EFR 790: How to Increase Longevity, Boost Cognitive and Physical Performance and Why You Should Prioritize Spirituality with Dr. Kien Vuu

00:03 - Speaker 2 You know I was trained in conventional medicine, interventional radiology, so I did minimally invasive surgeries, radiology. You see all of the disease processes in your body as well, and so I had a really good breath of disease in our body. But seven years ago, overweight, diabetic, had high blood pressure on prescription medications and I was like here I am trained at the National Institutes of Health UCLA, howard Hughes Medical Institute how am I getting disease? It was really how I was living my life. People need to know.

00:33 You know, maybe my origin story was I was at boat, refugee from Vietnam. I spent eight months on a refugee boat, three months in a refugee, eight months Crammed with 2,000 other refugees, and you were the only child to survive. I was the only infant that survived. You know people either died of dysentery or some people fell off the boat. And just scan your body, scan your thoughts, scan how you feel, all these different things and just have the awareness Developing the muscle, how you're thinking, how you're feeling, the different sensations that's going on in your body is not necessarily you and that potentially there is a program that might be activated at a certain point to know that maybe those thoughts, feelings and emotions are not coming there and allowing it to potentially just come through your body and not to be assigning yourself to those thoughts, those feelings, those actions.

01:24 That's the initial step to kind of step into consciousness.

01:27 - Speaker 1 It's the recognition that we are just a vessel of these things. We are not, in fact, only in all ways these things Correct Right now. Do you think we, the collective, we humans, are actually more stressed out, or do we just have an incorrect perception of stress right now?

01:46 - Speaker 2 I think, collectively, we are a little bit more stressed out, and I have a theory behind that. Now, hi, this is Dr Qian Vu, but you can call me Dr V. I am a triple board certified MD and performance and longevity expert, and you are listening to Ever Forward Radio.

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04:18 - Speaker 2 Welcome to the show, it's great to be here this is a really cool place and to have a conversation with you with that deep baritone voice you have. It is so soothing, so it's feeling good right now, brother.

04:30 - Speaker 1 Well, I want to kick things off right away. Man, I heard you say this on another podcast and it just hit home how you live your life is medicine. What do you mean by that?

04:44 - Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I you know a little bit about my background. You know I was trained in conventional medicine, interventional radiology, so I did minimally invasive surgeries, radiology you see all of the disease processes in your body as well, and so I had a really good breath of disease in our body. But seven years ago, overweight diabetic, had high blood pressure on prescription medications and I was like here I am trained at the National Institutes of Health, ucla Howard Hughes Medical Institute how am I getting disease? It was really how I was living my life and we can dissect this a little further.

05:19 But you know, when I started, once I got disease, I did a lot of work in longevity medicine, regenerative medicine, and I studied people in the blue zones and how they lived their life and I correlated with how they were living their life just their choices and what they ate, how they thought, how they showed up and saw molecular and epigenetic changes, changes to their DNA in terms of certain behaviors. That is suggesting that how we live our life, the choices that we make, the energy that we create in our body, actually speaks to every single strand of DNA in our body. So the choices that we make can be our poisons if we choose to basically make choices that are detrimental to our cellular health, or it could be our most profound medicine and once I started to tap into that and started to make some more conscious choices about how I approached life, about the messages I was giving to my cells and how I lived my life how we live our life is medicine, man. I love that answer.

06:21 - Speaker 1 And you know it hits home so much more, I believe, because of who you are, how you were trained to hear in MD and we're gonna get a lot more into kind of the other verticals to which you have studied and biohacking, optimization, longevity but just to hear a Western doctor you know an MD allopathic trained physician say that, I'm like, yeah, dude, more of that, more of that, all right.

06:46 Yeah, One thing I wanna get into is stress. Right now, I think a lot of us, legitimately, are more stressed out for a lot of different reasons. The world is never it's never getting to be, an easier place. Also, we have access to so much more potential and opportunity and information and with that access comes, in my opinion, the stressors of what do I do with this? How do I apply it? What does it really mean to me? You may be stuck in comparison syndrome, but I also think some of us might be in this weird unrealistic relationship to stress. We have a tainted perception of stress. My question for you is right now, do you think we, the collective, we humans, are actually more stressed out or do we just have an incorrect perception of stress right now?

07:41 - Speaker 2 I think collectively, we are a little bit more stressed out and I have a theory behind that. Now, how do we use to deal with stress? We actually have programs in our body, in our system, to be able to recognize danger in our body, and back in the Paleolithic days it was a saber-toothed tiger coming to attack us, or it would be a neighboring village that would come after us, and it actually activates the stress response. Once our body perceives stress, it basically turns on this gene sequence called the conserved transcriptional response to adversity. So basically, once we recognize stress, our body quickly allows us to be able to fend off the stress. What happens here is inflammatory genes get upregulated, because what if you got a flesh wound from a saber-toothed tiger or a spear or something like that? Inflammation has to come in and it would drop your immunity genes, because why expend energy on fighting against cancer or infection?

08:34 - Speaker 1 I have this acute issue I need to work on right here, right now, exactly First right, yeah, now the people in the Paleolithic days.

08:39 - Speaker 2 Once the stress response was gone, just like many animals that are out there, they would flee from their predator and then we'll go back to grazing. That's where we were before. Unfortunately, our modern-day lifestyle has started to spring out all these potential things for us to worry and be stressed out about. It's just like stressed landmines, everywhere Exactly, and we never calm down. So unless we are starting to be aware and we could talk about this a little bit later but there's a part of our brain and nervous system called the default mode network that's constantly looking for what can hurt us.

09:14 And as we're developing as children, we're almost kind of taught not to be ourselves. We need success, to be loved, we need to act a certain way to receive love from mom and dad and to be accepted or to belong. So we have all these different stresses and we're going out into the world as that. It becomes the seat of our ego. And I would pause it to say that, unless we are aware of how we're approaching life, most people are kind of asleep to these old programs that keep them stressed out pretty constantly. So I would probably say that, compared to our ancestors, we are more stressed out over an extended period of time. Our stresses are supposed to come with a big surge and then dissipate. Now it's just tiny stresses throughout the day and it activates this conserved transcriptional response to adversity. So inflammation is elevating our body, our immune system is down. This puts us prone to chronic symptoms and chronic disease.

10:11 - Speaker 1 I heard you say that we are incapable or don't have the skill set strong enough now to reduce stress or get rid of stress like we used to. Is that correct? What do you mean by that and why? You would think, with all the advancements we have made in health and technology and humans in 2024 compared to 24, that we would be able to better hack stress. Why not?

10:34 - Speaker 2 Yeah, well here's the thing I mean we'll talk about this a little bit more as I talk about longevity but if we look back at who we were as civilizations, as human beings in the world, we had a deep sense of a tribe. Everybody was connecting with each other. People were moving around, we slept when it was dark, we woke up when there was light. There was all these things going around and we behaved as human, when we were hungry, didn't just graze the pantry, exactly.

11:03 So we lived in such a way that human beings were supposed to live, and then we had a stress response that handled danger. How are we living now, completely devoid of how a human being should be living?

