[00:00:01] Luke: Mark, what is Radical Generosity?

[00:00:04] Mark: Wow, we're starting there. I love it, buddy. I love it. Radical Generosity is the title of my book that technically we're doing a launch party tomorrow. So this is a brand new piece of information.

[00:00:17] Luke: So it'll be out by the time this episode drops.

[00:00:19] Mark: Technically out now, so people could already buy it.

[00:00:22] Luke: Yeah.

[00:00:23] Mark: It's available on Amazon. They can download it from any number of digital places. Go to themarkyoung.com, and they can buy copies there too. But Radical Generosity, buddy, I got to tell you, it's my heartbeat.

[00:00:36] I was telling you earlier, it's like I've done a lot of cool things in life, but this one's been a bit of a passion project simply because I genuinely believe that there is a lack of generosity in the world because there's too much of that scarcity mindset that I think people have this belief that if I do something for someone else, then that means that there's less of me.

[00:00:59] And the reality is I just don't believe that. I believe in that abundance mindset, that if I do something for someone else, then that just makes me even better. And I think people want to do that. But I think we all need to tap on the shoulder periodically to remind us that that's what we need to be.

[00:01:17] And that's been this project; it's been walking through that. And also, my goal is to dissociate generosity from money. Because we hear generosity and everybody gets this vision of a wallet and cash and credit cards and all this other kind of stuff. Like, oh, feed the children kind of mindset.

[00:01:33] It's like, no, no, no. Generosity takes so many different forms, financial being one and a very important one, but how are we generously sharing our time? How are we generously showing up in valuable ways in our relationships? How are we sharing the wisdom that we have accumulated over years?

[00:01:54] We're about the same age. And it's like sometimes I look at people in my own office and I'm like, "How do you not know this?" And I'm like, "Well, because I've lived twice as many years as you." That's how I know this and you don't. And how am I showing up in a generous fashion to mentor? And then lastly, I actually go through in that book the topic of how are we generous with ourselves.

[00:02:16] Luke: That's good.

[00:02:17] Mark: Yeah.

[00:02:17] Luke: Sometimes that's the hardest one.

[00:02:19] Mark: Yeah. Especially for people who are in this-- I grew up a lot of the church circles even. And it's like the more volunteer hours that you clocked, there was going to be an award for it. And it's like, no. Sometimes the best thing you can do is take a nap.

[00:02:35] That's the holiest thing involved today, is a nap. Because just giving yourself that moment to take a breath, because metaphorically, the flight attendant tells you to put on your own mask first before you help anybody else in case of emergency. And I think we all need a little reminder about putting on our own mask first sometimes.

[00:02:53] Luke: I like this idea of generosity not being limited to money.

[00:03:01] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:02] Luke: And it's funny that you said that because I was just sending someone a message today and I was describing a former guest on the show who one of the listeners had been disrespectful toward. And I was writing a message, and I was going to describe them as generous.

[00:03:20] Then I was like, "Oh no, that makes it sound like she gave me money or something." But intuitively, that term came because she's just generous in spirit in terms of her level of attention and presence. Think about how many people lack the ability, myself included at times, I'm sure, to just be fully present with someone.

[00:03:44] Mark: Turn the phone off.

[00:03:45] Luke: Yeah. And just turn the mind off. And turn off the need to say what you feel like you need to say or response to what they're sharing or going through, but to really just learn how to be a listener.

[00:03:58] Mark: Totally agreed, man. And it's interesting to me because I've fortunately had a lot of experiences over the course of my life where generosity has affected me. Tomorrow we're doing our launch party. I was telling you about it, and it's like the entire premise is not about, tell me about how generous you are, because that's a really awkward statement.

[00:04:18] I've had people who've already read this book and come to me and been like, you don't tell as many stories as you did in your last book. And I'm like, "No, because it's not about me." That's not the intention. Like, it's not about, let me tell you all the generous things I've done.

[00:04:30] It's more about, let me tell you about other people and how generous they've been, or let me tell you about how other people's generosity has impacted my life. We are all benefactors of other people's generosity, whether that's through mentorship, whether that has been through financial support that people have given us.

[00:04:46] We all started at zero somewhere. Whether that has been through relationships that showed up. Times in life that are harder than others, who were the people who just sat-- they didn't talk. They didn't write a check. They didn't do anything to fix the problem. They just sat with you.

[00:05:03] Sometimes that is the most generous thing a person can do, is just presence, as you said. So yeah, this has been a fun project because I love disassembling and reassembling things. And generosity to me is a lifeblood virtue. So I'm super excited to get that message out. It's the whole pay it forward.

[00:05:23] Luke: And we'll put a link to your book at lukestorey.com/zona, Z-O-N-A. What do you think it is about the human psyche or the human condition that makes it so difficult for us to see the value in serving others?

[00:05:41] Mark: He's going to unpack all the existential stuff here. I like it. My background is actually in clinical psychology, so I'm going to actually love this conversation. I'm going to say that most of it is the psychology, but also a physiological defense system. And it is that idea of scarcity, that we're programmed to believe that what I give is no longer mine as opposed to what I give leads to me getting more.

[00:06:09] And I think people have this tendency to think that it's karmic to believe that if I give to you, then the universe is giving back. And it's like, no, we don't understand, even on a physiological level, just the act of generosity. If nothing else, just the thought of giving something to somebody else actually is an oxytocin release. Literally, physiologically--

[00:06:31] Luke: The helper's high.

[00:06:33] Mark: The helper's high. But helper's high, it happens, and it's clinically studied that the helper's high actually happens even when I just think about giving something to you. I don't even actually have to release it.

[00:06:45] Luke: A lot less sacrifice involved.

[00:06:46] Mark: Literally. So I'll just think generously. The thought is what counts.

[00:06:51] Luke: I'm going to think I'm going to give that guy $1,000. Ah, it feels good.

[00:06:54] Mark: Oh, this felt good. Now I'll just keep the 1,000 too. But just the idea of that is a physiological change to people. But I think that we get into a competitive space. I think social media has led to a lot of it because I'm comparing what I live every single day to everybody else's highlight reel.

[00:07:12] And that becomes an issue too. Because how can I compare my daily lows to everybody else's high points and expect those to ever look in any way comparable. But I think there's a connection there. I think we are, unfortunately, from a societal standpoint, programmed to believe that giving removes something from me rather than adds something to me.

[00:07:37] And I don't believe that. I believe that what I give comes back to me in more ways. I live my life better than I deserve. And I don't mean to make that sound like a cliche because I could literally unpack that for you, but the reality is we are able to-- given a relationship without the expectation of return-- give to anybody without the expectation of return.

[00:08:01] I love the idea of mentorship because what is that person going to do for you? You are in a position of authority or you are in a position of superiority. And the reality is that it doesn't cost anything in most cases. I was talking with someone the other day who was just having a rough day and getting into that negativity concept.

[00:08:22] And it wasn't a rough day. I won't go into the details for privacy's sake, but someone close to me who was like, look, I'm having these issues. I'm having this. I'm having this. I'm having this. And it was a lot of Dr. Google stuff, right? And what do you think? Do you notice it? Do you think it's a problem? What's going on? I value your opinion. I know you'll always be honest with me.

[00:08:41] I'm like, "I'll always be honest with you." And I said, "And thank you for acknowledging that I will always give you honest feedback." I said, "So let me give you my honest feedback. Quit speaking death over yourself. Let's start there." And I got that, "What? I wanted you to tell me if you think I really diagnostically meet the criteria for whatever."

[00:08:59] And I'm like, "And I understand what you are asking me. And what I'm telling you is if you believe that there's a problem, then let's strategize how you can overcome that. And whether that's nutritionally, whether that's some physiological changes that you can make, that's fine.

[00:09:12] "But I'm going to tell you, psychologically, quit constantly speaking diagnosis into your life because diagnosis leads to categorization, and categorization is going to lead to identity. And I'm in no way, shape, or form going to reinforce the identity that you are assigning to yourself right now."

[00:09:33] Luke: That's a whole podcast in and of itself.

[00:09:35] Mark: We can do this again.

[00:09:36] Luke: It's like, yeah, that the phenomenon of identification and taking on a disease or pathology as who you are. I think that's one of the things that keeps people stuck in a loop of said disease.

[00:09:55] Mark: You can't cure a patient who has identified with the disease.

[00:09:58] Luke: Yeah. Even I have a cold, just in the neurolinguistic part of it, oh, I'm experiencing a lot of mucus. There's a number of different ways you could describe the symptoms so that you can communicate or seek a solution or get empathy from people, so they know what you're going through.

