 I am James Swanik and today on the show we've got Wade Lightheart who is the co-founder and president at Bio Optimizers, a digestive and health optimization company. He's a three-time Canadian national all-natural bodybuilding champion who competed as a vegetarian, a former Mr Universe competitor. He's the host of the Awesome Health podcast and he's one of the world's premier authorities on natural nutrition and training methods. Wade has been in the health industry for over 25 years. He's coached thousands of clients and he's sought out by athletes and high-performance-oriented individuals worldwide for his advice on how to optimize their health and fitness levels. He and I have worked out next to each other a couple times at Gold's Gym in Venice Beach and we've bumped into one another at the A1 supermarket at Venice Beach and I recall being in Phoenix, Arizona or Scottsdale, Arizona with him actually at a business mastermind as well where we got to socialize a little bit and hang out and have some fun. Wade, how are you mate? Great to have you here. Dude, always a pleasure when we get to connect so it's great to be on the show. Thank you for having me. Just before we started recording here you were telling me about your cool little home or pad in Venice Beach, California. Just tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so this is a good point to bring up for people because with this COVID craziness there's a lot of people focused on the negativity and I can believe that when it all happened. I had moved down to Venice. I was excited to train at Gold's Gym and I got this place close to the beach. COVID broke out. We didn't know what was going on. I went to Sedona for three months to see everything kind of settled. The gym was closed. They opened Gold's back. I said, yay, my dream is going to come true. I came back and I found myself living in the most expensive ghetto in America. Trash all over the streets. I was breaking up fights between domestic disputes between people who were on drugs or mentally ill or something like that, homeless, all that sort of stuff. It was not a good place to be, especially at the price I was paying. Long story short, we went wandering through a little ways away here and we found this brand new building that had never been used and because the rates were depressed because of the market challenges that are happening because of it, I was able to negotiate a great deal. And so now right here we're in my office, which is on the bottom floor. Then we got two floors of living space on the second and third floor with biohacking rooms that we're filling up with all kinds of gear. And then I've got my own dream, which I've moved from Gold's to God's gym as I'm under the great blue dome with sunshine and palm trees and a power rack and an assortment of gizmos that allows me to continue on with my training career. And the ironic thing is I was up there about a month into this training and yeah, I mean, it doesn't have all the equipment that you'd have at a Gold's gym, but I went, yeah, I don't really care if the gym opens up again. I'm having so much fun training outdoors here in the sunshine and the outside. Yeah, I don't have all the other things, but if Gold's doesn't open up, doesn't matter. I'm happy as a clam. Anyways, I'm not going to let external circumstances ruin my life. Yeah, that's a great attitude. And just for context, if someone's listening and they're not familiar with Gold's gym, Gold's gym is kind of like the mecca of bodybuilding, isn't it? It's right there in Venice Beach, California. It's where Arnold Schwarzenegger and all of the original OGs of the Mr. Olympia championships used to train. When I lived in Venice Beach, I would often see Schwarzenegger training. In fact, I got to do two sets of lat pulldowns with him one time, which was a great thrill for me. He didn't really say much, but just doing it with him and waiting for him to finish and then exercising with him for those two rounds, it was a great thrill. And as I understand it, Gold's just shut down completely when COVID hit. Is that right Wade? Yeah, they did. And they had a brief opening for 10 days. And then they closed back down again. And it's been that way ever since. And it's sad. And rather than get depressed about the whole thing, I started to find ways around it. And turned out, I found the bio home and now I have the best biohacking center and it's only going to get better from here on out. And so when life gives you lemons, you can either just sit there with a sour taste in your mouth or you can get to work and turn it into lemonade. And I really believe in that philosophy. And so it's despite all the mitigations and my personal opinion about the whole thing, which is another story, we're moving forward regardless of what, you know, fat people in suits who have power as their interest, as opposed to my health and well being an interest, whatever they're doing, it's irrelevant to what I'm going to be able to do with what I can do in my life. And I encourage everyone to think the same way. And and then today, I got my new set of swanis, which are pretty styling, I got to say, I almost look intelligent with these things. So I'm feeling very strong and powerful with this. So if you're listening and you're not quite sure what's going on, Wade is wearing a pair of the swanis, blue light blocking glasses, the nighttime ones with the orange lens, I'm wearing pair of the daytime ones with the clear lens with the aviators. Just on that, have you seen both sides of the coin where you've seen people who when COVID hit, they responded in a similar fashion to the way you did, which is, okay, I got lemons, I'm going to make lemonade and they've shifted. And now they feel that their situation is now better. Likewise, have you had friends in your community who have gone the other way where COVID hit and, you know, life has given them lemons, but they're still going, wow, life has given me lemons. Have you seen both of those sides? And what are your thoughts on that? I have. And keep in mind to, you know, to be clear, when this first hit, we didn't know anything. I exited out of the big city because I recognized immediately that the consequences of whatever this thing was could be definitely severe and significant. And I said, I needed to gather information and data to kind of make a choice. And there was, you know, it was all over the place and still is today, still is today. And when I came back, I wasn't sure if I was going to continue to live in the city. I had a lot of my friends move out. I've seen a lot of businesses close down, especially the brick and mortars. And I really think it's unfair and it doesn't make much sense to me how the mitigations are different in every state and sometimes even in cities, how somehow COVID can be blocked by a plexiglass glass or I can wear a mask standing up at the