[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the heart rate variability podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness. Please consider the information in this podcast. For your informational use and not medical advice, please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart rate variability. Podcast is a production of optimal LLC and optimal HRV. Check us
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Welcome to the heart rate variability podcast. I am Matt Bennett. I'm just going to do a quick introduction here. We have a great episode with Don Moxley today. We had a little bit of technical difficulty. I did my best in editing to overcome those difficulties. I believe you've got a great listening experience ahead of you, but I just wanted to apologize up front. If you just see it, there should be maybe one or two little glitches in there. We tried to do our best, but I think you will enjoy this episode regardless. So welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast, and let's get on with the episode.
Welcome friends to the heart rate variability. Podcast. I am Matt Bennett. I'm here with Don Moxley today, who I'm excited to explore just a range of topics, getting to know Don a little bit over the last few weeks have we been setting up this episode. So don. I want to welcome you to the heart rate variability podcast. And before I kind of jump in with my questions, I'd just love for you to do a brief introduction of your work before we start to nerd out.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Thanks, Matt. Yeah, and I'm excited you guys have a great podcast. I love what you do, so I'm excited to be part of it, give you a little introduction. I was a college athlete back in the early I actually I grew up feeding beef cattle in Ohio and went to Ohio State with every expectation of going back and feeding beef cattle. But I struggled with injuries, and I had to come up with a formula so I could at least stay on the mat and fell in love with human physiology, finished up my undergraduate degree, did my master's work at Ohio State, and immediately started teaching. So I've been a university professor for almost 35 years now. But rather than just staying in the classroom or going the quote unquote academic route with research, I was always adjunct. I love to teach, but I've always had a foot in the industry as it relates to technology, things like that, or working with elite athletes.
Part of that journey put me in Polar Electro, so the heart Rate monitor company, and I wound up working with them. And this is what my introduction to HRV. So before cell phones, I'm that old.
Certainly before smartphones, polar was introducing technologies that were called own zone, own index, things like that, and I started to dig in. Okay, what is this technology, and frankly, I loved it because in the exercise community, we want to prescribe exercise from this thing that's called max. So we think we got to do a max test and we back down. I hate that.
When you start to understand physiology and you understand lactate and some things like that, you find out there's a much better place to prescribe from down in one of these thresholds. Well, all of a sudden you figure out HRV in the way Polar was using. It was a really good way for predicting this onset of cardiovascular benefit and the range. So that was my introduction.
It didn't take long to figure out, okay, we can use this a lot of different ways. So I had my own facility, and when people would come to my facility to test, I would always measure HRV because I wanted to see what their status was. And actually what happened. One day, I had a police officer at an 830 appointment. He comes in, his SDNN was horrible. It was like 15 milliseconds. And I go, what have you been doing? I said, When's the last time you slept? And he goes, how do you know that? And I said, well, just answer the question.
I just got off work. He says, I worked all night. And I said, Listen, we can do this test, but it's not going to be valid. You're not ready for it readiness.
And so this was the introduction, and I'll give you a link to a presentation, so move the story forward several years. In 2015, the head wrestling coach at Ohio State came to me and said, hey, I've got this athlete that's struggling. And we had a relationship because I'm an alumnus. And this kid comes in, I'm getting ready to do some testing. This is 09:00 on a Sunday morning. This kid had not wrestled since 06:00. Friday evening was the last physical involvement he had. Comes in, I wire him up with a Zephyr system at the time, and his RMSD is about ten milliseconds. Wow. Yeah. And so I don't say anything to anybody. I tell him to go lay down in my facility, goes down, lays down a bench, RMSD over the next five minutes, climbs to about 100 milliseconds.
Soon as he stands up, crashes down again, and I'm like so I go ahead and I run the test. He does about half of what he should. I mean, all the overtraining signs were there.
And so I said to the coach, I said, here's your challenge with this very talented wrestler. This kid's a three time Pennsylvania State champion, very talented kid, but he was just stealing matches, just slipping by. And I said, this kid's maladapting to your training.
And the coach said, what do we do? I said, well, you got to start training him for what he can do, not what you think he should do.