[00:10:17] Or even identifying as being an emotion. That's something I catch myself, like, oh, I am angry, or I am afraid, or you made me feel this, or you made me feel that. So much of the language we use unconsciously, I think reinforces the thing that we're trying to avoid.

[00:10:35] Mark: One of the things that-- this is going to be crazy to me, and I love that. For instance, I don't know if you're bilingual and speak any other language other than English.

[00:10:44] Luke: A little Spanish.

[00:10:45] Mark: Okay, so Spanish, you're familiar. But if I take the verb sad, to be, and then I take the verb estad, to be, two very different words and very different use cases because one of them is to be as a state of identity and one of them is to be as a state of just present placement, if you will.

[00:11:06] And it's like, "I am tall," but I don't say things about permanence using that same verb form when I'm talking about an emotion or when I'm talking about, "I'm tired." Well, yeah, but I'm not tired as a person. I'm currently experiencing tiredness.

[00:11:24] Luke: It's not who you are or what you are.

[00:11:25] Mark: Right, exactly. But I love that bifurcation of the way that that verb is even used, because we, in English, use the exact same word. And I don't think our brain recognizes temporary states versus permanent states. And we speak that. I am diabetic. No, your blood sugar needs some work.

[00:11:44] Luke: Right.

[00:11:45] Mark: There's a difference between those two things.

[00:11:46] Luke: It's like a negative self-hypnosis kind of thing.

[00:11:49] Mark: Yeah. It's this concept of psycho neuroimmunology, like how do we actually speak words right into our cells that our cells continue to believe that over time because we're literally telling our body what we need to be at defense. If I walked up to you and said, "Luke, there's someone outside wanting to kill you." You haven't done anything, but your cells immediately start behaving in response to that stimulus.

[00:12:16] You immediately move into a sympathetic nervous system because those words triggered a physiological reaction. If you are constantly telling yourself things on a daily basis, how does your cell not respond in a fight or flight type state? You're going to.

[00:12:32] If I tell myself every single day that life is bad, and I tell myself that I'm never going to fix my disease, and I tell myself that this is eminent, we're back to that exact same mindset. It's that scarcity mindset that things are going to be bad and I'm not going to have enough and there's not enough immune system to fix my disease. And there's not enough this and not enough that.

[00:12:56] Our cells respond to that the same way they would respond if I walked in and gave you bad news. Your body responds to it in a very reactive way before you even process--

[00:13:08] Luke: Oh, man. So true. I've had situations in which I get a text or an email from someone and I create meaning behind it or the lack thereof. Someone doesn't answer. This is a good example. I text someone and I put myself out there. I'm a little vulnerable, like, "I need a favor." Or I'm asking for help in some way. They ghost. And then the mind will create all this meaning about it. Oh, they don't respect me. They don't like me.

[00:13:36] Mark: We weren't as good friends as I thought we were.

[00:13:37] Luke: We were at this party. They probably thought I was stupid because that one thing I shouldn't have said, all that. And then you start to feel badly and then they text you back and they're like, "Hey. Sorry, I was in Thailand, man, I love you bro. I miss you. What can I do for you?" And you're like, "Ah." All that mental energy and negative emotions was just completely built on fallacy.

[00:13:59] Mark: And yet your physiology responded to rejection.

[00:14:02] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

[00:14:03] Mark: You responded to rejection in that way. It hurt. There was shame. There was all these other kinds of things that you were programming your body to react to. You lost your appetite. You didn't sleep correctly. All of this stuff happens. And I don't think that people give enough emphasis on the power of that kind of stuff.

[00:14:21] Just personally, it just happens to be a stage of life that I'm in right now. Because I think different topics attract us in different ways at different times. And I think that's where I am right now, is just really paying attention to the power of words and the power of really showing up in that way.

[00:14:35] So to the point of radical generosity showing up, I believe this is, I'll use the word manifested in my life in a time that it's forced me to look back at the last 30-plus years of my life and recount some of the high points, deal with some of that stuff. I'll be honest and tell you that there's even been relationships in my own life that have gone unhealed for a very long time.

[00:15:01] And even the writing of this book was, wow, forgiveness is an act of radical generosity. Granting forgiveness in relationships where I can logically tell you it isn't deserved and yet continuing to move in that direction. And the liberation of that has also been amazing. Because I'm like, "I can't write about it and not live it."

[00:15:20] Luke: Yeah.

[00:15:20] Mark: It's a mirror. I wrote a mirror.

[00:15:23] Luke: Yeah, yeah. I know the feeling, brother. Yeah. Much respect. As I was telling you earlier, anyone that writes a book, regardless of the quality of the book or how much I enjoy it, just the fact that somebody starts it and finishes it and gets it out into the world is a huge undertaking. Especially I think if it's bringing up--

[00:15:43] Mark: You used the word earlier, vulnerability.

[00:15:45] Luke: Yeah, exactly. Right. You can write a book about sailboats. It might not be that emotionally challenging, but to your point, writing about experiences in your own life causes you to recontextualize them and reexamine them in ways that are sometimes less than comfortable.

[00:16:00] Mark: A cool thing about that though is, getting into that psychological programming of discussing, bringing up topics and having physiological reactions to them, it is, when we do bring up stuff from the past, good or bad, we re-contextualize it in the present. And when that data gets restored in long-term memory, it gets stored with today's context.

[00:16:19] So often going back and revisiting some of that stuff, people are like, leave the past in the past. And I'm like, sometimes we need to pull the past into the present so that I can process it with today's mind, particularly things like childhood trauma and whatnot. How do we actually deal with that?

[00:16:33] And totally off topic, I sit on the board for a, I call it a trauma recovery center, but it's actually an organization that deals with a lot of addiction recovery. But the belief is that most addiction is actually the symptom of some root source trauma that's never actually been dealt with.

[00:16:50] Luke: Absolutely. That my experience.

[00:16:53] Mark: Yeah. And I think we can all relate to that at some point. And whether that trauma is commission or omission, we've all had traumatic experiences at some point, but that trauma is not just a psychological trauma. It is a physiological trauma as well, because we are programming ourselves over and over and over again to believe the things that we believe.

[00:17:13] I was at a Tony Robbins conference back in December, and as much as I can sit and have this conversation with you completely straight faced, it's amazing that when it actually happens in real life, you're shocked by it. And it's like, wait, what? I know this stuff. This shouldn't be new information. But I'm at this Tony Robbins conference with friends of mine, and there was a moment that this-- and I don't know if you've ever been to a Tony conference.

[00:17:36] Luke: Yeah, I've been there. No worries. I know.

[00:17:39] Mark: And I like Tony. I think Tony's the real deal. I'm not one of the Tony disciple fan boys, but man, so much respect for the man. He's incredible. And you say that word and sometimes people-- I grew up in a family that Tony Robbins was snake oil. So anytime I use Tony's name, I feel like I've got to disclaim that because maybe that's a trauma.

[00:18:00] Luke: No, I get it. I get it.

[00:18:02] Mark: But there was this woman there and she started telling this story and she was from, I believe it was Malaysia. And she's crying and Tony's like, "Tell me about your thing." 6,000 people in the room in West Palm Beach. And she's just like, "I forgave my mother." In her broken English. And everybody's exhausted because they run till four in the morning and you're like, oh, she forgave your mother. That's so sweet. Another trauma story, whatever.

[00:18:28] And you're getting cynical, and I'm getting cynical. And it's like she starts telling a story and she's like, "The story." And he's like, "Tell me." And she's like, "When I was a kid, my mother said she couldn't afford me. She gave us, I'm assuming siblings, to this family to live with. And told us in six months she would come back because she would be able to earn enough money to be able to get us back from them at that time."

[00:18:51] "So we had to go live with this other family. And I was probably five, six years old at the time." And you're just like, "Oh, wow, that's really sad." And she's like, "And the man that we lived with, the father in that family would molest her every night." And you're like, "Oh my God. That's terrible." Because you're like, "Oh, okay. You're forgiving your mother because she sent you away and you got hurt."

[00:19:16] And she said, "And then I called my mother and I was able to talk to her one day. And when I was alone, I told her what was happening. And I said, mom, he touches me every night." And you're like, "Oh, cringey listening to the story." And she goes, "And my mom said, 'I know, but it'll only be six months.'"

[00:19:32] Luke: Oh man.