lineup to the restaurant but I can sit outside literally a foot away from that. And now I don't have to wear a mask. So I do believe that there is much more at foot here. And I think that people have got to recognize that even though the data has actually shifted, like the CDC has changed. It's, you know, and we talk about co-morbidities and we talk about all this sort of stuff. The fact that we're still in a lockdown, the fact that we have agents that are using this as for political gain, one way or the other, I think is despicable. It's horrific. And we have yet to see the real consequences and the economic consequences. We have no one's talking about the millions of people who have died worldwide because of the financial consequences that trickle down into developing countries and things like that. And so I think what we have is a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety. And when you're faced with stress, see stress is a normal part of living. And this is an incredible amount of stress and there's an incredible array of conflictive information. And then whatever camp you start to lean to, the algorithms keep rewarding that until you end up in some sort of tribalism, which now has a political overtone outside of the medical side of it. And people have lost their trust with each other. They're going crazy on all this sort of stuff. And, but the economic damage is real and it's going to continue because all these stimulus bills, we're all paying for it. And that's going to be a consequence. Now, in the meantime, during this time, a lot of people have been focused on who's right, who's wrong. A lot of people have been focused on what you're going to do. Now, I've had friends that had their brick and mortar businesses completely shut down and wiped out, destroyed. And they're doing extraordinary. They've never, in fact, I was talking to a good friend of mine last night. His business was absolutely decimated. Family business been around for 35 years. And he has redeveloped a new relationship with his kids. He's taken his health to the next level. He got ticker care of some things that were on the line thing. And I was talking to him last night. He said, this has been the best thing that's ever happened to him. He's taken his kids to school. He's got a relationship with his kids. He's, he's upgraded his gym. The kids are training, the family's training, they're biking together. He says, I'm having a whole experience of life that I've never had in his entire history. It's awesome. Now, he says, I'm not winning financially, but I'm winning in other areas. I've got people like our company, we've exploded with growth. We've, you know, our company has gotten more attention and more interest because of many of the immune system supporting products that we have, people taking their health. The fact that we're a digital based company and aren't relying on brick and mortar, the fact that we can all live isolated in our, in our places around the world and work and do our work and all those things. So we were a company that did Bella, then there's other people that got destroyed and other people that are, you know, wasting all their time on things that they can't control. And they're getting stressed out and they're getting anxious. And I think that is very real. You know, if you look at suicide, you look at a pharmaceutical abuse and use and alcohol and violence and crime and all these things that have gone up in a lot of different areas with, which people who've made, maybe made poor choices in their response to this situation. The evidence would certainly indicate that being able to handle stress and having a healthy body and a healthy mind and the ability to step back and analyze information and go, hmm, is the narrative I'm listening to true, but what does the real facts, what does critical thinking say? And I'm just grateful to be in the, in the positive side of that camp. Could have been terrible, but it worked out all right for me. So there's part luck and part action. So the part action, the thing, the mindset that drives your action, where did you and how did you develop that? As I said, when I was introducing you, you're a three-time Canadian national law, natural bodybuilding champion. You competed as a vegetarian. You've been a former Mr. Universe competitor. Just tell us a little bit about your story, about how you developed this mindset of turning lemons into lemonade and how you view all of your actions in the world. Well, there's two major influences that I would have to say in my early formative years that made that impact. And the first one was my father, and we were living in a very rural environment. We didn't have a lot of money. So if something broke on the car or something broke on the house, or we had to build something or fix something, my dad went out there and figured it out oftentimes with poor tools, poor equipment, lack of resources, and just ingenuity, creativity. And I worked with him for a number of years, and I keep a mile. It was five miles to my nearest neighbor on a dirt road in the middle of the woods. And so what do you do when the power goes out and you don't get the roads plowed for three days? You better be prepared. You better have firewood ready. You better have generators ready. What do you do? You can't have access to food for extended periods of time. Sometimes you couldn't get to the grocery store for maybe a week. You had to be prepared for all these things. There was no internet back then. There was no GPS back then. You needed to know how to fix the snowblower when it wasn't working right. You needed to know how to do these things. And so my dad taught me a self-reliance of how to deal with extreme levels of adversity where there was no one to turn to. There was no Google. There was no Amazon. There was no any of these things. And so my dad instilled that into me. And I think those little wins, whether it was figuring out how to fix the carriage on the lawnmower, whether it was learning how to Jerry rig something so it would hold together so I could get home. These little things, I think, built a little bit of confidence of what to do when something happened. And also the importance of preparation for when bad things happens. Because sooner or later, bad things are going to happen in everybody's life. And it's how you're going to handle it, how you're going to manage it. So that was that thing. But that was more of a management of crisis. It wasn't really moving to a position of excellence. And funny, you should bring up Arnold Schwarzenegger. Because when I was 15 years old, as many people know my backstory, we moved to this rural place. It was a 15-minute ride to get sometimes on a snowmobile to get to the bus, an hour bus ride to school, an hour bus ride home, 15 minutes back up the hill, taken away from all my friends, all that stuff. It sucked. I hated