11:19 in terms of our ability to move, the connection we have with people, how we show up in the world with purpose worth, always thinking, me, me, me. So the way we have lived has changed and those things have continuously caused stress. We had natural abilities to be able to just go back down to feeling safety, love and connection. That's the key thing that we had earlier. On that we're losing Our default mode. Network is constantly being turned off because we learn things as children that we are not safe, that we are not loved and we're not connected, and we formed this ego and then now we approach the world with that. So we just have a lot more stresses and we don't have those natural things that we used to do back in our Paleolithic days of being able to come back down to stress. And that's really just living as human beings, as we should be living moving, eating right, connecting with other people, serving the other people that are there. We don't have that anymore.

12:20 - Speaker 1 Not everybody and not as much. I believe there is kind of this in my observation, this kind of resurgence right now for a lot of that and which I'm all for, which leads me to a unique question I actually just thought of randomly this morning before we came over here and A lot of people like ourselves. We lean into a lot of technological advancements biohacking, optimization, we run all the panels, we research all the peptides, we look into hormone therapy, supplementation, the right timing for this exercise, for this sleep, for that thing. But then I also feel like a lot of those same people are ones that talk about and promote what our ancestors did, and I feel like there's a little bit of a dichotomy there. How can we be promoting ancestral health, what our ancestors did for wellbeing, stress reduction, sleep, body composition, longevity even while still also leaning so heavily into the advancements of modern technology, optimization and biohacking? Don't you kind of have to be one or the other? Yeah?

13:28 - Speaker 2 there is a great dance. I think what technology has been able to show us is the different things in our life that are proving what our ancestors did made a lot of sense and I think many people want the science that's there. And there's a lot of great science that's out there and don't get me wrong, I mean the advances that we have in diagnostic testing to stem cells, regenerative medicine, pharmacologic agents that are proving to have some really cool potential in extending life. All that's amazing. I put that in the bucket of the science of longevity, but if I look back and I see where people live the longest, where the people are the happiest and really being able to be really thriving until their old age, they don't have access to any of this technology.

14:20 - Speaker 1 Yeah, if you ask them, hey, what's your A1C? They're like what? Or when's the last time you had this lab done or any of these kind of markers that so many of us are after now, so that we can preserve or even add longevity? They have no more or less, have no idea, or zero or extremely limited access to.

14:38 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it's going back to that, but it's marrying the balance of sort of like this current chaotic lifestyle that we have. And yes, it's good to have some biomarkers as feedback. But do you wanna live as a Brian Johnson or do you wanna live as somebody?

14:55 - Speaker 1 in the.

14:55 - Speaker 2 Blue. Zones. Nothing wrong with that. I think it's great to have some feedback, but there's also ways of doing it without all of that. That probably gets you pretty similar results.

15:06 - Speaker 1 Yeah, he's a pretty extreme example, brian Johnson. For anybody that doesn't know, go check him out. He's dumping tens, hundreds of millions of dollars into himself to be I think the line is the most rigorously studied human ever, something like that. He doesn't even like dopes his son's blood or something. He like cycles their plasma or something.

15:32 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I think they do plasma for free. I'm probably bet you I think he's done that with his father and potentially his son. But I think it's really cool. I think people want to see the signals.

15:45 But I think, when he boils back down to the message, it's really very basic tenets of lifestyle and nutrition that I think the people in the Blue Zones have. So at the end of the day, it's great that we have all that science and certainly if something isn't working for you, if you're not feeling well, let's dig into the science. But I think ultimately it's coming back to one loving yourself, remembering who you are and tapping back into that essence and soul of where you are. I've done studies and research that basically shares this.

16:14 Yes, how we live our life is medicine, but the thing that makes you feel alive, the thing that brings you joy, that the lights you up, the things that light you up or bring you this joy and a lifeness is as unique to you as your DNA. When you do that and you live in life, as the energy of that that actually preserved your telomeres, reduces inflammatory markers, puts you in states of gratitude. So that's the amazing thing that I think I want to share with people. It's that sense of aliveness. Do you remember who you are? Before the programming, before the societal conditioning? Can you come back to that? Live is that, and that will produce not only years to your life but much much more life to those years too.

17:00 - Speaker 1 Amen, amen, brother, which leads me to we're in great flow here. I love this. Another question I have down is are we too married to protocols, more specifically, other people's protocols? And this is coming from a guy that has a lot of regiments in his life, a lot of disciplines, a lot of habits, a lot of rituals, however you want to carve it. And the reason I ask this question is because I think now where I personally am at in my wellness journey is I'm realizing how much those served me in the past and now how grateful I am to have them as a fallback as an infrastructure so that when I do kind of get off my course, I know where, how, why and when to fall back on certain practices and I'm also realizing heavily they were because of somebody else.

17:46 They were not as much for me and that is why I have struggled with some more than others. For adherence, certain protocols can serve humans across the board in a collective way, I believe, but when we don't understand why we are doing them or testing them out, to be fair to us, I think that's where a lot of us struggle. What's your take on certain protocols especially?

18:09 - Speaker 2 anybody can go on Instagram now or listen to Hubertman Lab or any other kind of like biohacking source and go oh, that's the thing I need to try, but it doesn't always work for them, yeah that's a great question and I think if you're looking at a population that is asleep, to how they were living life and sleep, nutrition, movement, their social community, their sense of purpose, all these things, if they were just off and they were just living in default survival mode, then a protocol would help just create some boundaries in place.

18:45 - Speaker 1 So going from nothing to something. You kind of chaos to order.

18:48 - Speaker 2 Exactly, which is probably why you found the protocol so helpful. But I think at the end of the day and I work with a very intelligent AI group that's called SHEAAI S-H-A-EAI, where they're just looking at how our bodies are formed Everybody requires something a little bit different not the same exercise, not the same amount of sleep, not when to be sleeping and things like that. That app is phenomenal for that. But getting a little bit of order initially starts to shift the way you feel and I think for most it's kind of tapping back into you. Who's that authentic you?

19:26 And as you start doing protocols, it is just a little bit of structure for you to go oh, what's working for me? And as you do it more and more, you're starting to say I can't have any structure because all of my life has been. I've learned, potentially things that light me up, but I'm probably learning how not to be myself. Protocols will start to put in, to play at least some system for you to go. You know what? I start feeling good when I'm doing this and I'm starting to feel differently when I'm doing that and you're starting to just listen to yourself and your body more. That's how the people back in the Paleolithic days lived is they just naturally live life in flow. We used to be more in flow and we're not in flow anymore and I think those protocols help initially to kind of tap us back in because we were so deviated. But once we start to do more of the work, here's the other thing for me. I've lost like five orange rings. I've lost like a couple Apple watches and woop bands.

20:30 - Speaker 1 I can't keep track of the technology. I'm double dipping over here. Still, these things are locked on.

20:36 - Speaker 2 But I really feel, now that I'm so in touch with my body, I know what back in the day, every day, I just used to feel crappy and I just thought life was that way. And then I started to implement some protocols, started to track what I did. But once you kind of get into a place where you're like oh, I know what feels good, oh, I ate that thing, when did I eat that thing? And I'm starting not to feel good, so you start to tap back more into your intuition as to how you approach life. And I think that's where you're finding now is like you know what, I know what's good for me and I know how this protocol is helping and I can use them to kind of guide how I live my life. That's how I think we should be adopting those protocols, not, as you know, this rigid.