[00:19:33] Mark: And you're like, "Oh my God. Literally, you just felt like all the air in the room gets sucked out, just collective gasp." Like, "Oh my gosh, six more months of that. That was the answer." And she's forgiving her mother. I probably would've shanked my mother if that had had been the situation.

[00:19:53] And it was like everybody's got this moment. And Tony, in his only-Tony-can-do way is his giant man speaking to this little Malaysian lady. And he goes, "I want you to stop right now, right there." And you're like, "Oh, no. What's about to happen here?" And he's like, "I want you to knock it off."

[00:20:15] And very abruptly, because of course Tony's an NLP genius, he's just like, "I want you to stop." And she's like, "Okay." And he's like, "Every cell in your body regenerates every seven years at a maximum. There is not a cell in your body that that man has ever touched. And the only reason the cells in your body know what happened is because you keep telling this story to them."

[00:20:42] And it was like, okay, all right. And it was, sure, I know that. And in fact, I literally was having breakfast with a friend of mine who was at the conference who is a psychoneuroimmunologist, and we're having this conversation about, yeah, technically that's accurate. And it's like, that's really interesting.

[00:21:02] And he's just like, "Finish your story and never tell it again." And it was like, yeah, that's just really sound advice. Never tell that story again because we program ourselves in that way and again, extrapolate it into more everyday situations rather than hers being an extreme case.

[00:21:23] What do we tell ourselves every day? It's the person who's overweight that convinces themselves that, well, I'm just fat. This is how I live my life. This is how I'm going to always be. This is my burden. Or the addict who just keeps repeating themselves, I am an alcoholic.

[00:21:38] In 12-step programs, what do they do? They go in there and, first of all, speak that over themselves before the meeting even begins. I am an alcoholic. And it's like, okay. I get that you struggle with substance abuse. I get that you crave alcohol, but we're speaking that identity over and over.

[00:21:57] Luke: I want to unpack this one. And this is funny because for those listening, you probably saw the title of this show, and I don't know what it'll be, but it'll have nothing to do with what we're talking about.

[00:22:04] Mark: Nothing to do with this.

[00:22:06] Luke: I was like, I'm--

[00:22:07] Mark: I blame you.

[00:22:07] Luke: I'm finally going to do a show on cardiovascular health and hypertension and this amazing technology that you guys have come up with. And it's like, okay, but I don't know. You get a vibe with someone you feel like you might relate.

[00:22:19] Mark: Just edit this into two podcasts.

[00:22:21] Luke: Yeah. Right. Not a bad idea. But I won't do it. Okay, so I have to talk about this because it's something that's so interesting to me as a, I guess you could say, former addict, an alcoholic, or a recovering addict and alcoholic. As I was telling you downstairs, it's been 28, I think coming up on 29 years since I was freed from that hellish life.

[00:22:45] But that thing of identifying and verbalizing like, I'm Luke and I'm an alcoholic, I think the value in it is, and it might be some semantics kind of thing, but I think in the beginning for me, the value was in the surrender. It's like, okay, yeah, I've been reduced to this, this point in my life, and that's all I have going on, and that's the elephant in the room that I need to address.

[00:23:13] But then at a certain point, even years into my own recovery, I started having a hard time wearing that. So then I would start to play with it, well, I'm Luke, and I have alcoholism. It's like, well, do I? There's only one way to find out, and that's to have a drink again.

[00:23:31] And I'm not going to run that test. So I personally, at this point in my life, don't ever, I don't think, really refer to myself as an alcoholic. But if we were at a bar and you're pressing me to have a drink and ask me to explain why I'm declining it, I probably just by default would say, oh, I'm a alcoholic, or I wasn't alcoholic, or something like that.

[00:23:53] Mark: Right.

[00:23:54] Luke: Then no one's really come up with, I think, a workable, concise way to describe that. And also, as I said, I think in the beginning, it's important for people like me to go like, "Okay, I'm admitting that I have this issue that I have not been able to solve on my own, and so I'm going to a group of people in accepting their generosity and love and service to help me overcome it. And part of the entry to avail myself of that help is to say like, yeah, I got this thing, whatever it is, and I can't seem to solve it on my own."

[00:24:27] Mark: My ex would always use the phrase-- she would say, "I'm in recovery."

[00:24:31] Luke: Yeah, that's a good one.

[00:24:32] Mark: And the "in recovery" was less of an identity and more of a temporary placement.

[00:24:37] Luke: Right. It's not something I am. It's something I'm participating in.

[00:24:41] Mark: Absolutely. I'm participating in recovery. Or the other one that I've heard a lot of is, no, thank you. I am sober. And I was like, "Okay, well, sober doesn't necessarily even mean that you have a struggle with alcohol. That just means you're alcohol free."

[00:24:56] I'm not an alcoholic myself. It's not been a struggle that I've had. I've had plenty of others. That's not my cross to bear, but I could tell you, I'm sober. And not an admission of anything, but I do like the linguistics of it because there is a neurolinguistic programming component that I think happens there.

[00:25:17] And I do understand the surrender portion. People that are in Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, highly support that. In fact, a little bit of background there, I actually lost my mother to alcoholism.

[00:25:30] Luke: Oh man.

[00:25:30] Mark: So very familiar with the topic.

[00:25:33] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[00:25:33] Mark: And there was never an admission.

[00:25:38] Luke: Well, yeah. That's the thing where it is like, when you're an addict or alcoholic, denial is probably the biggest roadblock. And then oftentimes there's a period where you admit it to yourself that something's going on. And you can keep the wheels on it for a little while, but when the wheels fall off and you have to admit to other people that you have a problem, how else do you say that?

[00:26:05] Because people say, "You're an alcoholic." You're like, "No, I'm not." And that egoic defiance will resent that and also just push that reality away. But when you finally get to the point where you hit bottom, it's like, okay, you guys were right.

[00:26:17] Yes, as you said, I'm an alcoholic, I admit it. It's like the admission of defeat that opens the door for grace. Because it's a statement of humility that allows you to start to evolve through it.

[00:26:34] Mark: This isn't the first step-- again, I'm not personally acquainted with the 12 steps [Inaudible], but it's admitting that you're powerless over the problem. It's literally that idea that it's like past the denial. I'm powerless. I can't do this. And I think the confession of "I'm an alcoholic," it's two things.

[00:26:53] I think the first thing is the admission of powerlessness, and it's also identifying with the group. It's that we are the same. And in so many cases-- you know, I'm a marketing guy in most of my life. In that case, I will say that we deal with some clients in the healthcare space that-- we have one client who has a supplement product that abates.

[00:27:19] And I don't want to step on FDA terms or anything, but it's like it pretty much eradicates or arrests the symptoms associated with ALS. And we were having a conversation in our office recently, and somebody was bringing up topics of like, demographically identifying or working on, who's the demo that this product resonates most with.

[00:27:40] And in most marketing conversations, that's a great conversation. Like, who's the demo? Is it women over 45? No. It's anybody who's ever heard the words ALS come out of a doctor's mouth. And demographically, it doesn't matter. And I'm telling our team, I'm like, "Thank you. I'm glad everybody's having this conversation, but I'm going to fast forward and say none of that's relevant."

[00:28:03] I'm just going to interrupt your conversation and say, "No, throw that off the table." I'm going to fast forward to you and say, it's kind of like being diagnosed with cancer. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter what color your skin is. It doesn't matter. Male, female, gay, straight Jewish, Hindu. We both have cancer, and we are now part of a subgroup that no one else in the world understands except us. And I believe that that Alcoholics Anonymous admission of "I'm an alcoholic" is the same thing.

[00:28:35] Luke: Yeah. Very well said.

[00:28:35] Mark: It is. We are part of a subgroup. We are the same regardless of everything else and all the roles and personas that we play outside of this room. Lowest common denominator has just been admitted by everyone here.

[00:28:49] Luke: Yeah. And if I was someone suffering from ALS, I'd be much less likely to listen to anyone except you sitting here if you also had ALS, especially if you had healed it. I'd be all ears. But some Dr. Google guy over here said, "Oh, ALS. Have you tried this and that?" It is like noise. I want to talk to a person who solved the problem or someone who understands and has the empathy for what it's like to live with it.

[00:29:16] Mark: And you've touched on so much of a heartbeat of mine, and it kind of ties back to this whole idea of radical generosity, again, and that is, we are relational beings. We are not transactional. And looking at my symptoms on Google is very transactional. Because I can Google alcoholism, I can Google anything else all day long and learn everything there's possibly to know about it.