So they hired me. I came in, we put an Omega Wave system. I got one of the first versions of the latest Omega Wave system, and we started doing training based on readiness. And literally, I changed nine workouts we were able to get him up to. So we got this kid who was stealing matches. And I don't know what you know about wrestling, but the Big Ten is the wrestling conference.
If you're a Big Ten wrestler, you have every expectation of wrestling at Nationals.
So we get this kid, I get his morning RMSD up to about 70 milliseconds.
We get him through big tens. He goes to nationals and he makes all American.
So I have coaches in the room prior to this looking at me like, what are you doing? I mean, this kid's got to train. I'm like, no, no, this kid's got to do what he can do. Then he makes all American. Ohio State wins national title that year. And everyone looks at me like, okay, tell me more about this voodoo you have.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: So the team starts to invest in it. I have a year. I get a first beat system. One of my alumnus gives me a First Beat bodyguard and First Beat software.
We start to do some more extensive studies on the rest of the team. But I only have one device. Really?
So you can only get so far.
Well, the blessing was the US. Air Force special operations lab is based in Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Well, they were in a partnership with Ohio State looking at wearables and athletes because they're trying to understand why their warriors are breaking.
They're trying to do a wearable study.
The athletes wound up being good analogs. So when I got the relationship with the Air Force research Lab, I went from one device to 16. Wow.
And my data just skyrocketed. So in 1718, we measured three and a half million data points on a wrestling team.
What came out of it? We got to where I could use HRV for diagnosis. What is the problem with this kid? I could use it for prescription. How hard should we go today? Is this team ready? And we got to where it was for selection. So, Matt, the last year I was with the team, we qualified ten guys for nationals. First time in school history, we had eight All Americans. First time in school history, I could have told you the two guys that wouldn't make All American the first day of the tournament based on RMSD scores. Wow.
This was a huge breakthrough. I mean, literally, we were predicting success.
We were predicting failure too.
And then it's crazy the way the universe works.
I had worked with a guy in New Mexico in a wearable company out there that was using HRV in a corporate wellness setting. And it was a pretty cool technology. But he and I had exited that company about the same time, and he went into cannabis up in Oregon, and that's when I went to ohio state. Well, the whole time he's sending me notes, what do you know about THC and HRV and this and that? And I'm like, I don't know anything about THC, and know my guys are NCAA athletes.
But I start looking at it. I've got pro coaches reaching out to me saying, hey, there's something here, because pros can use cannabis.
And if you had a good HRV guy in the pros, they're seeing the reaction. So my friend comes to me and says, so, do you want to work in cannabis? And at the time, I'm like, I want to understand this.
So I leave Ohio state, and I go start selling weed in south florida, as all great academics do.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: There's a TV show in there somewhere.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: They hired me to be the director of brand. It was a medical cannabis brand they wanted to put, and they knew I understood some things that other people didn't.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: What year are we talking about now, don?
[00:10:36] Speaker B: This was 18.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:10:38] Speaker B: This was 18. So, matt, the amount of information that is available on cannabis, the science of cannabis cannabinoids is immense. No one knows about it's. Like, it's behind this curtain.
When you take a deep dive into the deep end of the pot pool, all of a sudden it opens up, and I was blown away. Now, the thing that really hooked me early is, number one, when we look at the runners high, the athletes high. So, matt, I've taught exercise physiology for 35 years, okay? I've been teaching the exercise sciences. I did not know about this ligand, this molecule called anandamide, okay? The zen molecule. Anandamide is responsible for runners high. This is what drives it. I don't know this until I'm in the industry and happened to cross paths with another pretty good physiologist.
But then I start digging into this, and the next thing I come across is the role of anandamide in the amygdala during fear conditioning. So there's a lot of data on mice and dogs that if you fear condition, there's a drop of anandamide in the amygdala. And I looked at this, and I go, this is trauma. This is the impact of trauma. This is the actual physiological impact of trauma. And then all of a sudden, my two worlds collided weed and HIV.
And we've just been off to the races since then. But listen, I've listened to you guys enough. You recognize in modifying parasympathetic sympathetic behavior, a good friend of mine, steven kotler, who wrote the rise of superman, he's into flow. He and I have had a lot of conversations about I personally believe flow is a sympathetic parasympathetic co activation.