it. My sister was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer. My parents were completely integrated in trying to get her care. She died after four years of watching just the most horrific transformation of a world-class athlete going to death. That was a very stressful time. And you had to learn to manage that. But she gave me a bodybuilding magazine, had Choiza Clotto on the cover, Mr. California, two pretty girls on it. And he had all these muscles, and they were pretty. And I was going out of my mind with testosterone. And I was like, I got into working out. And at that time, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the number one television star in the world. He was a former Mr. Universe, Mr. Olympia, he was married to the Kennedys. He was living in California. He had everything that I want in his book education. I picked up his book, Education of a Bodybuilder. And inside that book, he said, you can achieve anything you want in life with three basic things, a positive attitude, self-discipline, and hard work. Now, I had heard the hard work story. Everybody I knew around me worked really, really hard and had nothing to show for it, but aching joints, broken bones, arthritis, and dysfunction. But a positive attitude and self-discipline wasn't something I heard about. And I became the disciple, if you will, of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And I just preached whatever Arnold said. I got his encyclopedia of bodybuilding. I read his books. I watched his movies. I watched Conan the Barbarian once a week because it was the story of this guy that was in this terrible life. And he was a slave and he was thrown into cage fighting. And he just kept overcoming challenge until eventually he became the victor and king by his own hand. And that was a story that I was like, that's me. And I took on that super person, that person that stopped at nothing, that could, you know, that's terminator mentality, that every obstacle is something that gives you an opportunity to rise beyond. And that's what I've implemented into my life ever since and it's worked out. Yeah. So you had the hard work down packed. How did you cultivate the positive attitude? Like, how did you... That was the toughest part. Because I was in an environment of negative nellies. And my natural nature is extremely negative by nature. I'm one of those people because of the training that my father put inside me. You're always looking for the flaw in things. Is the tires down? Is the brakes not working? Is the oil not checked? Is the roof shingle going? So I just noticed these things. And there's a negative association in how you identify that because in rural environments, when you're running a woodcutter, you're running a bulldozer, you're running a tractor or something like that. People scream at you in a very, I would say, politically incorrect home with a damaging language to get your attention. And the reason is because if you make a mistake, somebody loses an arm, somebody's house gets knocked down or somebody dies. And so this gets burnt into your nervous system very early. And it's very hard to overcome this. In fact, my statement at my university graduation in my yearbook was, life is not fair, so neither am I. That was where I was at 18 years old. Now I was reading the books and I was doing this stuff and I was really identified, I think with the victim of the slave that was working away. And I was angry and frustrated and didn't know how to go, but I just wanted out and I was going to do whatever it took. But over time, through training, through Tony Robbins, through Arnold Schwarzenegger, through the spiritual endeavor, everything that you could possibly, every tool, chemical, herb, experience teacher that I could find. And I started to notice patterns. And the most successful people that I met developed extremely positive attitudes for extended period of times, even under trying conditions. And over time, slowly but slowly, surely, it seemed to warp into becoming an extreme optimist. I'm actually the opposite now. And when things are bad, I'm like, hey, it's really sucky and bad. Isn't that great? Because it's going to make a great story when we win. Yeah, I like that. It's like, I call that the flipper rune. I remember being in San Francisco 2013 with a friend of mine, Manish Satie, and we were staying in the mission for about 30 days. We've got an Airbnb place there, and we were working on a little business idea. If anyone's been to San Francisco in July, you would think that it would be super hot, like because that's a U.S. summer, right? But it's actually dark and gray and quite cold because of the way that the wind or the temperature of the air comes off the, is it the San Francisco Bay? I've got to make sure. Yeah, it's terrible. It's cold and just eerie and foggy and nasty. Shocking, in the middle of July. Anyway, I started complaining about this a few days in a row. I was like, oh, God, I can't believe it's July and it's cold. I've got to wear a jumper to go to the gym. And Manish and I realized that we were complaining like a lot after a few days. And we agreed that we were going to come up with this system, that at any time we caught ourselves complaining, we would then have to finish the sentence with a positive. So the first time we started this, it was like, oh, man, it's so overcast again today. And then we'd both look at each other and go, which is awesome because it's different and it's moody. And it kind of was like, didn't that famous author say describe San Francisco? I think it was Oscar Wilde. Someone described San Francisco as being gloomy in the summer, in the summer in San Francisco. Isn't it cool that we get to live into that very famous story? Even if it didn't make any sense, the fact that we were attempting to complete the sentence with a positive did two things. One, rewired our brain into looking at every obstacle as a potential opportunity to turn it around. And two, it actually just reduced the number of times that we complained. Exactly. And you do have to make these little tricks, whatever it takes in order to repatter. And thank you because most of our thoughts are habitual patterns. They're not actually really legitimate. And many of those have been programmed into us by the people that we hang around or what our influences. And then that becomes quote unquote, our truth. And what you expose yourself to, and what you continually kind of recycle to your brain is can lift you to the highest heights, and it can take you to the lowest steps. And being mindful of what comes into your consciousness is perhaps the most important decision that anybody makes in their life. And you need to make it every single day. What barriers do you put up to prevent the stuff that you don't want to enter into your conscious or your subconscious? Yeah, great question. So first and foremost, I