[00:29:39] Sitting across the table from somebody and having a conversation from it builds a relationship. And that relationship not only creates knowledge and empathy and all these other things, but physiological reactions to us because there is a shared community there.

[00:29:54] There is that love hormone response that takes place when we are in community with like-minded people. And I think that's something that we are lacking in our tech world because chatting with you on Facebook is a very different physiological reaction than actually sitting here face to face like we are. And it's true. Zoom meetings are not like sitting around a table.

[00:30:18] Luke: That's why I do so few Zoom podcasts. I can't stand it. I've gotten so spoiled from being able to sit here and share space with people.

[00:30:27] Mark: Knees to knees. There's just an energy change that takes place that you can't duplicate as you're [Inaudible].

[00:30:31] Luke: Yeah. I'll wait two years to do an interview if somebody can't make it to Austin.

[00:30:37] Mark: I don't disagree with you. I'm glad this worked out.

[00:30:39] Luke: Yeah. It's funny though. There was one time I really wanted to interview Gabor Mate because, trauma and addiction, all that stuff. His people said, "Well, he's not coming to Austin anytime soon. We have to do it on Zoom." So I said, "Okay." And this went on for like a year or something.

[00:30:56] We're trying to book it. We finally do it. We have a beautiful conversation, albeit on Zoom, but right when we started, we introduced each other and he said, "Oh, Luke. Where are you from?" I said, "Austin." He goes, "Ah, I was just there recording a bunch of podcasts." I'm like, "Hello."

[00:31:09] Mark: Wow.

[00:31:09] Luke: He'd been on Rogan and whatever. And I'm just like, "Dude, I just missed him." So after that I was like, "All right, we got to stay in communication with people and make sure we don't miss them when they come in. All right.

[00:31:21] Mark: So what are we actually talking about?

[00:31:23] Luke: Yeah. I love this train of thought, and there's other things keep pinging in that I could refer to, but I want to talk about the topic of cardiovascular disease and heart health and all this stuff for a number of reasons; one is I haven't really covered it somehow. I don't know how I missed this. It's such an important topic, heart disease being, I don't know, the number one or two or three killer.

[00:31:48] And my dad, sadly, a couple of months ago, died of a sudden and massive heart attack, which I think there might have been some pharmaceuticals largely, if not completely responsible for that. But nonetheless, that happened.

[00:32:05] So it's top of mind, thinking about like, "Wow, if you think about the heart, from a metaphysical point of view, it's like, oh, I feel your heart, man. Oh, I got a little sadness in my heart." It's like the heart is the energetic center of your whole being, not just your physiology. It's like your heart.

[00:32:21] You lead with your heart. This is everything. The brain's almost inconsequential. It's just like a necessary computation tool so you can hopefully find what you're supposed to do here and execute. But the heart is where everything comes from. And it's funny because I forget I'm 54.

[00:32:39] And I'm just like, "Oh, I feel good." Hair's getting a little thin, but generally pretty fit. Still holding up, and I go, "Dude, people my age, your average American, or Westerner, they're starting to have heart problems by now-- blood pressure, low, high." I don't even know what the problems are or how to fix it because I haven't experienced it.

[00:33:00] But now I'm seeing people in my life having sometimes pretty substantial issues, and it's like, "I need to cover this." And then I've seen this Zona device around at events for, I don't know, a few years I think now. And I walked by the table and, oh, a little thing you squeeze.

[00:33:18] It just didn't really grab my attention until I became interested in this particular topic. And I'm like, "Okay, these guys have really discovered something very unique and novel and backed by so much research." So I thought, okay, we got to talk about this. So we will transition now into that. And I know this is something you know a lot about, so I don't know. Where should we start?

[00:33:44] What is cardiovascular disease? What's the problem here? And then we can talk about ways that we can fix it. I know isometric exercise. I think about doing planks or leaning against a wall and supporting yourself and try not to move. I'm a yogi from way back and a lot of yogic postures have to do with just holding still and not activating joints and just keeping muscles engaged but not moving. So I get that, but I've never drawn the correlation between cardiovascular health, heart health, and that exercise, for lack of a better term.

[00:34:21] Mark: Where to start? I don't know. That's a really good question. You said something in a--

[00:34:24] Luke: I know that's my job, and I'm just like, "Here--"

[00:34:25] Mark: No, it's good. It's good. It's good. I got you, man. I got you. So what did you want me to interview you about?

[00:34:31] Luke: Yeah, exactly.

[00:34:34] Mark: You said something a minute ago that I was like, "Yeah, that's exactly what it is." You said, "It's not really important until it is. And I think that's exactly--

[00:34:43] Luke: I don't want it to be important for me ever, so I want to be preemptive.

[00:34:46] Mark: No, but the truth of the matter is, yeah, that preemptiveness is making it important before it's urgent. And I think that becomes the issue. It's like it's never important until it is. The day you have a heart attack, all of a sudden your heart's the most important thing. What's the thing? A man without a health problem has 100 problems, but if somebody with a health problem has one.

[00:35:06] Luke: Mm, that's good.

[00:35:07] Mark: The only problem you have is the health problem, if that's the problem. Because everything else becomes irrelevant if this is something you're dealing with. And to your point, how do we get away from that so that we're preemptively dealing with some of the stuff that it never becomes an issue?

[00:35:22] I hope that anybody listening to this never has to have that conversation because they've lived a life and they've done the work to never have to be in that situation.

But invariably, that's not the case because 45% of the US population has diagnosed with pre-hypertension to hypertension. And that's just the people who've been diagnosed.

[00:35:42] Luke: Oh my God. 45%?

[00:35:45] Mark: 45% of the adult population in the United States--

[00:35:47] Luke: See, this is what I'm talking about.

[00:35:48] Mark: Has been diagnosed with--

[00:35:50] Luke: I live in this bubble, this silo. Everyone I know is super healthy. Literally all my friends, family, even my dad, he made that one maybe fatal air, but super healthy. My mom, everyone's always been into health, food, supplements, all the things. So I forget that the rest of the world and the rest of the country are still just sleeping next to their Wi-Fi router, drinking Diet Cokes.

[00:36:16] Mark: You want me both?

[00:36:17] Luke: I'm just like, "What?" I feel like I should-- should's another one of those words we probably should not use, but, I feel like I want to find a way to understand what's going on outside of my little bubble of wellness. 45% is freaking shocking.

[00:36:32] Mark: It's absurd.

[00:36:33] Luke: It's insane.

[00:36:33] Mark: The fact is--

[00:36:35] Luke: And leaving apart the group that is not diagnosed, but let's just take the 45. What happens then? They're going to be put on one drug. That drug's going to lead to a side effect that's going to require another drug that's going to cause one of their organs to fail.

[00:36:51] That then requires another drug. Then they can't sleep, so they got to take the sleep drug and so on and so on until you're-- maybe you live to 65, 70 and you got to medicine cabinet full of all these freaking drugs for which there have been no studies to see what their interactions are.

[00:37:05] Mark: My grandfather died last year. It's been about a year ago now. Five different anti-hypertensive drugs every day. And here I am talking to you about cardiovascular fitness. And a member of my own family's dying. Here's the connection, and I hate to even say this because I'm cynical when I say it, and it's not because it's not out of a love loss by any stretch.

[00:37:28] But it's like five anti-hypertensive medications taking per day to keep your blood pressure in check and yet died of kidney failure. I'm like, "That's not a surprise." We put so much stress on our own bodies in this way. I was just reading a post that Kiran Krishnan-- you know Kiran, I'm sure.

[00:37:47] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Actually, he's coming on the podcast Friday.

[00:37:51] Mark: Oh, no kidding. Oh yeah, he is probably going to be in town for HOS.

[00:37:54] Luke: Yeah. It's a busy week for the Health Optimization Summit.

[00:37:56] Mark: It is. No, I love--

[00:37:58] Luke: Shout out to Tim Gray. Great outfit over there.

[00:38:01] Mark: Yeah. No, love Kiran. And he was saying something in a post and it was all about gut leak. And it's like anything that's leaking out of your gut is getting processed in your liver, which means that by not dealing with your leaky gut issue, you're ending up with liver problems from it.

[00:38:16] And I was like, "Yeah, that got to filter somewhere. If we're not going to expel, we're going to have to filter." That's just how that works. I'm like, "Yeah, the body works in a very harmonic way." And like I said, five drugs, your liver's going to take a toll. Your kidneys are going to take a toll.