Don't think of those as a teeter totter. You got to think of those independently.
In his book. I mean, I was reading the introduction to his book stealing fire. I don't know if you've read this or not. Great book, by the way.
I'm reading Stealing Fire, and I'm like, okay, this is that co activation that goes on to drive flow because it's so critical for athletes, right?
For humans. Not just athletes, but humans.
So I start looking at this, and this is where the worlds came.
Know, my wife and daughter at the time were still living in Ohio. I was living in a one bedroom apartment in North Palm Beach, Florida. My kitchen looked like Breaking Bad. I had ram scales and beakers, and I was figuring out cannabis and cannabinoids and learned a lot and then left and came to work for longevity labs. So that's kind of the story of how I got here. Is that a great interaction with Polar almost 30 years ago to learn about HRV.
Listen, I don't know another sports scientist that has access. I had Omega Wave, I had First Beat, I had multiple devices, I had multiple platforms, and I had Olympic medalists, I had national champions, and we ran the Gamut. I had 38 guys on that team. Eight of them were all American or better, so we could profile what a great wrestler looks like. I had a group of guys that made the starting lineup from time to time, but never made All American, which gave me another cohort to look at. And then I had guys that never lineup, but they wrestled every day. They trained with the same guys, which the observations were just unbelievably valuable. And then you grow from that, you learn from that. And personally listen, again, I got the invitation from you guys, and I was thrilled to death because I believe, and I'm sure you would agree with HRV, is one of the single most indicators of health, wellness, and performance.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: There is not going to argue there, my friend.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Most medical professionals do not recognize the value, right?
And at some point in time, I'll have a presentation.
I'm actually working on it. You know Martin Seligman from University of Penn, the father of positive psychology, I was reading his book years ago, and when he became the president of the society, he said, Listen, what we do, we help people go from minus ten to zero psychologically, he says, to move people from zero to ten.
So when you look at wellness and performance, we know that at minus ten, your HRV will be zero right before you die. And my Olympians who are plus ten are 125, 155 milliseconds of RMSD. The rest of us are in between.
So HRV, as an indicator, gives us a tool for helping people understand. Listen, we don't get symptomatic, and we don't start to get pathological until what are we? Minus one, minus two? We start to see symptoms. We start to see it pop up. HRV has already dropped, okay?
And as you move your HRV up, the symptomatology goes away.
As you improve your blood pressure, HRV climbs, and you don't have as much cardiovascular risk. And so we can listen, you can go through this through immunity, inflammation, cardiovascular neuromuscular.
So this is the value of HRV as I see it. And frankly, Matt, I don't know what it's going to take for this to break through, but there's no doubt in my mind it will. Yeah, I can't wait for when I go to my doctor and he looks at my HRV scores and my CGM scores instead of looking at labs he takes one times a year.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Right? Exactly. Or your blood pressure. That was more measuring the stress of your commute in. So I have a quick question, because I think this is very relative, and it's just a little bit of fascination on my point as well, is that also, growing up in the Midwest, I was on the basketball court as the wrestlers were running around. I don't know if there is a more unhealthy group of people than wrestlers dehydrating themselves, starving them. I mean, they're running around, and this was in the 90s, so I'm assuming. But things we know no athlete should be doing, making weight, seems like you.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Got to be careful. Okay, slow down just a second. Okay. We now know fasting is an important part of health.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Fasting and autophagy and its role in health is really important. We're now starting to understand. Listen, this is my Sauna, okay? We now know that Sauna is a beneficial process. Intracellularly boosts cardiovascular fitness does a lot of things. So while the things that wrestlers do may be unconventional, probably not unhealthy. Okay?
Now, listen, we can make anything stupid, right? Don't get me wrong, okay?
I don't say everything that wrestlers do is smart. There's a lot of dumb stuff they do. But cutting weight, if it's done correctly in fact, one of my only studies in the literature, we able to show that high school wrestlers that cut weight correctly were more successful than high school wrestlers that didn't. Interesting, but it's got to be done correctly. We didn't do the side of the study. What happens when they mess it up, Matt?
It gave me an amazing platform understanding the physiology of wrestling, which is significant, arguably. Listen, it's the original sport. Genesis jacob Wrestled The Devil. Angel however you want to read Genesis Hercules, it's the original sport.