21:17 - Speaker 1 I gotta follow this thing, or else Not dogma across the board, Correct? Hey guys, quick break from my conversation with Ken today and I'm gonna bring your attention to something that I think he absolutely would get on board with, and that is bringing attention to the aging process, bringing attention to ways that we gotta get real right. We gotta check ourselves. After certain ages, like 30, 35, especially for us guys, we tend to kind of feel a little drop in energy. We tend to kind of notice hey, it's taken me more work than what I used to need to do to maintain current health, current physique, body composition, libido, sleep, all of the things that keep us ticking right and definitely, in my case, help us move forward, ever forward. We need a little help sometimes, and so when I came across today's sponsor, BioPro, from a mutual friend, Greg Anderson, shout out endless endeavor podcast. He's a few years older than me. He swore by this one product that has helped him tremendously in terms of injury recovery, overall muscle recovery, libido and just that overall zest for life, that virility, if you will, that as guys age we begin to feel it right. We begin to maybe see and feel lower testosterone. Things just don't work the same way they used to. But this product, BioProPlus, he swore by and so I had to give it a try and I did, and it comes in a 30 day package. But I can honestly tell you, after about day 10, I was like, yeah, wow, something is different. I am feeling way more youthful as a guy. You know, you know, you just kind of know how you feel back in your 20s for most of us. You are way more energized, higher libido, you see quicker gains, you're able to maintain more gains in the gym or whatever your training protocol is, and that was very noticeable for me, and it even stood out more because I actually was traveling at the time. I did this back in December, January, and I was off my normal routine. This completely shook me. I was so impressed and so within about two weeks I was hooked, and then I took a month off to kind of get my comparison down. But wow, was it noticeable Using and not using BioPro?

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24:29 For me it brings in some mind this concept of integrity. I try to live my life as much as possible out of integrity. In surface level you might think that means telling the truth. It's more kind of characteristics or personality. But I really put integrity in the same bucket as how I choose to move my body, how I eat, how I sleep, what I drink or don't. And I think to get to a point to have integrity with your health has to come first from a place where you have developed to your body and your body to you honesty, trust and respect. And how many times have we all been there. I know your health journey, which we're going to get into later on.

25:12 How many times do we believe that we are studying all the things, doing all the things, knowing all the things, applying all the things, but yet in our gut or in our heart of hearts, it just doesn't quite sit with us. And so our body is then our learning. Hey, asshole, I don't trust you. You're not giving me what I need or want in a consistent manner. And then we're trying to reverse the roles. But when we learn to just listen to each other and what is we can call biofeedback, we can learn, we can trust, and then we can keep that flowing so that we maintain integrity with every decision we make. That, for me, is kind of where I'm personally at. I love my whoop, I love my Apple watch. I use them for shortcuts, I use them for nudges. Honestly, right now, my whoop is just because I'm on a winning streak. I'm almost five years of wearing whoop and I just love the aspect of having that data for sake of having the data, but right now I live out of integrity.

26:08 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and that just feels good and I think you know we'll get to this once. We kind of get into my story and then sort of like where I see the future of longevity medicine. But I think it's that it's, it's integrity to who we are, because I believe we were brought into this world as the soul that wants to just express life and that has these unique gifts to share with other people. And then, as children and because of potentially our toxic culture, we become, we say no to ourselves and we live life not an integrity to our authentic self.

26:42 And that creates disease in our body. I recently launched and thank you for helping promote the Thrive State Summit, where we actually go through and we talk with 50 of the world's experts and mental, emotional wellness, and that's the key theme is the lab was like the super band.

26:57 - Speaker 1 It was like. You know what was that like back in the seventies or eighties, like you know?

27:01 - Speaker 2 feed the earth, or it was the one that Freddie Mercury.

27:04 - Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, it was like that before wellness.

27:08 - Speaker 1 It was great yeah.

27:10 - Speaker 2 And one of the common themes really is you know, are we, are we living in life just in integrity of who we authentically are? And I'll just you know, and do we know who that authentic self is? Yeah, well, here's the beautiful part is they're part of part of our brain and nervous system. We'll get to this later. Our brain and nervous system, you know, as we're in a culture that tells us how to be in order to stay safe and in order to get love, we adopt these behavior that are not us. But I think the beautiful part of the human journey is just remembering that, of doing the work to remember that. Once you start to remember that and say yes to you, you, you, that's the magic, that's how you live your life as medicine, and I can't wait to share with you what my ever forward is is being, but it has.

27:59 - Speaker 1 We got to wait till the end for that one, everybody, you know that comes at the last question. What do you think right now is the most commonly overlooked tool that has the most universal benefit in regards to optimizing our health? Oh geez.

28:15 - Speaker 2 You know, two things linked together, basically is our ability to handle stress and to show up with intention, and then you know that feeds into our sleep and that feeds into everything. In my book I talk about basically the seven things that people can master themselves. Outside of that, If you master these seven things and there's no bio energetics right yeah.

28:35 If there's no infections or no toxins in your life, that screws with those energetics. If you make conscious choices in those seven areas of life, you become your own doctor. That's sleep, nutrition, movement, our thoughts and mindsets, our emotions, our community or the people we spend time with, and then our sense of purpose, which will tap in which I'll tap into what exactly that is a little bit later but those are the things that control the energetics of our life and also controls, basically, the messages that we give to our DNA in a moment to moment basis. Beyond that, the only thing that would screw up that ecosystem is infections and toxins from the environment. So you have so much control of the message that you give to yourselves. I forgot what question you initially asked.

29:21 - Speaker 1 Don't let me down that rabbit hole. What was the? What do you think is the greatest overlooked tool right now that has the most benefit for our health?

29:31 - Speaker 2 Yeah. So being able to just deal with stress and recognize that you are stressed is so important, because if you're not, you're basically going through life off of a old program way of fear and survival. We have a I should almost you know talk about the default mode already. Let's tap on that, because I think it's so important.

29:55 So neuroscientists are beginning to understand a part of our brain called the default mode network. It's a primitive part of our brain and nervous system. So, as you're a human being, you develop this thing and its key role is to keep you safe and to help you survive. It's our baseline operating system. It's your baseline operating system and, as a young age, it's just in download information, so it's just like downloads from the outside. Now it's very connected to the amygdala or our fear centers and our hippocampus or our memory centers, and so the things that it's constantly looking out for is, you know, things that could hurt us, and so anytime you face anything that like danger, it's going to remember that more than it is everything else.

30:35 What are the things we fear most? Growing up is losing safety, love and connection. So it's going to learn things. It's going to learn hey, you know what? I have to behave a certain way to get love. I need to behave a certain way to belong. I need to. I need success to achieve this thing. I need to people, please. And this becomes the seat of our ego and we might start adapting behaviors that are not our authentic self, such as people pleasing, such as perfectionism, such as seeking success, such as aggression or avoidance, becomes the seat of our ego which these are the things usually later in life, when you have a moment of awakening, you're like wait, why am I even doing these things?

31:21 - Speaker 1 Like this isn't me or this doesn't feel congruent to him.