[00:38:31] You're going to end up in that situation. And then we write kidney failure on a death certificate when, in fact, if we would've went and connected the dots a couple of steps back, we would've found that that wasn't the problem at all. Had we have controlled this problem, perhaps this problem never would've happened, but we don't do that murder she wrote kind of investigation to go back into the history of-- when I was a kid, when you were a kid, we used to play a game called Mouse Trap.

[00:38:58] You remember Mouse Trap? And it's like, sure, the end result was the mouse got trapped, but there was 23 other little things and the boat-- the boot hits the ball or rolls down. Yeah, all of that stuff was data leading up to that. And we could have interrupted that Mouse Trap game at any time, at any step in those 23 stages.

[00:39:20] And we didn't. Ultimately, we ended up with this outcome, and it's like it's that combo shot to the corner pocket that we need to reverse engineer and find out what's going on. And diagnostically, I think we're just too busy moving on to the next thing to stop and figure that out. So yeah, 45%. How's that for a number for you, wig?

[00:39:39] Luke: That's gnarly.

[00:39:40] Mark: 45%. And every single one of those 45%, and this is the part that, while I understand it, and this is in no way me being cynical towards the medical community, we have created a--

[00:39:51] Luke: That's my job.

[00:39:52] Mark: That's cool. That's cool. I'll cue you up here. The 45% that we have created a legal precedent, that standard of care, if a person even has elevated blood pressure, is to recommend, if not prescribe, an anti-hypertensive to get the blood pressure under control.

[00:40:10] So 45% of the US population has been recommended to be on an anti-hypertensive because you had to be. Because if a physician does not make that recommendation, they can literally be sued for malpractice. So I can be sued for malpractice as a physician if I don't recommend that a person goes on an anti-hypertensive.

[00:40:31] But if I recommend some alternative or natural other kind of method, it can only be done in conjunction with also recommending a medication. And the truth is not everybody's even responsive to medications because everybody's protein profile is different.

[00:40:49] So medications are going to respond differently to people anyways. But even more than that, one of the things that drives me crazy is that the standard is so flexible. I don't know if you know this. A few years ago, and this was news that came across my desk, I just sat there staring at my computer screen. You ever have that moment that you're like, "I can't be reading what I'm reading right now."?

[00:41:11] Luke: Just about every week

[00:41:11] Mark: Right. Yeah, fair.

[00:41:15] Luke: Every time I'm like, "Luke, stop reading. You know the internet is voluntary." And it's like, ah, I can't resist.

[00:41:21] Mark: And I got this email and it was from the American Heart Association because, obviously, I follow all their stuff. And it's like American Heart Association says that normal blood pressure when we grew up was 120 over 80. That was the number everybody knew.

[00:41:36] And I would say most of the people, specifically our generation all still believe that. American Heart Association decided that, and I'm sure there was reasons-- you can be the cynic-- but the normal blood pressure now is 110 over 72. And I started reading this and I'm like, so somebody whose blood pressure was 115 over 75 was good last week, but this week, they're in a problem.

[00:42:05] Or someone who was 120 over 80, they were textbook Tuesday, but when Wednesday's email came out, they were now pre-hypertensive. And I'm like, "You changed the rule." If I said that everybody over 5'11 was considered tall and then all of a sudden it's, well, no, we actually meant six foot two, all of a sudden it's like, what? We have more short people in the world now? Did we just create a phenomenon.

[00:42:31] So if it was a 10-point gap systolic, if it's a 10-point gap systolic, it's like anyone who is in that gap is now suddenly considered at risk. And I'm like, "What is the reasoning behind that?" And again, the cynic in me pipes up and it's just like, anybody in that 10-point gap now is part of standard of care.

[00:42:52] Does that mean we're going to prescribe more? Because that's what it would tell me. And I'm like, "Don't be so cynical. Don't be so cynical." And I'm like, "I know, but when there's so many alternatives out there, we're not educating people on what this really means."

[00:43:07] And we were talking the Tony Robbins, seven-year thing, and it was like, this is an interesting thing. And I'll be honest and tell you it wasn't that long ago that I even learned this fact, which I thought was really interesting, and that is, we say that every cell in the body regenerates within a seven-year period. Some faster. Some not faster. Except the heart.

[00:43:25]And when you start talking about the existential side of the heart being that lifeblood of all things, that's where I feel, that's where I whatever, and my brain is a computation tool. It's interesting that the cells that exist in your heart at a core level are the same cells that have existed in your heart since you were born. The rest of your body's regenerated.

[00:43:43] Luke: That would explain in part why it's so difficult to get over a broken heart, emotionally speaking.

[00:43:51] Mark: Emotionally speaking. Physiologically speaking, 100%.

[00:43:55] Luke: Thinking about the somatic experience of emotions, how things get stuck in your body. Because when you're describing that thing with Tony, I was like, "Yes, and." But also I know as someone who's lived through a bit of trauma, that I've had to do a lot of work to actually get it out of my nervous system, regardless of whether or not I'm talking about it constantly. It's like I avoided looking at those things for decades.

[00:44:18] And when I started looking, I was like, "Oh, something's still there." But the heart, I think, really exemplifies that both on the physical, obviously health level, but also just the way we hold onto pain seems to be right here. If you talk to someone about a past and go, "Where do you feel in your body?" It's usually right in here.

[00:44:36] Mark: And the truth is, when the heart doesn't regenerate, it means that anytime the heart experiences damage, the damage stays because it's not regenerating. So it's like the ticker only goes so long, and periodically we experience these cardiovascular moments, these events, whether heart attacks, any cardiovascular disease.

[00:45:00] Anything that's contributing to the heart, having to work harder than the heart should have to work is causing additional stress on the only muscle in your body that's not regenerating. And that's a thing. That's a thing to pay attention to. So when you talk about--

[00:45:15] Luke: I got to start using this freaking Zona every day.

[00:45:17] Mark: I know, right?

[00:45:18] Luke: I rearranged my office and I put it in another desk drawer. And then I was like, "Oh shit, I got that interview today." And I got it out. I did it this morning, and I was like, "Dude, this is so easy. It takes two minutes." I'm like, "Literally, you just sit there." It's a little meditation. And I go, "I'm doing other stupid shit for two minutes that has way less long-term impact."

[00:45:39] Mark: Totally.

[00:45:40] Luke: I'm getting re-inspired as you talk.

[00:45:42] Mark: I like it. I like to be inspiring, let's say. I like to inspired too, but inspiring for sure. I'll tell you a little bit about this. I know that's really our topic to talk about.

[00:45:55] Luke: It was supposed to be, and now--

[00:45:55] Mark: Yeah, we've talked about everything except that. We're going to start sharing recipes here in a minute, I'm sure.

[00:46:01] Luke: I think with the topic of cardiovascular health and the Zona and all that, I feel like when I was a bit younger, I would've been like, "Meh, my heart's fine. That happens to old people." So if there are younger people listening and you're like, "My heart's rocking." It might very well be. Send this episode to your parents or someone older who's still in good health.

[00:46:23] Because I think you guys are really onto something in terms of that preemptive, a really easy habit to-- it's an easy buy-in. It's easy compliance with huge upside later in life.

[00:46:39] Mark: 100%. And I'll say this, the preemptive crowd is not a crowd that typically acts because we tend to not do a lot of things-- because we're being proactive, we tend to be reactive. And again, the marketing guy's always like, yeah, people always try to react when there's pain because I spend money. I spend time. I do these things when pain is involved because I want to eliminate pain because I will five times more likely do something to stop a pain than I will to even bring a pleasure.

[00:47:11] And when it comes to doing something that is preventative, just don't even bother talking to me about it because I'm probably not going to do that. People really have bad habits around preventative things by and large. And it turns out a lot of the things that we like that eliminate pain also are preventative.

[00:47:29] We like having good physiques. Well, that's good. It leads us to go to the gym, and then there's, yes, you get a good physique, but you also get all these health benefits from it. Because let's be honest, most people are going to the gym to look good more than because they're trying to make sure their heart lasts a really long time. That's the way that story plays out in most people's minds.

[00:47:49] Luke: I don't care about either of those enough to go to a gym.

[00:47:51] Mark: Oh, well, there you go. There you go.

[00:47:53] Luke: I'm not bragging.

[00:47:55] Mark: Yeah, so I want to unpack how this even works though because we've teased everybody and talked about Zona and said nothing about it.

[00:48:04] Luke: For those watching the video--

[00:48:05] Mark: There you go. There you go.

[00:48:06] Luke: It's right here. Here, I'll do a demo. Tell me what's happening. So I have it the wrong way first.