And as wrestlers say, there's only one sport. Everything else is a game.
But those practice, I just look at.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: You all up, running out there in trash bags, and I'm like, really?
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Well, they're not allowed to do that anymore. So they changed those rules.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Okay, well, that was kind of my question is my perception is never being in that god awful, hot, stinky wrestling room that they spent their time in.
It seemed like I just kind of wondered, was there hesitation when you came into a sport that, again, as an outsider, you can just say, Matt, your perception was wrong, and I'll take that is really a machismo, kind of like push, push, push, push as much as any, if not more than others. And you're coming in and said, hey, maybe we need to think about recovery different. Maybe you need to lay off a little bit on this end, maybe. So I just kind of wondered more the openness in a sport that I always saw as all out, all the time sort of mentality, which all sports was back in the 90s, but wrestlers just put trash bags on as they ran. We didn't do that.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: That perception is accurate, okay? But my point is this, and I've given this talk a thousand times.
There was a long period of time when going harder was the process for getting through selection, okay?
The challenge is now everyone in the sport, everyone that's good, goes hard all the time. So that's no longer a characteristic that contributes to selection and probably contributes to breakdown. And again, what we've learned is that, listen, I do a talk where I talk. We create boxes of stress. In exercise. The box is as high as the intensity. It's as wide as the duration. What goes into it is our mode. This is classic exercise prescription. And the number of boxes a week is frequency.
And so we know that when you apply stress, so it breaks homeostasis. It degrades physiological status. With recovery, we get hyper recovery. We get hyper reaction to it, and we get stronger with recovery.
And this is what we saw.
Listen, using our first beat, we were measuring 24 hours of an athlete, and I measured what he did. I measured his sleep at night after drinking four beers, okay?
And four beers is nothing for a college, so but it cut his nighttime recovery in half.
Matt, listen, we enjoyed our time in college, okay?
We did not back off of social, hardly at all. I mean, it was full on, and I walked into a lot of 06:00 wrestling practices.
06:00 a.m. Wrestling practices probably still intoxicated.
But I was a good enough athlete that not only could I get through the practice, I could perform well in the practice. Back in the early 80s, okay?
It was just go, go.
And we did it all. I mean, we went socially, we went academically, we went athletically.
It was all maxed out.
And so this is the benefit of wearable technology, the things that we're dealing with now, we're able to develop these insights.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's talk cannabis, because, I mean, alcohol, as the joke on this podcast is if you want to ruin alcohol, start checking your heart rate variability. It will show you that it's poisoning your body, basically very concretely. Cannabis is an interesting because there's all this noise out there now.
It's still a schedule one drug for whatever for now.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: We really think Congress listen, with all the dysfunction in Congress right now, who knows how long, but we literally were seeing the communication we're seeing conversation, bipartisan, communication, we think, depending on what the house does. And again, this is kind of a big week for that, but we think it could be rescheduled within a year.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: Right.
Which also may put some interesting challenges.
You talk about noise. I don't understand why it's a schedule one to begin with, in my opinion. But if you take it off schedule one, can you still buy it recreationally in Colorado?
It'll be an interesting thing. So lots of noise on this.
I think cannabis is such interesting because beer versus vodka versus tequila, you sort of have the drug stays fairly consistent with that. Obviously, if you're a connoisseur of one of those, you can argue with me, but the alcohol is, for the most part, alcohol. When you get into cannabis, I mean, I was out in where was I? Nashville. And you could buy over the counter strains of THC, where you so, like, there's all this noise out there. And I wonder, as somebody who has that scientific mindset of how do I go through this noise and bring out things that can help people, I would love to just kind of throw that at you and see what your journey has been like.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: Here's the difference. Your body does not have an endo alcohol system, okay? Your body does have an endocannabinoid system that we only know about through research on cannabis. Okay? We started to realize and then we learned about endocannabinoids. We know of six of them, but the biggie is anandamide.
This was one of the things that shocked me, Matt. I've been teaching exercise science for 35 years. Endocannabinoid system and anandamide should be chapter two of exercise 101.