do a little bit of a review every evening. So I start my I like start my day with an energization and a meditation practice. And I end my day oftentimes with a meditation and energization practice. But even if I don't do the meditation, I will review the day in my mind, I'll lie down in bed, and I'll be thinking about, All right, what were the interactions of the day? What things that I respond in a good way? And what things that I respond in a poor way? And then I analyze. And if I notice patterns that I'm responding poorly in certain circumstances or around certain people, I dive a little deeper into those conversations. And it's kind of easy to spin off into a form of negativity or positivity just by depending who you're around. The other thing I learned from one of my teachers is, how do I feel after I spend time with someone after you hang out with someone for an hour or two hours, whatever. And I walk away, what is what is the overall feeling that I have at that time in my upbeat and positive? Or do I feel drained? And if I feel drained, I got to limit my exposure to that person or those ideas. The other thing is, is if we if I start catching myself going down a negative track, which I still like I said, it's easy to do. I try to edit it. And I love your word, flip a rune. I'm going to borrow that one. I try and track it in a direction when we go somewhere that's a little bit more positive, a little bit more upbeat, a little bit more productive. Now, that doesn't mean to be Pollyanna. And that doesn't mean that you're not supportive of people who are going through a tough time. And one of the things that I think almost all of my close friends would tell you is I'm always ready to lend a hand or an ear to my friends who are in having a challenge. And it's going to happen to me. It's going to happen to you. It's going to happen to everybody. But if they're in that continuous state, and there's like a recurring pattern, I'll be like, yeah, you know, I heard this program before as anything changed, you're okay with your decision. But if you're bringing this dump load of of of shite into my world, is there something to change? My advice or my information or anything I got, it's not going to change. I'm not saying I'm right, but I've got nothing to offer you on this topic. So can we move on to another topic? Or shall we just move on? And I am much more disciplined about that. That was an idea before but now, you know, being co founder of a company and all the the onslaught of information choices and opinions and peoples and opportunities and and decisions I got to make. I only can make so many decisions in my life and I only have so much physical or emotional rather capital to disperse. And if I'm getting leaks by hanging out with the negative Nellie's, I got to cut it. So those are things. The other thing I would say is neuro feedback. I've done a lot of neuro feedback training. I've been to bio cybernode and 40 years of Zen, they're extraordinary programs. And those have allowed me to accelerate my meditation practice, my my awareness practice which helps me identify both my own patterns of behavior. That's not where I want it to be, but also to kind of create more optimal thinking in operating or emotional patterns in my in my in my being. So it's a continuous upgrade and things come up. I just had one the other day, I was noticing that I had to pick up and I'm like, okay, that's something I really want to get rid of. So it's it never ends. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your company and how that was formed and you know, what you produce and how does how does supplements you know, fit in with what you're talking about here, like the mindset and the mind work, I guess you would say, like you discuss things about meditation. I have a lot of my clients in my quit drinking business do what I refer to as the daily 20, which is 20, writing down 20 things they're grateful for every day to rewire their brain to activate their particular activating system. So they they start to see opportunities and see things to be grateful for rather than seeing, you know, blocks and and things to lament to all the time. So I'm just curious about your, your, you know, supplements and optimization and business. How did that get created? And where does that fit in amongst a whole holistic approach to mental and health well-being? Well, yeah, well early on in my bodybuilding years from, you know, my teenage years and I was reading magazines and learning about nutrition and supplementation. And I studied exercise physiology and nutrition at the University of New Brunswick. And then I got a sports nutrition degree. And I worked at every area of the nutrition industry from working in supplement stores, owning my own supplement stores, being a representative of various brands as an athlete. And then eventually writing books. And in 2004, my business partner, partner, Matt Galant came to me. We were both personal trainers at the time. And he said, yeah, let's let's do a bodybuilding book. You just got back from the Mr. Universe contest as a vegetarian. That's really no drugs. That's really weird. I think we can sell money on the internet. I thought he was crazy. I said, what do you mean you're making money on the internet? That doesn't make any sense. And I didn't even own a computer at the time. I had been living in an ashram in India prior after the Mr. Universe and was considering being a monk. But the monk said, no, I wasn't going to cut it. So I came back and he put this offer to me. And so we started a bodybuilding company and I had gone through a real breakdown of digestive distress after that contest from people who know I gained 42 pounds of fat and water in 11 weeks and had to rebuild my digestive system under the guidance of a doctor. And he introduced me to high-powered nutritional supplements, enzymes, probiotics. We were talking about the microbiome back there, enzyme stuff, and minerals. I went on a raw food diet. And literally in a few months, I recaptured my health and hit a new level of performance and well-being. And over the course of four years, kind of optimized that with about 15,000 different athletes around the world that were on boards at the time. And we were sharing information. They were buying our products and we were trying all these experiments clinically. And Matt and I recognized one of the problems that I had as being a vegetarian is that I couldn't get enough amino acids from the food that I was in, the protein I was eating to recover. You know, at the time I was, I went on a raw food diet. So there was really hard, there was no protein powder, nothing in those days. And so we started down that route. And I did, him and I determined that we were going to build some nutritional supplementation that could augment the performance of athletes and people such as myself who had a