a century roughly has been built in this way of doing things that didn't look at any of these other areas. That is a problem. That is, this is the large, so many different things that are missing. So that is very important. Now we get to point number 14 I recognize that big pharma has a track record of criminal and harmful activity while drugs have their place. That place has been inflated through advertising, incentivizing doctors, lobbying and successfully passing certain legislation, public relations campaigns, and more. I will strive to understand that proper place. This is a deep one. Something we'll probably cover in future episodes even more so when I'm saying big pharma, I am talking about all the different pharmaceutical companies and I'm sure some are better than others, especially small ones, but we see this in the pharmaceutical industry.

16:15 Basically the big companies buy up. The small ones happen all the time. So there really are not that many of the big players out there because this is just how they roll. So I'm not trying to be libelous here, but we can actually see there is a track record of criminal and harmful activity. So there's not that many criminal cases though I will touch on some, but we can certainly see a lot of harmful cases. There's many civil cases that have been brought against the pharmaceutical companies. One, I can think off the top of my head is a case of Merck with Vioxx. And what we saw with that was they falsified the research, they downplayed the side effects and what happened from that was that people died. It basically caused heart problems and many people had heart attacks and died from this medication. I would say that is criminal behavior.

17:13 And harmful behavior. Absolutely. So what happened? Merck had to pay a large fine, but even though I think this was over a billion dollars might have been hundreds of millions, forgive it. Exactly. No one within the company was held liable for the criminal activity itself. Essentially they got a slap on the wrist and that's all it was. Even though this sounds like a whole lot of money, the amount of profit they made off the drug in the time where they delayed things from actually being pulled or they did personally pull it down the road, but they were able to sell it for years and years and pull in a lot more profit then what they were ultimately fined for, and this is part of the thing you need to understand when we say track record, they do this things again and again because they can get away with it. If the CEOs or the people involved, the people that made decisions to suppress this research or falsify this research do not get held liable.

18:11 They don't even lose any money personally themselves. Why would they change behavior? Right now being in the news, we have the opioid epidemic. I'm going to try to find someone that knows this area super well to get an interview. I think that'd be fun because I've read a little bit about it, heard about little things here and there, but it's definitely a huge case. Lot of things going on there. What do we see? We see pharmaceutical companies multiple involve that pushed this drug. They said it was safer than it was. That is a recurring theme with drugs. Say it's safe. Say it works for the things they often say they're more efficacious than they actually are and it's safer than it actually is. And both of these things can be falsified through different methods of manipulating scientific research. So that's their two tricks and in many ways of applying these things.

19:03 So they push these drugs out, they sold a whole bunch of them and this is one of the most addictive substances in the world that causes massive problems and lots of people died and had lives ruined for the sake of profit. And we're seeing fines being levied. All kinds of stuff. Will this case be any different ultimately or just a slap on the wrist and business continues as usual. So in this aisle, drugs have their place. Once again not saying drugs don't have their place, opioids, they have their place. I think it might be better if we just went back to the old opium and smoking that having the dense, I mean as long sorted history with that too. And now the British purposefully did that to the Chinese people don't know a whole lot of details on that but certainly seen some things.

19:49 So we have these drugs and painkillers are great and I'd say necessary different things. Even within more normal urbanism, there's many analgesic herbs out there that can be used that don't work quite to the same level of opioids but also don't quite have the same side effects either. So these drugs have their place, but should we be using these drugs so much for chronic pain that's happening and getting people really hooked on these things, especially when there's better stuff. I mean Kratom that's been a lot in the news and getting a lot of buzz and a lot of kind of gray area stuff. Is this legal? Let's make it illegal because it's going to take away these opioid profits perhaps. But it seems to have less effects. But yeah, very interesting stuff. So drugs have their place, but we have to understand that proper place and when this is inflated because we can make profits by manipulating research, insane, huge amounts of profits.

20:44 That is a problem. So they manipulate through advertising, right. Turn on the TV. What do you see advertising for pharmaceuticals left and right. I don't know anyone that has watched one of these than gone to their doctor and actually said like, Hey, what about this drug? I want to be on that. I'd be curious how much that actually happens, but is this not just another control mechanism? So they are paying lots of money to advertise on these TV channels, including new stations and are they able to use this saying, we're pulling our advertising because you're trying to say something that we don't want you to say. This is the way the world works. They incentivize doctors all kinds of different ways. Hey, come on, have a trip down to canned Coon so you can learn about our drugs, or we'll give freebies to your staff and all kinds of things.

21:32 Lots of different ways that they incentivize doctors short of outright paying them. Although they may do that for serving on boards or Hey, we'll give you some money if you put your name on this research paper to show that different people are involved on this. All kinds of different ways. I can do that. Lobbying. When you make hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, you can afford to hire lobbyists. You can afford to then have legislature made that supports you doing what you do. And there's so much of this going on and this has been going on for decades and decades. Once again, we have the momentum of the system. We have all this stuff in place that just allows them to continue in this one direction. So when they pass legislation, something that may have been illegal in the past is made legal think about that. So even though sure they haven't been caught for criminal activity or charged for criminal activity all that many times.