Anandamide and BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor. That's why you exercise. You should not exercise to lose weight. Worst goal in the world. Okay. You should move daily with a high volume of movement to produce anandamide. This is the zen molecule. And when I talk to people, Matt, when your body is dehydrated, what signal does it give you to hydrate?
[00:26:43] Speaker A: A dry mouth, thirst.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So if your body is in need of nutrients, whether energy or some other nutrient, what signal does it give you to gather nutrients?
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Stomach grumbles, hunger?
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Yes. What is anxiety? Okay, look at anxiety as a signal. And when you look at anxiety and neurological communication, what we know is that there is a back at a synaptic level.
A nerve reaches its threshold, it dumps a neurotransmitter into the clef. The other nerve gathers enough, and when it gathers enough, what there is there's a back channel signal from the postsynaptic cleft to the presynaptic that says, we're good. Go ahead and stop that's anandamide. Okay? If anandamide is low, you just keep dumping. Okay? This is anxiety. This is when you're running out of neurotransmitters. This is when you're creating that kind of stuff. And we need to go talk about the amygdala, too. And anandamide at the amygdala. But there is a fundamental system in your body that runs on a set of molecules that looks just like the cannabis molecule cannabinoids. So we'll talk more about those in a minute. So that's the big difference. Your body listen, again, I go back to Kotler's book stealing fire. He spends a lot of time talking about all animals, nearly all animal groups, particularly mammals, have an intoxication desire, okay? So whether it's dolphins that are grabbing a hold of blowfish and getting stoned off of them or things like that, pigs eating rotten apples and getting drunk. So there's a natural piece there. But going back to the anandamide production, we also produce a cannabinoid when we orgasm. So it's two AG, so it's going to promote that behavior.
So that's the big difference between alcohol and cannabis. And remember, cannabis was part of the US. Pharmacopea. It was part of the list of drugs that doctors had to recommend until 1948, okay? And the AMA argued to keep it in, but because of congressional pressure from I'm not going to go the conspiracy.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Theory, we can just say racism, I.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Think is well, it's more than racism. Plus it's racism. So dupont had nylon. They didn't want to compete with cannabis ropes, with hemp ropes.
When we take a look at bear and water based insets, well, cannabis is a much better inset. It's oil based, but it's not injectable. And then you look at the paper publishers.
Our constitution is written on hemp paper. Our first flag is made out of hemp.
So there's a lot of history here that got lost between 1950 and 1970 with the war on drugs. But back away from that. We're starting to break through that. The science is solid here. And what we know is that as you do things to improve endocannabinoid system status, meditation, any of the things that we do that are parasympathetic boosts, you have to have the ligand in there to respond. So let me go one more step here. Talking about the amygdala. So if you're born in a rattlesnake pit, hyper vigilance is the only way you survive. If you get through that and I take you out of the rattlesnake pit and I put you into a house full of bunny rabbits, you will still be hyper vigilant, okay? Even though the environment's changed and I believe, listen, you can't do this study in humans, but dogs, mice, these are good models. There's a drop. And you know what, listen, I think you're probably old enough to remember the Vietnam era.
I don't want to date you. I apologize if you're not. It's you know, we took a bunch of kids and we dropped them in rattlesnake pits, okay? We put them in the worst environment possible. It's no wonder they came back smoking pot, okay? This is the only way to restore the vigilance to get back to normal. Well, this is the kind listen, you guys do a beautiful job of understanding trauma, recognizing trauma. And it's impossible. When you understand trauma, it's impossible to ignore it. Okay? And how we traumatize. We're really good at traumatizing in our society. We're really good at it.
But physiologically, what's going on? Well, I'll tell you. There's a drop of ananamide in the amygdala. And if you want to restore that, you have to take on a bunch of behaviors that are parasympathetic in nature. Sympathetic is easy. Parasympathetic is the part you got to train for. And if you go ahead and boost the endocannabinoids in the system, it improves the efficiency of the system.
[00:31:56] Speaker A: Interesting.
Let's talk about practical applications of this and some of your work in bringing this more to the market as one of those voices that is like, hey, we need to look at this. This can have some really good benefits for individuals, if I understand your work right, not just elite athletes, not just people who are struggling with trauma, but the whole range of so talk to me. Let's bring us up to speed about your work. Where are you trying to bring this science to helping people?