[00:48:14] Mark: I was going to point that out. I didn't know if that was too obvious.

[00:48:17] Luke: And then you can tell us what it is. So it says squeeze as hard as you can, grip strength. So stop.

[00:48:22] Mark: Stay. You switch hands.

[00:48:24] Luke: Okay. Rest for a second.

[00:48:25] Mark: You do it over on that side.

[00:48:26] Luke: Then the left side. It's funny because I was stronger this morning. This is embarrassing. Oh, there we go. Left's kicking it. 66. stop.

[00:48:34] Mark: Probably means you're right-handed. Most people don't realize that your non-dominant hand is stronger than your dominant hand. Everybody assumes it's the opposite.

[00:48:40] Luke: What?

[00:48:41] Mark: Because your dominant hand is actually more positioned for doing-- you want to switch back to your right hand--

[00:48:46] Luke: Oh yeah, yeah. Okay.

[00:48:47] Mark: Yeah. Your non-dominant hand is actually used for leverage. Your dominant hand is used for fine motor skills.

[00:48:55] Luke: Interesting.

[00:48:56] Mark: Right with my right hand. I manipulate a fork with my right hand. If I were to reach up and pick up something small off the ground, I would probably use my dominant hand to do it because it's more tuned to motor skills.

[00:49:06] Luke: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

[00:49:07] Mark: Your left hand is the one that you brace things with. So I pick it up and then I hold it with my non-dominant. I know.

[00:49:13] Luke: So cool.

[00:49:14] Mark: See, I'm just full of trivia here for you, buddy.

[00:49:15] Luke: That's super cool. So to explain to people what's going on, I get a little sign on the screen, and it'll tell me hold when I have just a steady pressure. And then if I squeeze too hard, it'll even say squeeze less. If I let it up, it'll even say squeeze more. So the goal is for-- it's two minutes, right?

[00:49:33] Mark: It's two minutes, four times. So two minutes on your right, then left, then right, then left. But I'm going to walk you through the physiology of what's happening there, because Zona-- so I'll take you through a little bit of a history lesson. Just hold it. Hold it. It'll stop. Exactly. Nobody has to check their audio. That was--

[00:49:52] Luke: It's like incomplete, incomplete. Abort mission. I know. I know. I was trying to do more.

[00:49:56] Mark: The science that is here, we call it the accidental discovery. And that is the original science behind it was a doctor by the name of Ron Wiley. And he was a research scientist who had worked with the US Air Force, and they were actually working on trying to figure out why when pilots go into mock speeds, they actually blackout, which is called g-force blackout. And if you saw the latest Top Gun movie, you'll remember the moment--

[00:50:19] Luke: I didn't, but I get the concept.

[00:50:20] Mark: You go into that mock speed. Your blood pressure goes so low, you pass out until your blood pressure recovers. They've got--

[00:50:26] Luke: It's like a band name, by the way, g-force blackout.

[00:50:28] Mark: Oh, it wouldn't be a bad one. I like it.

[00:50:30] Luke: I'll take note of that. Carry on.

[00:50:31] Mark: But the idea that you're going into g-force blackout, he was hired to study that and find out how in the world can we eliminate this? Because we've got pilots who were up in the air unconscious with multimillion dollar aircrafts. At the end of that study, I'll be honest with you and tell you, I don't even know what the results of that study were because they're irrelevant.

[00:50:52] But at the end of that study, one of the things that Dr. Wiley had observed was this serendipitous data that was, man, everybody who went through this study, and again, these are military guys. These are guys that are already in good shape. At the end of the study, he ended up finding out that these guys, all of their blood pressures regulated.

[00:51:13] And he's like, "That's just so weird." We ran them through for months. We put them through all these stunts. We made them do all this stuff because they were flying during that period more than they had ever been flying before. They were literally everyday testing to see how they would pass out and whatever.

[00:51:28] So he's like, "Hmm, this is interesting data." And what he did is, if you even look at the shape of the device, it's actually shaped like the joystick that you would find in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Not coincidence. And what he discovered was that the grip that the individual would put on that joystick while they were flying, they had to hold a tight control of it, but the grip that they would put there actually was an isometric hold because they had to in order to keep the aircraft under control.

[00:52:00] And he's like, "Wow, there's got to be an association here." Now the first thing that goes through people's heads when I'm having this conversation with them is, oh, it's like one of those grip strength things. No, it's the exact opposite. They're like, "Oh, I made a stress ball." No, the exact opposite.

[00:52:12] Oh, but this is actually helps your grip get stronger. Yes, but no, it's actually not the purpose. So I always have to debunk because, again, psychologically we want to chunk information and we want to associate things. We want to, oh, it's like. We categorize information and metaphors.

[00:52:29] Oh, this is like-- and my answer's no. It's like nothing you've talked about with anybody before. I'm going to give you new information. So please rule out all of those misconceptions early so we can get on with the new information. And I know it sounds so terrible, but I'm like, "No, let's just fast forward that conversation."

[00:52:46] So what this is actually doing is it's isometrics. And if somebody doesn't know what an isometric exercise is, I always do the comparison. You mentioned a plank a moment ago. A plank is isometric. A sit-up is not. A sit-up is a concentric movement followed by an eccentric movement.

[00:53:04] And that is where it's the up and the down and the up and the down. It's taking a muscle group, tightening it, and then relaxing it, and then tightening it, and then relaxing it. It's the constriction of a muscle followed by the extension of a muscle.

[00:53:17] Luke: And it requires a joint to move, right?

[00:53:19] Mark: Yes, typically because when a muscle tightens, that's what actually moves a joint. A joint doesn't move on its own.

[00:53:26] Luke: If I'm doing the Zona or if I'm doing a plank, I'm not moving at all.

[00:53:30] Mark: You're moving nothing. You're moving absolutely nothing.

[00:53:32] Luke: There's no range of motion needed. You're just being as still as possible. Because if you hold the Zona, this morning I was like, "Oh, let me reach for this other thing." Boop, I lose it. You have to actually focus.

[00:53:41] Mark: You got to pay attention to it a little bit. The more you do it, I was going to say, you actually get better at it. I can check my email and even type with the other hand while I'm doing it because it's like driving a car. It starts to go on autopilot after a while. You probably remember how you got to work, but most people go from the home to the office and they have no memory of what the drive to work was like because it becomes so repetitive. We just do it.

[00:54:10] But anyways, to the point, isometric is actually the holding of an exact grip strength over a period of time. So whatever that is, this is grip strength. For instance, a plank or a wall sit, as you had mentioned, all of those things are isometric. And they're isometric because a muscle group is held in a very static resistance level.

[00:54:31] Now, to that point, what I will add is that most people think they're doing isometrics when they're doing isometrics because the obvious response here is like, then I can just do planks and I'll get the same response. Sure, if you do a perfect plank.

[00:54:45] But I go to a HIT gym and I've yet to see somebody do a perfect plank because it's like the plank turns into a pike, which is when you put your butt up in the air and now you're doing downward dog and calling it a plank. And it's like, no, it's not actually a plank.

[00:54:57] Because you moved around and then it turned into a side plank. Now it's the other side plank, and now it's like my knees are on the ground. You did a lot of good stuff. I'm not saying that your muscles didn't get a benefit, but it wasn't isometrics.

[00:55:11] Luke: Also there's no biofeedback. Even if you're the world's greatest plank expert, there's nothing telling you if you're making minor fluctuations. Whereas this seems like hyper. Dude, I barely change my pinky and it's like, beep, beep, beep. Wrong.

[00:55:29] Mark: That's exactly right. And this is a biofeedback device. So it's going to work with you on actually doing the exercise because it calibrates-- So when you did the original one and it said squeeze as hard as you can, all it's doing right there is, it's calculating what's called-- what we call the maximum voluntary contraction.

[00:55:45] And that is how hard does your arm actually have the strength to squeeze. And then you notice when you're holding it, you're not holding it at that same grip strength. You're holding it at a much lesser grip strength than your maximum.

[00:55:57] But that's because the circuitry in the device itself is actually calculating an algorithm that it understands is what is the optimal range for Luke today. Because if you did it in the morning and then did it again at night, your maximum voluntary contraction is going to be different just based on whatever your body's experienced today.

[00:56:15] Some days you're stronger than others. The reality is that it's going to calibrate for each use, then it's going to have you hold it there for a two-minute period of time. Now, this is where the interesting part comes in, and I'm going to nerd out on the science with you here because there's a lot of cool stuff and some people are like, "Oh, you do this and it's nitric oxide release and so on."