compromise, essentially I had a compromised digestion and I had a compromised diet. And I said, well, if I can make it work for me, we can make it work for anyways. Now keep in mind, Matt's a keto guy. We're polar opposites of the dietary spectrum. And we have all sorts of discussions. And we're, frankly, we're dietary agnostic. We think that you should choose what's right for you at the time and season of your life, regardless of what that is, mitigate it's every diet has benefits and liabilities and to assess them equally and mitigate the liabilities and accentuate the benefits and remain flexible enough that you can go to somewhere else. So we started producing supplements and we made a pack with ourself at that time that we would never put, we would never compromise the mission for margin. We were just going to make products that we wanted and that we liked and that worked for us. And if they worked for us, maybe they would work for other people. Well, that result in us paying ourselves in pills for about 10 years. The money that we made, we just put it all back into R&D and all back into the business and never paid ourselves. We just loved the process of it. And it's been great. And then about five years ago, we rebranded because we over the course of this time, we figured out, we had solved most of the digestive problems that people have. And we went out of an athletic model to more of an open to a lot of expanded our market. We weren't really in the bodybuilding world or anything like that. I was just an old geezer and irrelevant to that market. And so we decided we would go on and keep going. And that's where we rebranded as bioptimizers. And really, at that point, that's when things really took off for us. We also were able to contract some world-class doctors and chemists and genetic experts. And we have PhDs in microbiome working for us that test their products. So we go all in very much like a pharmaceutical company does in order to produce the best products that we can and we back them up. And we've got kind of like a cult like following because there's a lot of people with digestive issues. And then now we're moving into nervous system optimization as well as a neurological optimization. Just before we continue, if you go to bioptimizers.com forward slash swanik, that'll take you to the bioptimizer store. And you can actually get 10% off if you use the code SWANIK10. So SWANIKSWANWICK10. We'll get you 10% off there. 10% off there. I'm sorry. You can go to bioptimizers.com forward slash swanik. So what are some of the, you said digestion. I've got two questions here. So you mentioned before vegetarian versus keto. So I'm assuming your business partner Matt eats meat and steak and all that kind of stuff. You don't eat meat currently. Is that correct? No, I haven't eaten animal flesh since 2001. Got it. Yeah. So I guess we're getting close to 20 years. So getting close to 20 years, you haven't eaten animal flesh. Your business partner Matt does eat animal flesh. He's- Every day. Yeah. Every day. It's the opposite. What's he eating? We'd have to ask him. But the thing is, is there's one thing that we do share and that we're always doing experiments on ourselves with various diets. So in any given week, he's- Matt's probably running at least a half a dozen experiments on himself and at least running one or two. He's certainly, I think in many ways, more experimental. And on the nutrition side, and I might be more experimental on some other areas of life. Got it. And you said a few minutes ago that really your agnostic, your diet agnostic. So from 20 years of being a vegetarian and not eating meat and from 20 years of knowing Matt and him eating animal flesh, are the reactions to your respective bodies so vastly different that you can definitively say, my way is definitely, if I was going to do a blanket statement for all of society, my way is definitely better. Or do you both get similar results in terms of your overall health and outlook, et cetera, that maybe it doesn't- Maybe the style of eating isn't as important as we think. This is a deep question and I'm glad you asked it. In fact, we're working on a book to actually flesh that out because it's very hard to flesh that out in one statement. But I will put it this way. I think, and today we were actually reviewing a hierarchy of choices one needs to make relative to their diet and involves everything from your spiritual philosophy, social customs, genetics, epigenetics, lifestyle, your goals, values, which could be related to whether a person's going to use drugs or not use drugs, whether that's pharmaceutical drugs that are prescribed or non-pharmaceutical options or black markets. There's just a vast array of decisions that I think to the layman, there's so much information that is not dispensed to the population when people are talking about diet books. They don't talk about many of the factors that may have bigger influences than the diet itself. Also, when you're looking at peer-reviewed studies for all our PhD friends and that stuff, very few studies that I'm aware of actually, if you look at it, filter out genetic variants and epigenetical variances in that group. What I would say is that every diet I've been around long enough that I see these fads come in and come out every few years. Right now, we kind of peaked on the keto trend. It's coming down. Paleo was a few years ago, and raw food, veganism was a few years. Now, the fasting trend is catching hold. Pretty soon, there'll be people that'll be bashing that. What happens is one group bashes the old system with the new system. Here's something that's really clear of how we look at it. If we put you or any group of people on any given diet, say we put this group on keto, this group on plant-based diets, this group on paleo diets, this as carnivore, this group is raw foodists. That group of people, and as the group gets bigger and bigger, you're going to have a distribution on a bell curve of the results and benefits. Some people are going to die on that diet. Some people are going to feel miserable on that diet. A bunch of people are going to feel okay. Some people are going to feel good. Some people are going to feel great. Some people are going to overcome some debilitating condition that was life-threatening. When you hear the stories and testimonials and stuff of any given diet, guess what you're going to hear? If on the positive side, you're going to hear people at that top of the bell curve that changed your life and they became a super genius and more creative and had better sex. They heard 14 different diseases that were terminal and couldn't fix for over 30 years. The bashers are going to be the people that tried that diet. They almost died. They contracted some condition that took them years to get over. They said they needed to find a better way. They discovered this new diet and gave