31:25 - Speaker 2 And this thing is constantly on. One really cool study is the ACEs study back in 1998, I believe, from Kaiser San Francisco that looked at adverse childhood events. This is abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect as children, drugs in the family, divorce. So you have to find up all these. You know 10 different adverse childhood events in. The more of these events that you had as a child, the more likely you would have high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, mental illness, cancers All these childhood traumas. You have increased incidents of physical ailments and disease going on. So the more trauma you have earlier on and trauma where those big T's I just talked about but it also could be not being seen for who you are not being able to express who you are, because ultimately, at the end of the day, it comes down to the depth to which that imprint was made Exactly.

32:24 - Speaker 1 And so outside, looking in, most people would say or agree a hard trauma like that being beaten, being molested, being starved would imprint very significantly, but to the same level. Someone who just learns to feel the same way that I'm not safe, these people aren't safe, I'm not getting what I need to survive or thrive. It's almost like what happened to some degree doesn't matter, it's the degree to which it imprints and it still can have the same effect. Yes, exactly.

32:55 - Speaker 2 And so here's the thing is, all these programs are placed into this default mode largely before the age of 10. Unless we are conscious of this, we are basically making decisions from this unconscious autopilot survival mode of the brain.

33:14 - Speaker 1 So most likely I'm hearing correctly by age 10, how we will view the world and our world ourselves for the rest of our life. Unless we change it is set by age 10.

33:25 - Speaker 2 It's set, but it is malleable.

33:26 - Speaker 1 There is no neuroplasticity.

33:28 - Speaker 2 There's things that we could talk about a little bit later to be able to quiet down that default mode. So we start making some new choices. But how does that default mode lead to disease? Right? So I just mentioned that the ACE is study, but let's just say me as the example. How did somebody that has studied medicine and all these things created disease? Now, people need to know. You know, maybe my, my origin story was I was at boat, refugee from Vietnam, escaped post Vietnam, spent eight months on a refugee boat.

33:53 - Speaker 1 three months, eight months, yeah, please, everybody like soak that up like don't skip over that part, that's unreal.

33:58 - Speaker 2 Yeah, we spent eight months in a refugee boat crammed with 2,000 other refugees, and weren't you the only child to survive? I was the only infant that survived. You know people, either, you know, died of dysentery or some people fell off the boat when they were. You know, we had to, like, migrate from boat to boat.

34:14 You know, at times we spend another three months in the Philippine refugee camp and you would think a child going through that experience would be so grateful to be alive. But you know, I watched TV, I looked at the people in school and I was constantly being teased. For the holes in my hand be down closed. The stinky food my mom sent me to school with, I got a lot of. Go back to your home country, chinky, got all of that.

34:36 And so what was programming that child? I was not enough. I was not rich enough, not tall enough, not American enough, not white enough, all these, not enough. And so that was my default mode, that was my old programming, and throughout life it was like hey, how do I get more attention, how do I succeed more so that I can feel worthy of love? And so those seven things, the bio, energetic elements. What choices was I making in each one of those categories? Well, shoot, I'm going to go through medical school. I'm going to go through medical school, I need to get to the top places, I need to get to the top residencies. And so, hey, sleeping was for the week. I got to do what I got to do. You know, did I have time to move an exercise? No. Did I eat good food. No, I just basically ate the trash that was in the hospital during my training.

35:22 - Speaker 1 Well, because, again, you were talking about the food that you were eating and bringing in wasn't acceptable. So, okay, cool, let me jump on board to the amazing typical standard American diet. Right yeah that did wonders.

35:32 - Speaker 2 Yeah. So the choices that I was making in each one of those seven categories, as much as I knew yeah, you know, diet, exercises I was making unconscious choices that basically created cellular dysfunction. And so that's why you know, even as a chief of interventional radiology, my hustle. I was overweight, I was diabetic, I was on prescription medications and I realized that that form of training and certainly the tools that I had to try to manage those symptoms were working for me. And so that's why, if we're not conscious of this old program, we don't do the work of healing ourselves. We're, even though we kind of know what we should be doing. We are making these unconscious choices that are basically producing poor cellular health, ultimately symptoms, ultimately disease.

36:23 - Speaker 1 So I want to go there more. I feel like we're at a great little transition point, but before we really do, because I want to get into your thoughts and expertise around the world of spirituality, meaning even religion, consciousness and how it literally works in the body and why I believe so heavily that this is a commonly overlooked, crucial component to maybe why we're so stressed out, we're still doing all the things, maybe why we're not losing the weight when we have the best diet, the best workout. But to kind of wrap up what the first part of the conversation was about, this aspect of longevity and leaning into advancements of technology and wellness, I think right before we hit record, we were talking about how so many of us are working on longevity. We're trying to live for tomorrow but we're losing today. We are trying so hard to make sure that we are around as long as possible and we're playing that long game, which I agree has a place, but at what cost for the here and now?

37:27 - Speaker 2 Oh, so good. I bring it back down to this thing of the default mode network. Right, it's that part of our nervous system that it just fears what's going on outside. And there's people in the biohacking and longevity space that are just trying to do so much. Let me get as much exosomes as possible or stem cells Give me. Do all of this because I fear aging, I fear dying.

37:52 But in that fear process, in that consciousness, you are having an overactive default mode network. Guess what? When that's overactive, it activates that conserved transcriptional response to adversity. Guess what? Inflammation is slowly brewing and elevating. Your immune system is actually being weakened. So the more you chase the thing, the more you try to do is creating that stress in your body, whereas doing the work is really being not the doing. If you could start to understand just how beautiful life is, if you could start to just understand that you were gifted into this world to provide something beautiful for this world to evolve into, and if you could step into that energy and not have to worry about all the doing, or actually, if you take that being in what you do, then you actually start to activate the biology of performance and longevity. You are actually turning on the epigenetics of longevity and performance once you start to be.

38:52 - Speaker 1 Really doing what so many people are seeking to try and happen, but just trying to cram a square peg around a whole kind of thing.

39:00 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talk about community, for example, and if you were just doing community, if we were just forth of, hey, I'm going to hang out with Chase right now because I got to for my longevity, that's not going to do anything. But if we're actually here and we're smiling, we're hugging, we're actually connecting, we're deeply connecting. That's when the oxytocin in our body goes up.

39:20 - Speaker 1 Do you think it's the same thing when people have resentment towards their workout? If you go to the gym so begrudgingly, or you just look at your schedule and look, I'm like I've been there Some days. I don't want to work out, I don't want to do it, I want to have myself a moment. But I know on the other side of that, I'm going to be glad that I did, but I'm still coming to that thing with stress, with cortisol, with not being in alignment to the thing that my body really needs and wants more of. Can this same thing happen with exercise?

39:50 - Speaker 2 That's going to be, like you know, an intimate dance of your intuition. You know, I think earlier on, because you are an awake and probably the old programming says you don't want to be doing these things. You have to get yourself lit up and to do something different. Once you tap into a little bit more of your intuitive sense, you would recognize there's probably some stresses on your phones or in the work day or these other things that pile up and potentially you don't have the juice to do it at that moment, but that takes a little bit of time. Going from somebody where you're not disciplined at all, you will notice that moving is going to make you feel better almost immediately. But I think training that intuition to know what's default programming versus who you truly are, is a process and I am continuously evolving day to day.