[00:56:35] Yes, that absolutely happens. Because one of the things that happens is when you're holding that at a two-minute, it's uncomfortable to hold a muscle group for the exact same amount of time. How many times have you and I both during this conversation, moved around in our chairs, moved our legs, got more comfortable, pressure points, so on and so forth?

[00:56:54] And it's because our bodies want to move towards comfort. If I'm holding an isometric, anything like a plank even, 30 seconds, 15 seconds into a plank, people are like, "I don't know why everybody complains about this." A minute in, you're like, "It's got to have been two minutes already."

[00:57:09] Minute and a half in, and you're just literally fighting, trying to count the seconds before you collapse. Because two-minute planks are the optimal plank as well by the way. Planking longer than two minutes actually starts to have deteriorating benefit.

[00:57:23] Luke: Really?

[00:57:23] Mark: Yes. Two minutes is the perfect. After that, it's diminishing return.

[00:57:27] Luke: I'm pissed at a lot of yoga teachers right now.

[00:57:30] Mark: That's funny. Yeah. No, two minutes is the perfect plank. Doing it for three minutes is--

[00:57:33] Luke: Fifteen minutes you're there doing some kind of hold.

[00:57:36] Mark: That's not even human. But you're holding this for these two minutes. Your body starts to have a sympathetic nervous system response because we're just in parasympathetic right now. We're just chatting. Everything's good. There are no wild lion trying to come eat us. We're sitting, chilling, everything's cool.

[00:57:53] All of a sudden, my arm hurts. What's going on? Well, my first reaction is, why am I not fidgeting to fix that problem? You cross your legs too long, and you start to have circulation issues. What's going on? I want to move to a point of comfort.

[00:58:07] As the device is recognizing that you are holding it at the correct grip strength, you're not out of alignment. It's giving you the biofeedback to make sure that you're not letting go or squeezing too tight. Your body starts to respond to that. The brain's response to it happens before the body even realizes it, and your brain actually flips into that sympathetic nervous system because it's like something's wrong.

[00:58:28] There's got to be something wrong. The arm is uncomfortable, and it won't go to a comfort state. We didn't voluntarily do this to ourselves, of course. Why would we do this? Speaking the body, collectively. And what's happening is your body starts to release nitric oxide, and it produces nitric oxide for the purpose of vasodilation, which is just the cardiovascular system starts to open blood vessels up to let more blood flow freely to the area that's in need.

[00:58:53] So you're almost creating this fake crisis in your body so that your body will respond in crisis mode. We do that all the time. I tell people, one of the ultimate biohacks that nobody thinks about is a tanning bed. You literally go into a tanning bed so that you freak out your body to think that it's about ready to bake, so that it releases more melanin.

[00:59:15] Then as melanin's being released, we like the byproduct of the oxygenation process of the melanin, which turns us brown. Tanning is a body's defense system to not bake from the inside out. That's all that's happening. We're triggering that biohack because we like the outcome. Same thing is happening here. You're creating a crisis so that you get the benefit of what the crisis response gives.

[00:59:38] So yes, we create the crisis. Nitric oxide is released. There's a beautiful layer underneath that though, and this is what's probably not understood by most people when they're talking about using Zona or isometrics or anything along these, and this is the studies that have been done for countless times. Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Health Letter, you name it.

[00:59:59] I've got dozens and dozens and dozens of clinical trials that have been done on isometrics and specifically using Zona for decades, going back on this stuff. Can't put them on our website because they're human studies and the FDA doesn't like that, yet we are in the process right now, just to let anybody know that we are actually in the midst of an FDA clinical trial currently.

[01:00:22] The FDA has been incredibly good to us in so much as-- I can't officially say this, so I'll disclaim and say my perception of how the FDA has responded to us, they understand this science. They just need to cross the t's and dots the i's to make sure that-- they're always trying to advocate to make sure that they're protecting the population. So they've been very good to us in making sure that we're set up correctly--

[01:00:51] Luke: That's encouraging to hear.

[01:00:52] Mark: To get through our clinical trial to say it's okay. So that's been our goal, is to get through the FDA clinical trial.

[01:00:58] Luke: If you get through and past the clinical trial with the FDA, going back to what you were saying earlier, if I go to an MD and say, I have hypertension, they have to say, "We recommend this pharmaceutical, even if you're doing this other thing." Would they be able to say, "Hey, try this thing?"

[01:01:15] Mark: That's our intention, is that the FDA approves and says that this can lower blood pressure. So as of right now, this is an exercise device. That's what it is. We're a class one exercise device with the FDA. We are classified the same way as a treadmill, but you never see a sign on a treadmill that says, guaranteed to lose weight. Because it can't.

[01:01:37] That's not something they say. We can make that association because we understand that walking on a treadmill or running on a treadmill is exercise. And exercise leads to a caloric deficit. And caloric deficits lead to weight loss. Similarly, I can't make that connection for people here.

[01:01:52] The problem is, what happens here is less intuitive. What's actually happening here is that when the body gets into that stressed out state of holding it in the static grip, which does not hurt, by the way, for anybody listening who's wondering, oh, this must be super-- no, it doesn't--

[01:02:09] Luke: No, it's very easy. Like I said, for me it just requires a little bit of attention because--

[01:02:13] Mark: You got to pay attention to it. It's like an active meditation.

[01:02:15] Luke: Yeah. Exactly. And you don't want it to beep. You want to do a good job. You're trying to do something effectively and efficiently.

[01:02:24] Mark: Performance issues right there.

[01:02:24] Luke: Yeah. It's like competitive with yourself kind of thing. It's like, I want to get a good score. I think that's what's great about some of these technologies, is--

[01:02:35] Mark: Gamified.

[01:02:35] Luke: Yeah, gamify. Even the freaking Oura Ring or something that's like my sleep has probably improved so much just because I'm tracking it and it's like, ooh, I want to get a higher score.

[01:02:45] Mark: Sleep competitions. It's amazing.

[01:02:46] Luke: Yeah.

[01:02:47] Mark: So with Zona, what's happening is you're obviously getting all of these other benefits that we just discussed. Those things are [Inaudible]. Those are happening. You're getting the nitric oxide release. You're getting those types of things. But what happens is, when a muscle group is held in a static state, one of the things that a lot of people don't really think about is what ends up making your muscle not cramp.

[01:03:07] Because that's what the muscle wants to do. It wants to spasm, which makes sense. But what causes it to not spasm is a sodium release at a cellular level, the electrolyte issue. So we're releasing sodium from a cellular level to actually give the muscle what it needs to not spasm.

[01:03:26] But at a cellular level, what happens is that sodium and potassium have to release in equal amounts. So I'm getting a potassium release. Let me back up to what is hypertension real quick because that story--

[01:03:38] Luke: You read my mind.

[01:03:39] Mark: That story needs to flush out.

[01:03:41] Luke: Yeah. I'll be honest. I have no idea what that even means.

[01:03:45] Mark: That's so funny.

[01:03:45] Luke: I know it has something to do with blood pressure, but again, it hasn't been a known issue for me, so it's just not a rabbit hole that I've dug into.

[01:03:54] Mark: Hypertension, or blood pressure in general, I'll say, is actually measured by, we talk about systolic versus diastolic and systolic being that top number and diastolic being the bottom number. And the systolic blood pressure is literally measuring how much active force that the heart has to put into the pressure that it takes during an active beat of the heart. Think of it, as a musician, that the systolic is the upbeat, the diastolic is the downbeat.

[01:04:21] Luke: Oh, I get that.

[01:04:21] Mark: Okay. So there you go. That's a nice metaphor. Strangely, one that I've never used before. So you got an upbeat and a downbeat, and it's really just measuring the amount of pressure that is taking there. What is that pulsation? And it's measuring in millimeters of mercury.

[01:04:36] So what's ending up happening when we did the hypertension is that, think of it like a kink in a garden hose. Pressure builds up when there's more trying to move through a channel than the channel is going to permit easily.

[01:04:48] So kink in a garden hose, the water pressure builds up. And then imagine you let go of the kink and the water spurts out of nowhere. But it doesn't always do that. It only does that when the pressure is high. The goal behind it is to never have a kink in the garden hose so that pressure can stay consistent over time.

[01:05:06] Your cardiovascular system functions much the same way, and that is blood is trying to travel through the body to every extremity in your body, but when blood vessels are constricted and that constriction can happen for multiple reasons, you end up pushing the same amount of blood through a narrower channel.