22:31 How much of that is because they can actually change the laws in their favor. Once again, not saying all pharmaceutical companies are bad. I mean the companies themselves, probably the big ones, not all the people there are working a bad, I think probably the majority of people there are good, but if you have just a few key people in key decision making places, then that's all it takes to manipulate things towards profit away from health for the people. We can see quotes from pharmaceutical heads themselves saying it's about profit for our shareholders, not for health, for the people. That's why they just Jack prices of the drugs up left and right. Oftentimes because they can, they are a monopoly. No one can compete against them legally. No one can compete against them. I cannot say herbs, cure anything. Treat anything now possible. I can sell them in this country.

23:22 Other countries, it's a bit harder. No legal competition. Public relations campaigns and you're listening to this either nodding along, agreeing with me or you're not, or not anywhere in between there, maybe you're open to the possibility. Understand when you can control or influence media, you can do so through public relations people. This is what they do. They spin things. You can go and look up Merck's PR spin of this Vioxx case and they got other cases against them. There's a whistleblower case saying they falsified data again against some of the other things they produce out there, but they can spend this in their direction and they can do things like AstroTurf organizations. Let's create a grassroots organization make it looks like the people are for this thing that the pharmaceutical companies happen to want and we can make this appearance and then get PR based around that and unless people investigate thoroughly, they don't know that that organization is actually tied to the pharmaceutical company.

24:29 So all kinds of tactics, manipulations that they use. This stuff has been going on for decades. Long-time allows a lot of momentum to build. Once again, drugs have their proper place. We as health sovereigns need to understand that proper place and that proper place is much less than is done in the standard worldview right now. So if you're on any drugs, not saying you get off them cause there can be problems with that. And once again it's illegal. I can't practice medicine without a license. And not saying that this should not be a licensed profession, just understand how things work. Is there a good reason for you to be on them? I remember a couple episodes back, we talked about only 10 to 20% of interventions in our medicine are shown to be actually efficacious by science. Further complicated because we can manipulate science.

25:22 Half of it's wrong. That's what I Oneidas and other people I've said half of our science is wrong at least half. How much of that is around pharmaceutical medicine and I'm picking on them now, but I think they deserve picking on their one little or at least trusted industries out there for very good reason. They do not deserve our trust with their track record of criminal and harmful behavior. So understanding their proper place is something we need to strive for much better. Some drugs absolutely do have a place. Most of them now they don't. I'm sorry. That's just the way it is. And many of the biggest and most prescribed ones are in that latter category. I don't think we need Staten's cholesterol medication because cholesterol, well one, this goes back to the reductionist model. We reduce things down to say, Oh heart attacks, plaque on your arteries is because of cholesterol.

26:20 This reduced down, we're saying cholesterol equals heart attacks essentially. Is it that simple? We have a very complex body and even if it were that simple, let's lower cholesterol. What are the other problems that come from having that lowered? Because there are others, cholesterol does not equal one single thing equals many different things and if cholesterol doesn't need to be lowered so much easier to do it through diet and lifestyle interventions now, of course, many people will not do so. That's cause they think they can just pop a pill and get by without any problems. Part of the world view that is reinforced the advertising, the incentivize doctors, the laws in place that allow this all to happen and the PR that pharmaceutical companies get. So yeah, proper place. Try to get that and it's true of all these other interventions. Here's the thing, the homeopaths do not have a what, hundreds of billion-dollar industries.

27:20 The herbalist do not have hundreds of billion-dollar industries in which to do similar sort of things. The energy medicine people do not have $100 billion industries. All of the other health interventions, are they smaller industries because they work less or because there's this success to the successful loop that the rich get richer because they can put laws in their place, they can manipulate the media towards what they want to say. I invite you to do your own research to look into this deeper. We will be covering it deeper, but I want you to understand these patterns, all these things that lead us to understanding this. Very important to understand that's going to cover it for this episode. I could keep ranting and raving about pharma and I will in the future for sure cause it's a fun topic. Although I do want to keep this mostly positive. I think we have to address the darkness for people to understand that.

28:16 That's my feeling. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Well, let me know. Send an email my way, [email protected] or leave a review. You can let me know in those comments as well. I'll be sure to read all of them. If you've enjoyed this, lost empire, herbs.com they make this podcast possible and just in relation to what we're doing, same sort of thing can happen there. Herbs can be reduced down to their so-called active constituents, but this is nature being statistically significant. As we talked about in earlier thing. These have been used for thousands of years. They're doing something in a more holistic way than we can even possibly understand. We don't know all the different synergies that happen with all the chemicals in there. And that's just thinking of it biochemically. That's thinking of it in a materialistic way. What about the spirit of these plants? We can work with those too in certain ways. We can do much more. Let's change the culture. Let's bring awareness and have more health sovereigns out there. We'll all be healthier and we'll all be much better for it. I'll talk to you next time. Thank you.