it to them. They did the exact same thing that the people that they bash did. That is, they selectively picked the best results as to bolster the social credits of why that diet philosophy is better. We continue on this cycle. Now with Google algorithms and Facebook algorithms and social media algorithms, what happens is people get into these echo chambers and these feedback loops. When you're given a plethora of decisions to make and information to make, well, what happens is we take shortcuts in our brain and we default to the tribal rules, values, and beliefs. Usually the most outspoken person of that group now becomes the de facto quote-unquote representative of that group and gets on there and starts going to war with the other tribes who have a different belief. We thought that the internet was going to unify and connect people. The unintended consequences was, and it did, but we still have this tribalistic brain inside of the human psyche that is now activated as an emergency threat response to default to the tribal beliefs so that one can maintain its survival because when you have conflicting information, it's a threat to your survival. We see this playing out in politics, we see it playing out in health, we see it playing out in business, we see it playing out in social groups, and as a society, we've got to recognize that that's why I say I'm dietary agnostic, and that's kind of not maybe the answer you expected, but what I'm here to say is I'm going to suspend any idea of what I think someone should eat. We're going to run in through a barrage of tests. Then we're going to let that person experiment with those tests, and then we're going to continually to evolve and tweak as we go through the different seasons of my life because guess what? I'm not as interested of going to the gym, turning up heavy metal to full blast and squatting till I barf in the gym and not being able to walk for a few years on end in order to get bigger and to grow at this stage in my life. That was really cool when I was 20. I was excited to do that. Right now, I want to go upstairs in my gym. I want to train. I want to stay fit. I want to enjoy the sunshine. I want to cruise on down to bulletproof after, take a cryo, maybe go for a walk on the beach, get back because I'm focusing here on my business life and I'm not as active as I would be. I'm 30 years removed and my nutritional supplementation should echo that as well as the decisions I make. In order to do that, I need an array of expert opinions that are going to give me feedback and then I got to experiment with those and weed out what works with what doesn't work. That's the overarching philosophy. It seems like personalized health is really a way to describe what you're describing here. I remember someone saying this to me like six, seven years ago said, oh, personalized health is going to be the way of the future. I said, what do you mean by that? The gentleman was telling me, everyone's different. Everyone has a different genetic makeup. We see now you can change your genetics by stimuli, whether you were bullied as a kid in the playground, whether your mother loved you too much or not enough, something that someone said to you at a certain time. That can literally affect the cortisol in your body which can affect how you later respond to certain foods or exercises. Everyone is different. What I hear you saying, if I'm hearing correctly, is personalized health essentially. There is no definitive yes in terms of dietary requirements. What absolutes are there might even be an even more interesting question because I think what we all agree on is getting sunlight, drinking lots of water, doing some form of exercise, and eating and not eating processed foods is a win. What are we agreeing on? As a health expert a number of years ago, what I realized is I had to apply Pareto's law to try and sort out the plethora of conflicting information. Of course, that's the 80-20 rule. 80% of what all the dietary components say is concordant. The 20% usually applies to the variance, but that 20% could be significant enough that it gives you 80% of the results for that individual. That's the variance. When people go on that link that you said, whether it purchase anything, it doesn't matter, you can go to the site and download my course called the Awesome Health course. I created an acronym as a filter to make a systematic assessment of what people could spend their time, their energy, and their resources in the most effective way given 30 years of my own experimentation and training thousands of clients. That started off with air. And air is not very popular because it's free. Deep breathing practices you can control every aspect of your nervous system. And the nervous system is what determines a threat or something that is going to be food or fuel for your body in a positive way. Water, maintaining hydration. When I ran a holistic health clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, we had an electric interstitial water scan. Virtually everybody that came into that place was chronically dehydrated. And that has massive complications in the short term and dire consequences in the long term. Exercise. We're in a new age and the unintended consequences of technological innovation is that we need to schedule exercise into our lives. Before 100 years ago and beyond up in history, that was called living. Everything was hard and difficult. The average person walked 20 miles a day, if you can believe that. That was the recommendation of the World Health Organization. My grandfather went to town on a horse and logged with an ax and saws and things like that. So that's not that long ago that the advent of technological innovation has allowed us to just be totally lazy sloths. And the human body doesn't work very well if it doesn't have some sort of stimulus in the form of stress physically. It just doesn't work. You put a person in a hospital bed, no matter how healthy they are, and you don't let them move, they waste away extremely quickly. Very, very quickly they waste away. And so those three, air, water, and exercise, that's where you need to put the bulk of your energy in to start out. Forget the diets, forget everything else. Fourth thing, sunlight. And I look at food as condensed light, and I look at everything on the planet as light because I'm actually a little bit of a physicist by nature. That was the one area I had a great aptitude in school, and I had a friend that was a PhD in physics that ended up running the Gottlieb Space Center for NASA. And we had all sorts of discussions, and I got lots of integrations from him about understanding vibration and frequency, the difference between solidity, liquid gas, and states. And I realized that most of what we see is actually just vibratory energy. Therefore, if I apply my diet, my life, my sleep, that could go into sleep, EMS, sun