40:40 - Speaker 1 What you're saying makes so much sense for me. I'm going to share a little bit of a personal story with you and kind of get your take on it. The part that I shared earlier about how I kind of realized where I was just having protocols for the sake of having protocols and now how I use them just as a framework and I'm evolving creating new ones, happened about two and a half ish years ago, when so much of what you're talking about kind of came to for which came to a head for me. And it was this culmination of diving deep into navigating mental health and going through a pretty intense string of events in terms of therapies, different healing modalities, particularly going through ketamine assisted psychotherapy, and take the therapy component out, take that spiritual component out, that emotional, spiritual surrender that I did have and a lot of people do. And ketamine, we're now learning, has a lot of unique neuroplasticity benefits, has a lot of unique abilities to what I'm hearing you say kind of I don't want to say bypass, but really create a more malleable default mode network, because in that experience, in the dissociative state, it actually shuts that off.

42:00 Walk us through what's going on there, because I think there's a strong component to the ketamine therapy that I went through, having that substance in my body, cross a blood brain barrier, coupled with the spiritual component and the surrender component, and understanding why I do certain things and what I want to let go of.

42:19 Also, I know there's a lot here. One other thing that I think really made the whole experience is that, excuse me, I had an ego death, but I also completely relinquished any fear that I thought I had consciously or subconsciously about death and dying. I want to live a long, healthy, quality life, just like the next person, I believe, and I'm doing a lot of things to hopefully help make that happen. Yeah, but if today was my last day on earth, if this was the last thing that I did today, can which I'll go out with the bang with you, man, if this was it, like I'm good, I am so good, I have zero qualms about dying and I think that also probably was the largest component to this and resetting that default mode network. Walk us through the ketamine aspect, that kind of maybe spiritual surrender aspect and this, this attachment we have to death and it's hold on us and actually having longevity.

43:20 - Speaker 2 Yeah, wow, so much to unpack there. You mentioned earlier like do we, do we have better ways to deal with stress? You know, back in those paleolithic days? Well, I'll tell you right now, the person growing up from zero to 10. Wasn't given all these different things of rules of how to be, you know. They were just accepted for who they were. They were constantly nourished in different ways so they didn't lose themselves in the process. That's huge. That's huge when we think of default mode programming, a child going through this type of household, having generations of different type of traumas and that was the other thing too. There was like trauma ads on each other. I mean, we can go into the studies if you want, on basically epigenetic transference. So the trauma, two generations right Up to two generations.

44:09 - Speaker 1 Yeah, it's wild Meaning, like the trauma that your grandparents went through. I think I even I read a lot about this in Dr Shana Swans book Countdown. It's so unique actually to the maternal side because we come from two generations of eggs above and so many people now, especially eating disorders. If your grandparents, especially if your maternal grandmother, was a Holocaust survivor, it's like a 40 to 50% chance you're gonna have a binge eating disorder, disordered eating, something significant like that. The scarcity of food starvation literally was imprinted two generations.

44:42 - Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely, and we need to start to understand that and the work that we do to heal. Sometimes that imprint is a direct, like little tag on your DNA, and doing the healing process can potentially remove those tags or it could just rewire how your DNA, you know, use different pathways actually, exactly that's why you do the healing process, but it's actually it's an imprint on your DNA and so for people that don't understand, you know, epigenetic transference, it's a way our body uses a trauma that's happening to our collective right now so that our future generations could survive later on, right? So it's a pretty neat thing that that gets passed down from our genes on. So they did this study on mice and they took these male rats yeah, it was rats actually and they put out the smell of cherries, and every time there was a smell of cherries around they would shock that rat. All right, and so this rat, after several different shocks, got conditioned to the shock, and so they would just put the smell of cherries up and then the rat would start to shiver Like, oh my God, okay, maybe a shock is coming. We'll get this two generations down, no, so the grandchildren of that rat that never got exposed to any shock. If you put out the smell of cherries, they would start to shiver. No way, yeah, wow.

46:09 So this is how powerful the traumas of our parents get passed on so earlier on, way back from before, where we were just seeing for who we were, we didn't have all these things of how we should be. We were allowed to be ourselves, and so that programming of the default mode never really got set. We just worried about dangers of neighboring villages, and same for two tigers. We weren't worried about having to look a certain way, having to be a doctor or scientist or lawyer when we grew up. None of these things, just be you, just be you. And then, throughout time and generations, we have basically adopted traumas. You need to be different, you need to be this, and then it got passed down and it just got heavier along the way, which is why, growing up these days, it's very difficult for someone to just say be you.

46:57 - Speaker 1 What about the aspect? Do you have any familiarity with ketamine? The aspect of the actual molecule. Can you walk us through a little bit of that if you have any familiarity? Yeah, so. I mean in terms of.

47:06 - Speaker 2 I lead people through ketamine ceremonies in the past and it's a very powerful molecule. It's used in the 1960s basically to help people undergo anesthesia and one of the great things about ketamine, compared to some of the other drugs, that is no respiratory depression and what we understand.

47:25 - Speaker 1 It's one of the most safe drugs out there, especially in the world of anesthesia, other than like pre-existing heart condition, cardiovascular disease, blah, blah, blah. It's very, very safe.

47:35 - Speaker 2 So it works on the NMDA and glutamate receptors and what it basically does is it's dissociative and it does, and it works differently in terms of mild doses, moderate doses and really high doses and get you in a k-hole. But one of the things we know that is super.

47:50 I'll for that, I'll for that, in a therapeutic environment, what we do know is it quiesce down the default mode network and this is why we find psychedelics and practices that quiet down the default mode network, so healing, because what you can do is almost from like a bird's eye view, almost start to see the different type of programming that was there. All the anger, all the resentment that wasn't released.

48:18 - Speaker 1 Get the bird above the bird's eye view in some cases.

48:21 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and you start to really wash some of those programings that lead to anger, lead to stress, lead to these triggers and go. Oh wow, I didn't realize this, but I chose something as a child to be safe, but it's led to so much pain down the road, and so the practices and the psychedelics, including ketamine, include psilocybin, lsd, ayahuasca and DMT the active molecule on that have been showed to decrease the default mode, and once you quiet down that default mode, it's really tapping back into new possibilities. Now this is very powerful. As we're speaking of this, I have to be responsible in letting people know it's really important to do it in the proper set and setting, and the most important part of any of this psychedelic work is the integration piece.

49:13 What do you do after your transformation was experienced? Please say that again. It's that important. The integration piece is key and that's basically what you do after the experience. Now that you have been able to maybe see some of that old programming and potentially see how you were wired, can you make some new choices? Because, yes, triggers will come? How are you going to respond to that?

49:37 - Speaker 1 And that's because our brains quite literally correct me if I'm wrong we are in a hyper-aware of past, present, future, thought states, beings, but also, quite literally, our brains. We are in a more malleable state. Yeah absolutely.

49:53 - Speaker 2 You're in a malleable state, which is great if you've got that integration piece and if someone's there to guide you in terms of what to do afterwards, because here's the problem without the integration piece, so you will get triggers later on, but you can then have practices where you ground yourself and go oh, there it is. Oh, I remember what that is.

50:14 - Speaker 1 I can be the observer, not always the participant and I could choose something different.

50:17 - Speaker 2 Here's the problem is, if you don't have the integration piece, everything that you felt in that experience was so great Without integration. Basically, you can have that particular therapy, even if it's not drug-related, like breathwork, be an escape, and if it becomes an escape, those things become addictions rather than healing tools. So that's why it's so important to have that integration piece and do it in the proper set and setting and to have the right intention of doing that work, that sacred work, because otherwise you can use it as a place to escape, as a crutch, which is an addictive type of route.