[00:32:38] Speaker B: So, Matt, I left the cannabis business to come work for a company called Longevity Labs. It's an Austrian company. And what they have found is one of the key elements to Longevity is an intracellular cleaning process called autophagy. It's critical in quality, end of life, both lifespan and health span. There's a molecule critical in the autophagy process that's called spermidine. It's a molecule in every cell of your body men, women, plants, and animals. And Longevity Labs has a product called Spermidine Life. So we launched this product, and then we started talking to our customers who were buying it, and a lot of our customers were spurry followers. So this guy's an online influencer at the time, he was an advisor to aura ring. All these people had aura rings. 80% of them had aura rings. 80% of them didn't know what to do with it. And I said to our CEO, I go, there's an opportunity here.
So he comes to me one day, and he says, so can we do an HRV supplement? I go, Absolutely. I figured this out when I was in Florida.
So the number one driver of poor HRV is inflammation. Okay?
It's what causes problems at end of life too. I mean, cancers, cardiovascular disease, neural, poor performance. Immunity is the word I was struggling for there.
But they're all inflammation related. As you improve autophagy, you lower inflammation. As you lower inflammation, HRV was improving. And so they came to me, and they said, can we do this? And I said, absolutely. So by a blend of cannabis extracts, CBD, which that's along for the ride. I'm not a huge CBD fan. I'm a huge fan of CBDA, the acid form of the molecule coming out of it. Huge fan of that. It hangs on lots of receptors. CBD does. Not.
[00:34:43] Speaker A: Oh, really? Can you go into that just a little bit? I know the nerds out there would love to hear a little bit about that.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: So we're dealing with about four different receptors. CB one, CB two. CB two is the big one on inflammation and wellness. But we all have our five HT pain receptors, the vanilla receptors, and we have our trip receptors, trip V receptors. CBDA hangs on all of those.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: CBD hangs on none of them. Now, what CBD does is there is an enzyme that breaks down anandamide. It's called FAAH. And CBD will interfere with FAAH, and you'll maintain anandamide levels longer.
But you've got to use CBD at levels probably ten x what most people are using them.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: You can the market just this is market stuff. But I buy CBD for a dollar a gram. They sell it for $180 a gram. So there's a huge disconnect there. Right now, CBDA, which is the form that it comes out of the plant, incredibly valuable. And then there's another terpene, parentheses dietary cannabinoids called betacaryophylene. So betacaryophylene would be considered a cannabinoid if it wasn't in black pepper and mangoes and some other places. But this is also an incredibly valuable cannabinoid.
So we've put those in to boost endocannabinoid system status, to give your central nervous system the necessary ligands to operate on, because we're not moving enough, we're not eating nutrient dense food, we're not sleeping enough, and we're not getting enough light on our skin, all of which improves HRV.
And so it goes down to that endocannabinoid system status. So we take those three cannabinoids. It's a hemp extract. So there is a risk of a little THC being in there, but it's below levels. It's whole other podcast, but we put that into a DHA. EPA rich fish oil. Again, omega three S drive the reduction of inflammation. But we also put in what's called specialized pro resolving mediators. These are the biologically available omega three S. They're called resolvens. And these resolve the inflammatory process. So we found a lab in Spain. So we've combined those two things, the cannabis extract that have been bumped with the CBDA and the betacaryophylene with the omega three fats that are spiked with SPMs. And that's where we came up with our product.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: Excellent. What kind of results are you seeing?
[00:37:44] Speaker B: So we ran an open label pilot study on this. We saw straight up across the board 10% improvement in HRV over 30 days. Wow. So we were thrilled.
Of the participants, we only had a 5% non responder. 95% of the people had some positive response.
Listen, we had 35% improvement from some people. Wow.
So that worked out well. One of the things that people tell us, Matt, is when they start using HIV, plus their sleep improves dramatically.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: I saw magnesium. Is magnesium one of the things in there, too?
[00:38:27] Speaker B: We've got a little bit of magnesium and a little bit of curcumin.
I don't think listen, it's kind of a witch's brew when you're doing nutritional supplements. And I wanted to get listen, there's not enough DHA EPA from this product for you not to supplement with more omega three s.