exposure, we spent most of our lives outdoors up until recently. Now we spend most of our time indoors. And so things like changing, putting on my swanis at night so that I can adjust to, because light, we didn't have light before. We had starlight and moonlight at night. That's it. Not halogen lights and not these things. So that's another issue. And then I went to optimizers. And so I went, well, for looking at the body, what is the one single unit that is ubiquitous through the entire body? And that is cells. It's the one unit, like there's liver cells and brain cells, but the cell itself functions relatively the same way behind the mechanics of how it works. So I went, well, what are the things that we know that make those cells work properly? Well, it comes down to enzymes, probiotics, the only two organism things, entities that do work in the body. There was essential amino acids, right? Because you need enzymes to get your proteins, proteins to get your minerals, so essential minerals, essential vitamins, okay? We need essential fatty acids that was inside the body. And then there were this unique category of herbs. And herbs is everything that's ergogenic plants that elicit some sort of metabolic or cellular or physiological response, which whether that's moving Chi from one area to another, whether it's activating or deactivating regulatory components, turning off and on epigenetical responses. But those are the ways that we can start to tweak. Then there was mental beliefs and attitudes, okay? Because you can have a terrible program with a great attitude and live very well. You can have an amazing program with a terrible attitude or with a, you know, and doesn't work out. So the bottom line is you have to be able to regulate your beliefs and your attitudes and continually upgrade them if you want to have a different period of life. And then finally, education, which is to learn from within, which is a deuce and you learn from within by testing. And the best way to optimize your testing is through coaching. So I call it, et cetera. And the whole acronym, air, water, exercise, sunlight, optimizers, mental beliefs, education, testing and coaching is the acronym awesome. And I put together a course that allows people to go through that sequentially over a 12 week period and our friend Ty Lopez inspired me when I took a 67 day course. I said, well, I'm going to create an 84 day course because it always takes about 12 weeks to really radically alter your health or your physiology or maintain a different body fat level. I knew this from my bodybuilding day. So I created an 84 day course that outlines those seven principles. And I took all the people I know just like he did and put all the links and all that stuff. So people can watch it at five to 15 minutes, whether standing in line to vote or standing in line at a restaurant or a grocery store or with the kids or whatever. And so that was the philosophy I developed to deal with that problem that you had. So that was a really long answer. But I don't want to give little bullet points to people because I'm doing them a disservice and leading them in a direction where they're going to run into a brick wall. Thank you for being so thorough with that. Yeah. Wade, let me ask you, you referenced the swannies there before and sleep. So what's your understanding of why we should be blocking all of this artificial light at night, whether it's through a pair of, you know, blue light blocking glasses like the swannies or other other ways. How do you do it? What's your, you know, your mindset around optimizing sleep? Yeah. So, you know, my business partner, Matt Galant, is probably one of the greatest sleep experts I'm actually aware of. He's extraordinary in his understanding and in his approach to sleep. He had a lot of trouble with sleep. And I was a person that didn't have a lot of trouble with sleep. And it turns out there's a genetic component to that. And so he introduced me the concept of blue light blockers in containing these lights. And I had studied light and sunlight and going back to Carl Rolier, Dr. Rolier, who used different spectrums of light to heal people way back at the turn of the century. And ultimately, there was a lot of interesting things that happened around that. And so he introduced me the concept. And so one night, he gave me these blue blue light blockers, and I literally felt myself get sleepy after about 30 minutes of wearing them. And I was like, that just blew my mind. So I was like, what is all this about? Well, then it turns out as we started to do some investigation. And he was very helpful. I was our researcher, Katrina Valinsky, who does a lot of our genetics and epigenetic testing is like that we run on these circadian rhythms inside, which are based basically it's a solar reset system. So there's advantages to getting up early and seeing the sunrise. And there's advantages to, you know, being in a darker world. But however, with the technological innovations of light technology, we discovered that staying with all this light upwards can really throw off our circadian rhythms that has been built into biological organisms since as long as this has been a planet. And hormone cascades, sleep relaxation cascades, how we go from fight or flight to rest and relax are all cooked into this. And in a world of increased light and electromagnetic frequencies, I love the advantages that we get. I certainly not an anti-technologist or some people are like, well, based on the technology we've developed, I like that we can turn on the lights at night and see at night. And I love the fact that we have TVs and computers. But it turns out the blue light in them is very disruptive to these circadian rhythms of cycles. And so most of the biohackers I know are using various forms of these type of glasses such as you've built, which by the way, I got to say I look pretty darn good in these things. And, you know, I feel like I'm smarter when I wear yours because I look kind of like what the prototypical nerdy guy. So I move from my jock self to my nerdy self. That's a little sidebar I'm kind of revealing too much of my psychological process. But anyways, bottom line is, is I'm like, wow, this is really cool. And I started to experiment with them. And I noticed when I did my sleep tracking that if I wear them at night, I get a deeper sleep. And I get a more restful sleep than if I don't. So it just became really that simple. It's like, okay, all my friends in the biohacking community are using it. Let me try it. Let me experiment with it, put them on. What happens? And boom, there was the result. It's measurable. It's definitive. Okay, I'm done. And it's really that simple. And I think in today's world, there's so many people that are looking for 470,000 experts to concur on whatever decision before they make a decision. And they waste all their