50:58 - Speaker 1 It's not just what you hear people say or talk about set and setting integration. There are trending keywords around this type of medicine and healing, but they absolutely matter. I cannot stress that enough. I've talked a lot about my experiences and it all comes back to me the most crucial component is integration absolutely. Which brings me to the next section of the conversation. Is, we could say, this kind of leans into spirituality? 100%.

51:25 We're getting into more practices or just curious about things other than the obvious when it comes to our wellness. Eating, moving, sleeping it's what's going on in the head and the heart. What role does spirituality play in our general well-being?

51:44 - Speaker 2 So great and it's sort of like how do you find it in spirituality?

51:49 - Speaker 1 I say spirituality different from religion. Yeah, certainly which. I want to get into as well, but spirituality.

51:55 - Speaker 2 Oh, wow, we're gonna go there. That's awesome. Well, spirituality, we should start to understand how we became this thing Sperm egg energetics, two different energetics fusing together, forming this physical form. But where do these energetics come from? Where do those proteins that come from? That create who we are? There is something much bigger, and all the energetics that are around the world basically come in through proteins, through cellular membranes interacting that then form who we are. We are actually connected to something so much bigger and I think recognizing that and remembering that actually allows us to perform at our best.

52:39 Because what is the physical part of our body is we've adopted a brain and a nervous system and in the adoption of that phase, we forget one thing, and I think we forget something super important that we are safe, that we are absolutely loved and we're connected to everything on the planet. That's it. But we forget those things and we show up in the world marrying some of our parents and grandparents traumas, and then we learn that here we are blessed in this world, that we are here to do something magical, but we forget that and we learn not to be our most authentic selves. We learn that life is not safe, that we need X, y and Z to feel happy, to be safe, and then we approach life in that mode. That is the survival mode.

53:32 So if you're in that consciousness, if you're in that consciousness of I got a hustle, I got a mig, life needs to look. I need X, y and Z to be happy. I need X, y and Z to feel love or safe or connected. You're basically in this world and trapped in this matrix of fear and that's intimately tied together with your nervous system and the rest of your body. I told you that when that default mode is active and overactive, it basically drops you in. You can't tap into flow. When you're in that stress day and also you turn on that CTRA response, inflammation goes up, your immune system goes down. You're basically sending the bodies of stress and danger throughout your body and the choices that you're making are unconscious. It's always coming from that default mode and so being in the matrix, being in that default mode, basically accelerates aging because you're not living as your true self, Despite, even if we're doing all the longevity biopacks optimization, we could be counterproductive.

54:33 You'll be a better version of yourself, for sure.

54:35 - Speaker 1 We could be missing out.

54:37 - Speaker 2 truly yes, Because I know some of these biohackers that are so tuned in and so proud, and proud is an emotion of the default mode, right.

54:48 - Speaker 1 Pride's an extension of ego and some components I believe.

54:51 - Speaker 2 Exactly so proud to have certain data looking a certain way.

54:55 - Speaker 1 Not a bad thing.

54:56 - Speaker 2 Yeah, not a bad thing at all, but I think if it's and don't get me wrong they're probably a much better specimen than the OB's person. But if they could let some of that stuff go, because that pride also activates the genes of stress when you have that, and so we're gonna let some of that go and, yes, kind of live in that way, life would just be much more magical, much more flowing, and I think that's really the new frontier in performance and longevity is this consciousness piece Can you remember who you are and live as that? Because when you could live as that, the thing that makes you feel alive Because I think there was a kind of opposite feeling, but generally the feeling of aliveness you don't need anything to feel like good, because you actually already are.

55:52 - Speaker 1 You know my daughter Don't tell I'm not gonna lie.

55:55 - Speaker 2 My daughter came into this world and there was a cord wrapped around her neck and ankle and I didn't know that she would survive or not. Because she got sent to the ICU. And in my life I was always preaching everything's happening for you, not to you. And in that moment I was so pissed off. At the hospital I wasn't able to go to any of the prenatal visits because of COVID. And I was so pissed off Like when did you know this? Why did we get to this point here? And I remember I was in the ICU and I was like how is this thing happening for me? Because I'm preaching everything happens for you. I was like this is bullshit, how is this happening for me? And the minute I asked that question I'm like OK, you know, I'm really believing this. Where's the gift?

56:51 In this moment, the nurse hands me my daughter. I hold her in my arms. She had a tube down her nose, a tube down her mouth. She had IVs in her arms and her legs. And I was just thinking you know what Health complications are not brain damage or not. She's absolutely perfect, absolutely perfect. There was so much love I had for her. She deserves so much love. And that moment, right there, there was like this huge healing that overcame me. I was like here's its daughter that I'm willing to love, even if she had a health complication or brain damage. Whatever she's so worthy, how could I not love myself?

57:32 - Speaker 3 And in that moment I'm like, oh man, it's happening for me, not to me.

57:41 - Speaker 2 And then as I look at her play now, as I look at her thank God she's doing great, great, great and I just see that version of her that's just natural that wants to just do these certain things I'm like thinking, ok, how do I not screw this up? But that's who we naturally are, that's who we authentically are, that every single one of us who's been gifted with this miracle that is life is love, connected and enough. And the work that we do in our human life is just to remember that. And when we could tap into that, we're tapping into this version and energy of ourself that is just beaming.

58:22 - Speaker 1 Thank you for sharing that. That's beautiful, it's very timely. I have a personal story I'll share as well. Right now that I'm going through this whole aspect of self-love, I'm being taught a whole new lesson about it and how self-love we can learn to have. But where I'm at is the realization of how long in my life I did not have it, or I had a version of it that I thought was enough and it wasn't true. Love and respect for myself.

58:57 For the past five weeks, yay me. I've been having panic attacks. I've been going through, just at first, what I thought were old triggers for me, from PTSD kind of coming back for whatever reason and very gnarly, very scary, having met home in the gym, out in restaurants I had one driving a couple of weeks ago and I'm navigating them, doing the things, the self-practices and back in therapy and doing all the things to get ahead of it. Unlike old Chase, he would have just stuffed it down. But a theme that I'm recognizing, I think, is a lot of these emotions that are coming up in memories during the panic attack, are past experiences of observing me in trying to mask and hide the trauma that I was going through at that time and what I'm really realizing, what I think is there is.

59:52 I'm recognizing how much self-love I did not have for myself, the things that I would think, the things that I would say, how I chose to live my life for years, years, was through the lens of someone who only cared about others, which I thought was a good thing. I put others first. I served my country for six years. I did all these things for my family through this major time of loss, and now I'm kind of being mirrored, like Chase. How much you put you on the back burner for 15 years. And what that really was, chase, was you didn't give a shit about yourself, you didn't love yourself, the way that you chose to try to put yourself in harm's way and just not give a shit about your life. I am being shown that now, and it's crazy because I believe that I have self-love now. But my body, my spirituality, my consciousness is reminding me hey, this is great for Chase now, but what about Chase then? We need to go work on him still.

01:00:58 - Speaker 2 Oh, so good. Thank you for bringing that up.