I personally think you need to supplement omega three s to three to five milligrams a day. The regular dose on this, this will be three quarters of a gram a day.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:39:01] Speaker B: There's a bit of a witch's brew.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: That the cannabis is really the star of the show.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: Cannabis, the omega three s and the SPMs.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:39:10] Speaker B: So I call it an inflammation sledgehammer, driving that down. When you look at cannabinoids with gut response, look at omega three s with gut response. You look at the gut leaky gut and those things that go with it with systematic stress, hand in hand.
And listen, I don't need to tell you about the gut brain axis and the challenges with depression and all the things that go with that. So we want to lower that inflammation as much as we can so that vagus nerve can work both directions well and give a sense of recovery, give us sense to be able to take a breath.
So that's what we did. And it's been exciting. It's fun know, Matt, the best part of this, my wife and I, we live in an RV and we travel across the country, and we got snowed in in Gallup, New Mexico, in January.
And the gal that was behind us was an army veteran. And frankly, she had to deal with some shit that she shouldn't have had to deal with.
Again, we traumatized. Well, and I said listen, I said, I don't need to know what you've dealt with. I said, but let me show and I gave her a bottle of sperm and I and I gave her a bottle of HRV. Plus, I got a testimony back. I really can't report it because of my role with the company, because we can't make claims, but it brought me to tears.
That's the kind of stuff that makes me that lights a fire under my ass every day and gets me going. And HRV is the check engine light that we all have.
And I think our wearable technology is improving dramatically.
Unfortunately, there's still a lot of wearables, there's a lot of big wearables on the market that frankly are making claims they shouldn't claim. I mean, if you into their data, it's not there, but there are good ones.
Listen, I think Aura ring does a great job. We were very happy with their data. But the challenge with Aura Ring is I only get RMSD from a heart rate. I am a huge advocate of understanding and using LFHF frequency measures. I'm a huge advocate of that. Listen, I consider it a failure that not everyone measures heart rate in every workout they do. Okay? Single most valuable thing you can do, but we see aura rings on people. We see this technology coming.
I don't know when Apple Watch is going to break through with theirs. They're not there yet. Every indication is they're not there, but I think they'll get there. I mean, that's a big company. They're figuring out Apple health. Kit So we're seeing the emergence of great products. Aura cardio mood. Now watch. I love Nowwatch. They have a product that's very fashion forward.
We're developing the ability to have that daily checkpoint.
Maybe you shouldn't look at it daily, but that data needs collected so it can be trended and we can see what's going on. And you as well as I know this will be a key performance indicator for healthcare. It's a key performance indicator for athletic performance. Period. End of story.
It's only a matter of time that it becomes the KPI.
Longevity and wellness and health and so forth.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Don, this has been great. I feel like there are many off ramps we could go exploring and hopefully we can have you back to explore some of those ramps. But obviously we will throw a lot of information links in the show
[email protected]. But Don, I know you wanted to give a special offer if our folks are interested in trying HRV Plus. So just where might they find a little bit of your work? Obviously go the show notes. We'll get you those links and everything with that as well.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: So HRV Plus is what the product looks at. Number one, you find it at a website called Modemethod.com. Modemethod.com. If you want to learn more about spermidine, you find that at spermidineLIFE us.
So we'll give you a 15% off code if you want to do this. But we've also created sample packs. So this is a three to four day that you can get for under $10. If you want to try it and not risk a lot, go to Hrvplot, go to Modemethod.com, check out the sample packs. Like I said, it's under $10.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: Awesome. And we'll throw all that in the show notes for everybody. Don, I want to thank you so much for your work. Being a pioneer in this field, it's just so fun to meet people who put the technology together and made it work way when it was a lot harder to do that. So, hey, I appreciate you, my friend. It was so great to meet you. And like I said, hopefully you have you back. We'll nerd out a little bit more about all those exit ramps. We didn't quite have time to explore this episode.
[00:44:27] Speaker B: Man, I'm so excited. You guys keep up your great work. You're some of the best out there. Keep it up and anything I can do to support you, I will.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: Thank. Thanks, Don. Everybody have a great day. We'll see you next week.