time doing research when all they need to do is get a testing device in the end of one, a couple of little testing parameters, try the darn things and see if they work. And that's it. And I do this with everything. Someone tells me this, this vitamin is good for me. Okay, well, I'll be agnostic. Sure. Well, I'm not going to say it's not. I'm not going to say it is. I'm going to do an experiment. And if it works for me, I say, yeah, that worked for me. And if it doesn't work for me, I said, well, it didn't work for me. I tried that before it was there's something I didn't know. And sometimes there's devils in the details, and there's nuances, and it's really simple to do. And that's really it. And it's so freeing. And so I think so many people have forgotten their ability just to run tests, because that's how animals and organisms on this planet has just run AB tests, which is the whole process of evolution, which is cooked into our nervous system. So yeah, that's how I got into it. So yeah, test everything, test everything, be a mad scientist. And then finally, finally, just wanted to ask you about alcohol, what's your alcohol consumption? Like, what do you understand about it as to what it does to the body? What's your understanding that happens to the body if you stop feeding it alcohol, you know, what levels just any like any anecdotes or anything that you do know about that, even if you don't feel like you're an absolute expert in it? Yeah, my my alcohol consumption is zero. I do not drink alcohol. And I haven't drank alcohol for a long time. And I was really good at drinking alcohol in my younger days. And upon reflection in my 30s, I looked back at all the just go again, because if you're not reflecting on what you're doing, I think that's a big mistake. But I look back on all my decisions. And I went, Hmm, when I looked at all the decisions I made while consuming alcohol, I couldn't definitively find any sustainable positive outcomes from nothing. Like when I really looked at it, because I also compared it, again, to the decisions I made without alcohol, and that meant social occasions that meant going out that meant going to parties and dancing, and doing all the things that are oftentimes associated with alcohol sporting events. And I realized that the quality of those experiences were not enhanced by alcohol. What I could say is that there was corollary downsides to the consumption of alcohol that had much longer effects. After those events, that I really felt that the cost benefit ratio was a very easy decision to make. And I just stopped drinking. Well done. Yeah, well, it just was, and I don't go around and I go to lots of social occasions. I'm not a preacher. I'm not a vigilante vegan. I'm not against anybody doing whatever. I believe I'm actually kind of a fiscally conservative libertarian. I think that I'd like maximum choice opportunity matrix. I would like the government to do the minimal amount of things to keep us safe from foreign invaders and from criminals. And that's about it. And everything else I believe that we could figure out on our own if we all just get along. And that's how I kind of view my own life. And that way I don't project my belief onto anybody else. I will certainly advocate for my beliefs and argue them or put forth my ideas. And I love when other people challenge them, because number one, I'll either refine my current position, or I will abandon faulty logic, which there's plenty of it to go around both within myself and other people that that I can upgrade what I've what I know at this moment into a better more holistic version. And I've been continually doing that for the last years. And it's much easier when you're not drinking, because unfortunately, alcohol dramatically impairs decision making process, as well as, you know, how aggressive you might see someone with a different opinion. Yeah. Well said. Well, Wade, thank you so much. Wade Lighthart, the co founder and president at Bioptimizers. Just a reminder, you can go to bioptimizers.com forward slash swanik. That will lead to the shop. Swanik 10 is the code for 10% off. Make sure you grab Wade's program there. Remind us what the program is called the free the free booklet you got there. Yes, it's 12 weeks of W or energy. And it's the awesome health philosophy. We give it away to everybody that goes to our website. You can utilize it. Take what you want. I would recommend checking out the bucket theory of nutrition, that video in particular, as well as enzymes, also water technology. I think that's a big one to address. So all that sort of stuff you can get into and have fun with. Wade, thanks so much for your time. It's been fun hanging out with you again and getting to know a little bit more about you. And hopefully I'll see you sooner rather than later back in Venice Beach, California. Please next time you're over, hit me up and we'll hang out here at the bio home. I'm looking and getting myself a pool table here in the office so I can entertain myself and my guests and be fun to have you over. Thanks, Wade. Thanks for listening to the alcohol free lifestyle podcast. I want to load you up with some free stuff right now. So if you want to go to James swanik.com slash guide, I will send you my quit alcohol guide, which has helped six figure entrepreneurs and top professionals produce or quit drinking. You can also text the word quit guide to the number 44222 if you're in the US, of course, it doesn't really work anywhere outside of the US. But if you're in the US on your mobile phone and you'd like that guide, text the word quit guide to the number 44222 or you can go to James swanik.com slash guide. If you'd like to schedule a free 15 minute call with one of my top coaches, just an exploratory call to see if or how we can help you, then you can go to James swanik.com slash schedule or you can text the word project 90 to the number 44222 if you're listening in the US on a mobile phone. That's James swanik.com slash schedule or you can text the word project 90. That's one word project 90 to the number 44222. Feel free to send me a direct message over on my Instagram account, which is at James swanik. You can also watch video episodes of this podcast and a series of other educational videos on my YouTube channel, which is James swanik one, or you can direct message me on Facebook at James swanik official. And finally, a request, would you please now write a short review of the podcast inside of the Apple podcast app on your phone or on iTunes on your desktop computer? Would you please give the show five stars and write a quick one or two sentence review? This will help the show get in front of even more listeners, potentially transforming someone's life. You can rate and review the show inside of your Apple podcast app on your phone or over on iTunes on your desktop. Thank you so much and I'll catch you next time.