01:01:00 I mean, doing the inner child work is very, very powerful stuff and it's sort of almost like a quantum exploration of the deep parts of ourselves that need healing, and it's very possible that, as young Chase, there were times where you didn't feel that safety, love and connection that you made the world mean a certain way and kind of abandoned that version and allowing him to feel that again. What would you, as the consciousness that you have today, be able to give to him so that he feels that I know some people doing some energetic work? I'm going to introduce you to them afterwards.

01:01:40 - Speaker 1 Thank you.

01:01:41 - Speaker 2 Thank you. My lady just got back from a retreat where she had so much trauma I feel like I could speak about it now but so much trauma with an alcoholic father, different men in her life that just showed up, that didn't allow her to feel safe, and being able to do that healing is so important. She's glowing now and so I'm about to go on that retreat in June. Maybe you'll join me, man.

01:02:05 - Speaker 1 I'm all ears.

01:02:05 - Speaker 2 I'm all ears.

01:02:06 - Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you. Consciousness is kind of a hot word right now. I know it's been around for a long time. Again, this might just be awareness theory on my end, but I feel like the way that it is being brought top of mind in podcasts, content, books, healing, wellness I think in a big, big way consciousness is being folded into practices that a lot of us have been having exercise, sleep, nutrition, et cetera. How would you advise somebody to kind of begin in the work of consciousness so that they are contributing to their total well-being as like a hey, what's another wellness hack? Let's skip all the obvious stuff, let's go into consciousness.

01:02:55 - Speaker 2 Wow, let's go there. I think for many people who are not familiar with it just sort of micromeditations and micro body scanning and how it could look at something like this. Every time you walk through a door you give yourself some kind of trigger to do this. It's really just sort of pause for a second deep breath into your nose, hold for seven out that's called four, seven for a count of eight, four, seven, eight breathing and just scan your body, scan your thoughts, scan how you feel, all these different things and just have the awareness Developing the muscle, how you're thinking, how you're feeling, the different sensations.

01:03:39 - Speaker 3 That's going on in your body is not necessarily you and that put in, that put in that and that and that put and that put and that put and that put and that put and that and that put, a pattern and that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that I am this thing, I am stressed out, I am anxious, I am depressed.

01:04:33 - Speaker 2 And once you start to develop the muscle of doing that, I have courses on my website that basically teach people that we are these energetic beings. And if you are stuck in the consciousness of the default mode anxiety, stress, worry, anxious, fear will probably be the dominant emotions in your life and the dominant thoughts in your life are going to be kind of negative. How do you start to shift the energy and all those seven bio energetic elements? One you can create pillars and habits for life to create an energy where you're vibrating. But there's also little tiny practices of breath work, of how you move, how you breathe, that actually shift your energy in a moment. So you know, don't make decisions when you're are in these.

01:05:15 You know negative emotions, be able to ground yourself, ask yourself, you know what that emotion is telling you and then go. Okay, if I want to be in a more resourceful emotion, to have this conversation with my spouse or to ask for a raise or to get this, you know, to get the sale or connect with somebody, how do I want to show up? Can I put myself in the posture, in the breathing in, in how we show up, to shift the energy of where I'm at so that I can, you know, show up in a different place. Being able to tap into different energetic states in our body. That's the cool, that's the coolest bio. That's what Thrive State's all about is being able to manipulate the seven bio energetic elements in our life, to control the energy of our life and to control the messages that we're giving to ourselves.

01:06:03 - Speaker 1 Some people might think of religion when they hear spirituality, when they think of consciousness. No, we're talking to our inner self, our higher self, the higher power. In your own words, the difference between adopting a spiritual practice and a religious practice, yeah, I think religion has been potentially tainted by man and their desire to control people. Strong potential for that.

01:06:32 - Speaker 2 Yeah, kind of the track record with man and there are lots of rules and dogma in the you know, in religious that I find, whereas spirituality there's almost a knowing that there's something greater, that you're a part of something greater.

01:06:49 My personal belief is Jesus is God, but also you are and I am, and him being able to identify that he is God, that he is part of something that is much greater, is what allowed him to transcend and for us to be able to recognize that, that we are a part of that as well. And so you know, that's that's what I feel and along the way, I believe man, the default mode, network to have the control, to have to have power, and all these things have maybe tainted the message of spirituality that we are part of God itself, that we are connected to everything, that we are loved, safe and connected, have distilled it down so that they could start to control masses of people and trick people into forgetting that they are divine, that they are God, that they are love, because it kind of imagine a world let's just paint this hypothetical If every human being believe that to their core, it's kind of like what role would religion have?

01:07:58 - Speaker 1 I personally feel like a lot, especially with the historical aspect of Christianity. In the Holy Roman Empire a lot of religion was used to control people and you know it was fear pushing because you know we are higher and holier than now. We have more of a direct connection to spirit and source than you can or are allowed to. I mean. So they recognize that if everybody believe this or knew my personal belief, shayshu'in's belief about this is that we all have access to the same God, absolutely.

01:08:32 - Speaker 2 Absolutely, and that's where I think you know the greatest teachers. But potentially, you know, you're Moses, you're Jesus, you're Muhammad. There is one truth and you know. Any deviation from that is potentially just our, you know, our man-made type of perception of that truth. And the fact that we have to fight over the truth is so, it's so heartbreaking.

01:09:03 - Speaker 1 I haven't. I've never thought about that. What a heartbreaking realization that the collective we have to fight over access to in acceptance of the truth. Jeez, man, that's. I'm going to be thinking about that one for a while.

01:09:21 - Speaker 2 I like that, I like that that is the part of our primitive brain and nervous system, you know, at play and I think you know, for as humanity evolves, it's just that dichotomy of can we start to see that, can we see, start to see the primal versions of us versus, you know, seeing the more divine aspects of who we truly are? And I think the more we start to evolve into that aspect of ourselves, we are automatically turning on the biology of human performance and longevity.

01:09:51 - Speaker 1 Woo man, all right. One more question around religion. Here I kind of wrap this section up. I also know that a part of your story was after being a refugee on this boat for months, your family was. What's the word? Sponsored by a Catholic church, and so I'm sure my assumption here please correct me if I'm wrong is that the Catholic church probably had a very strong presence, dare I even say influence, on your life, your family's life, your upbringing as a child.

01:10:22 - Speaker 2 I would say influence, yes, not a strong influence.

01:10:26 - Speaker 1 Okay, but it was there and you were aware of it. We were.

01:10:28 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I remember going to church I mean me probably until the age of five or so, I think. My parents were very grateful for the sponsorship. Sure, the sponsored family was so loving. We still keep in contact with them. Oh, this beautiful right now. We never converted to Catholicism. We were very grateful Like, hey, thank you, and what you believe has allowed you to loom your hearts, to bring us in. We were always eternally grateful, but we never converted to Catholicism.

01:11:01 - Speaker 1 Okay, thank you for sharing that. My question here is did you, do you feel any kind of duty, obligation, responsibility to Religion and in this case, catholicism, because of that kind of hey, we're gonna come in and like, bring, literally, save you guys, bring you into the country? The reason I asked that is because I feel like a lot of people myself included, speaking personally we are raised in a religious household. We are brought up in the beliefs, the religion of whatever our parents are. For me it was Christianity, for me it was Southern baptism mostly, and A lot of that was just ingrained in me and I thought that's what I had to do when I had to believe. And I'm not gonna get into all of that, but just nature and nurture right. Our community, the Temperament, the pulse, the, the religion of how we're brought into this world, I think can really directly influenced to our through line here at the default mode network in our core belief system. Did you feel that? Do you feel that? How do you navigate that?

01:12:07 - Speaker 2 I Never felt, you know, in terms of the Catholic religion. I never felt, you know, like I was obligated because my parents never felt like they needed to. You know, become Catholic. You know, down the road.

01:12:20 That was probably a Determining factor, kind of like yeah, it was only that but when we let's look at belief systems, you know, I mean, you know, I always, as a child, wanted to Be an actor or be an entertainment, because I think there was a part of me that just sort of wanted to I don't know perform and speak.

01:12:38 - Speaker 1 I see you out there on the squid game, squid game game show. Yeah, you're dipping the toes in.

01:12:45 - Speaker 2 Can't wait to find out. Did you, you know, mention if you're in this reality show? Oh, we're um.

01:12:54 In still in cast okay, early on there, let me know late next month yeah but certainly my parents, you know, had ideas as to what they thought was gonna be a successful life for me, and so they always push medicine, and so Part of me was, you know, feeling obliged that I needed to, you know, go down a certain path to make them happy. Okay, it was, you know, as a child, I think you always want to, to do, you know, make your parents happy, even though it wasn't really fully aligned with what, you know, I wanted to do, and I think different people, you know sense that as well as these belief systems, and just knowing that, oh, it's not the thing that truly makes you feel alive, yeah, yeah, but absolutely, I think you know this is the beautiful part of of life and and and the reason, discovery of who you are like, I feel, and I and I feel everything happens for, you know, as it's supposed to happen. Hmm, my ability to talk about performance and longevity and spirituality only came, and only, you know, possible To be able to share my story of being an infant Refref, refugee, understanding the default mode network and being able to explain it in my story. Going into conventional medicine, you know, into the higher ranks of conventional medicine, doing these awesome talks around the world about. You know, advances of interventional Radiology but still yet have disease.

01:14:24 Hmm, and going through all the process of the different healing and struggles have allowed me to really be able to understand performance, spirituality, longevity in a completely different lens. And now, as that child who wanted to speak or to act or to do all those things, now it's like, oh yeah, my desire to do that is there, but I have to learn the lessons in life so that I can actually use those, you know, innate talents, that to share with the world. Now. Yeah, I needed that life. And now I'm like, okay, I get, why I live the life that I lived. I love that and I'm so grateful for it.

01:15:06 - Speaker 1 I love that. Yeah, before I get to my final question, I I found a quote that I thought you would appreciate and I I think is a perfect way to kind of wrap up our whole conversation here today. It's from Albert Einstein. A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

01:16:01 Man like goosebumps brother. It's like I knew what we were gonna be talking about, or? Something like that is spot on yeah.

01:16:08 - Speaker 2 How does that sit with you? Oh, it sits. One of the things I want to be able to share as we leave is I, you know, I have the opportunity to speak to organizations on performance and longevity and what we have to understand is this there is a beautiful sort of stratification on the human body as it pertains the humanity itself. If we look at our human body, for us, in order for us to have the human potential perform at our best, you know, for us to reach longevity, we're all made up of individual cells. Those individual cells work together to form tissues, work together to form organs, work together form systems, work together to form the human body. And if that individual cell is optimized and if this individual cell serves like the heart cell has to be able to pump so that the, the lung cell can extract oxygen to deliver to the rest of the body, all this serves they. They have their own unique purpose, but it's serving the entire body. For us to have Human potential, longevity, performance, if one heart cell decides, you know what, screw everybody, I'm gonna extract all the oxygen, I want all the nutrients, I want all this. That's a very special condition in the body called cancer and Oreck the entire thing.

01:17:31 So how are we living life? Yes, we've got this default mode network that makes us focused on ourselves. But can we see this? Is that we actually are individual cells in the entire body of our families, of our teams, of our organizations and of humanity. And If you can see yourself as that, and if we want to see humanity move forward, it's not about the me, me, me. It's like actually I'm just one small piece of this awesome thing. Can we see that we're one small piece of this awesome thing? Not just to grab and and help the people immediately around us, but how, how do I make this entire thing better when we can recognize that? That's when we tap into the energetic and that's why you know, that's why purpose is so Important. That's why purpose has been shown to add seven to ten years of life and longevity.

01:18:23 - Speaker 1 That's why, when we lose, it we get sick, we die off, we become frail absolutely so.

01:18:30 - Speaker 2 He makes such an important point is that default mode, that that very primitive part of ourselves that just thinks that we, we are isolated, we'll accelerate aging. But once we can free that and see that we we are obviously love, that we are a small piece. That's that this whole thing operates on. Damn, we are important, but we're also connected.

01:18:54 - Speaker 1 We're also. We're important, but also we don't mean shit.

01:18:57 - Speaker 2 We're also Crucial to life happening, but at the same time meaningless Exactly and the more we get a laugh and see that we don't have to be so stressed out about not recognizing Just the very tenets of safety, love and connection. That's who we are, and and the fact, and and the whole joke about this is that, you know, this primitive part, part of our brain and nervous system Just makes us forget. But we have this beautiful life to remember the beauty of consciousness.

01:19:30 - Speaker 1 Yeah, the beauty of consciousness. Well, yeah, this has been amazing. It's been great getting to know you more of the last several months. I'm so glad we're able to finally sit down and deliver this conversation, this expanded conversation from so many other past conversations, and I want to bring it home to the theme of the show, and my goal with every guest and every topic is to Focus on a unique area or areas of our total well-being that, should we choose to pull some and apply it, we can move forward. We can keep living a life ever forward. Yeah.

01:20:05 Those two words. What do they mean to you today, man?

01:20:07 - Speaker 2 Ever forward. It just means that in every moment I get to evolve, that every moment there are parts of my old being that still show up, but I still get to choose, and Every single moment I hope to be able to tap back into that, that that state of authenticity, of Love, feeling connected, and in that mode that I described my book called the Thrive State, and I think every single day I consistently, you know, choose to make new choices into that and I want to be able to just celebrate everyone for where they are and what they get to contribute to this world and, you know, humanity moving forward. I think it's a beautiful place because people are starting to wake up to the beauty of life and who they are.

01:20:59 - Speaker 1 Never a right or wrong answer, man, but I enjoy every single one of them, thank you. Where can my audience go to connect and learn more about what you have going on in the world? We'll, of course, have this all in the show notes, video notes, but right now, where can I go?

01:21:13 - Speaker 2 all the work and practices and Courses that we do around consciousness of being an activator state. They could find at my Thrive State calm. If people want to know about the work that I do with corporations and consultancy work, that you go to go to my website at Ken vu dot com and you can find me all over Instagram, youtube, doing some funny videos, some consciousness stuff at Dr VmD.

01:21:37 - Speaker 1 Yeah, thank you, man. This is great. Thanks for having me. You guys definitely. Thanks so much for watching. Please, if you're listening, make sure to check this one out. I always try to route everybody to the, to the video, because it's a vibe in here, man, I don't know about you. Yeah, I enjoy it. Thank you guys so much. I'll see you next episode. For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to everforwardradio.com