[01:05:26] We're talking about the same amount of blood in the body. So how does it push through a narrower channel? And the answer is, pressure has to increase. Well, when the pressure increases, what ends up happening is the heart has to beat harder, if you will, or more frequently to push the same amount of blood through a narrower channel.

[01:05:48] The goal of reducing blood pressure is to decrease the pressure by opening the widening. That's vasodilation. We need to open the cardiovascular system up. Now, sometimes that happens because inside that blood vessel there is actually plaque buildup. It's narrowed like rust in a pipe, in a plumbing system.

[01:06:09] The water pressure's going to be less because there's this junk on the inside. And that can happen because of diet. That can happen because a lack of exercise. There's any number of reasons that that can happen. But there's also an underlying piece there, and that is what's called the endothelium.

[01:06:25] And the endothelial lining is actually the innermost layer of the cardiovascular system, and that layer of the cardiovascular system's functioning much like a sponge. So imagine it's a sponge. It's very spongy. It can expand. It can contract. It can stretch. It can move. It can do all of these different things.

[01:06:42] But over time and as we age, there is a predisposition for that endothelium to dry out. So imagine it's like a dried sponge. It's no longer flexible. So when the body needs to expand the cardiovascular system to allow greater amount of fluid blood to push through, it can't. It's a hardened sponge.

[01:07:05] Take a soft sponge and put it on the inside of a glass and wipe the insides of the glass. Easy. Try to do it with a dry sponge. You can't even get the sponge into the glass because you can't even bend it around the corner. That's what people's cardiovascular systems are functioning like.

[01:07:21] They're hard. They're stiff. It's that arterials sclerosis. That hardening of the arteries is actually leading to a greater amount of pressure simply because they're not flexible anymore. Now, I want to back all of that up--

[01:07:35] Luke: That was great, by the way.

[01:07:36] Mark: Thank you.

[01:07:37] Luke: Totally tracking all of that's.

[01:07:38] Mark: Oh, good. My life actually speaks in metaphors, so I'm glad that I can bring all of them into this conversion.

[01:07:43] Luke: It's great. You said we were going to get geeky and scientific. I was like, "Okay, man. Pay attention." But I'm totally tracking.

[01:07:48] Mark: I know. I'm not that complicated.

[01:07:49] Luke: I'm totally tracking.

[01:07:50] Mark: Yeah. So the idea is that sponge gets to be softened, but there's only one thing that actually softens that sponge.

[01:07:57] Luke: Nitric oxide.

[01:07:58] Mark: Potassium.

[01:07:58] Luke: Ah, shit.

[01:07:59] Mark: Here you go. Nitric oxide will actually lead to a certain degree, but nitric oxide is a temporary fix. Because most forms of nitric oxide that are being produced are metabolized within six hours of taking the nitric oxides. You'd have to be living on nitric oxide to constantly keep that, and you don't want that anyways.

[01:08:20] Nitric oxide is a great vasodilator. I use nitric oxide on a daily basis, and nitric oxide fixes a lot of things because it increases blood flow. People say, "What is it for?" I'm like, "It's for cardiovascular health." "Well, what does that impact?" I'm like, "Everything that has blood."

[01:08:36] If that system in the body has blood, blood flow is going to positively impact it. So you're changing everything, not just blood pressure. But back to that endothelium, I mentioned that when your muscle is under stress, it releases sodium so that the muscle doesn't spasm.

[01:08:56] That sodium release leads to a potassium release because the potassium and sodium levels at a cellular level must always remain in balance. Potassium leaves the cellular levels, passes through the endothelium, and actually softens the endothelium. That sponge begins to get soft again, which is why when you're using something like Zona, that isometric exercise, sure the nitric oxide will be the fast thing.

[01:09:19] That's the short-term benefit. You're getting the sympathetic nervous system response with nitric oxide. But the potassium release is something that is going to soften the endothelium, but it's over time. Over weeks of using this device, you are going to get that potassium release that's going to soften that endothelium.

[01:09:36] What you'll notice is as the cardiovascular system begins to soften and become more pliable, pressure doesn't build up anymore because it's able to expand and allow that to happen. The endothelium functions much like the thermostat in a furnace. If the thermostat doesn't function, it doesn't matter how cold it is in the house, the furnace isn't going to turn on. Because the thermostat is what recognizes that it's cold.

[01:10:01] So think of the endothelium, a dysfunctioning endothelium functioning like a thermostat is actually-- the body knows how to do what the body knows how to do. You didn't have these problems. Nobody had a high blood pressure at 16 years old because everything functioned normal. We were all manufacture settings.

[01:10:18] Well, over time stuff happens. And can you reset the body? Yeah, I believe that we can reset most things in the body back to normal as long as we provide the right kind of stimulus. And this is providing the stimulus. It's functional medicine. Chris Motley-- I'm sure you know Chris-- he once used the phrase that functional medicine is nothing more than reminding the body of what it already knew.

[01:10:41] And resetting that endothelium to its settings of saying, oh, blood pressure is high. We better expand. We better dilate. We need to let more blood through. If the endothelium isn't functioning, it's as if the body doesn't even know that the pressure is high.

[01:10:59] So how would it use its own systems to correct a problem it didn't recognize? So we are correcting the recognition software, if you will. We're rebooting that cardiovascular system, and now it's going, "Oh my gosh, the pressure's been up. How long has this been going on? Why did no one do anything about this? It's just letting your body go back to doing what it already knew how to do at a younger version of you.

[01:11:24] Luke: Wow. Great explanation. What about people with low blood pressure?

[01:11:32] Mark: I'm going to draw a comparison here and say low blood pressure or high blood pressure are two different issues. What's going on there? But our goal is not to lower blood pressure. Our goal is to regulate the cardiovascular system to do what it knows how to do.

[01:11:49] So high blood pressure is usually why people are using the device, and it's usually the reason why people are doing isometrics. Usually, all of those things is related to high blood pressure. When we talk about fixing the cardiovascular system, we're talking about conditioning it.

[01:12:04] So low blood pressure, it's not going to lower your blood pressure more. It's just going to continue to condition your cardiovascular system. If symptomatically that makes you low, if symptomatically, it makes you high, we don't lower blood pressure. I'm never going to make that claim partially for legal purposes, but I'm never going to make that claim because--

[01:12:23] Luke: I think we have a disclaimer on this podcast. It's for entertainment and educational purposes only.

[01:12:27] Mark: Exactly. I'm here to be entertaining and educational.

[01:12:31] Luke: Which is actually true, but it's funny that you have to say that.

[01:12:34] Mark: I'm so careful about that. So the reality is we're not trying to lower blood pressure. We're letting your body get back to what it knows how to do. And if lowering blood pressure is what your body needs to do, we are providing the stimulus to let your body do that.

[01:12:47] We're just trying to take your cardiovascular system-- and truthfully, I say that we're reversing time on it because if age related hypertension is what leads to a stiffening of the arteries and that's what's causing to that hardening, that arteriosclerosis we discussed, if that's what's causing it, then great. Then let's remove that stimulus.

[01:13:08] The stimulus of the hardening needs to go away. And how do we do that? We provide that release. It's that combo shot to the corner pocket again. I'm creating a device that's giving biofeedback that is done through isometrics, which is creating muscle stress.

[01:13:22] Muscle stress is leading to a sodium release. Sodium release is leading to a potassium release. A potassium release is leading to a rehydrated endothelium, which is leading to a recognition software in the body, understanding that there's a regulatory problem system wide. Like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. I get to my outcome. It's a hack.

[01:13:45] Luke: It's just crazy that something that on its face looks so simple can do all of that.

[01:13:51] Mark: Something so complicated.

[01:13:53] Luke: Like I said, I had that thing sitting in my drawer. I'm like, "I don't know. What's this thing doing?"

[01:13:58] Mark: It's so calm and intuitive.

[01:13:59] Luke: From a marketing perspective, I know you're marketing guy, if I was trying to market this, I feel like I would have a very difficult time because it's, you get a red-light panel or the BioCharger. I have a bunch of great tools in this house. You turn them on, it's like, whoa, what's that thing? Looks like it's doing something.

[01:14:16] Mark: This is so simple.

[01:14:17] Luke: And they're also sometimes a few thousand dollars, so they better do something that gets your attention.

[01:14:23] Mark: But they're very much a this tab goes in this slot kind of science. This is not. And the truth of the matter is it's why when we started this conversation, I told you people are like, "Oh, it's like one of those grip exercises." No. "Oh, it's like a stress ball." No. "Oh, it helps Grip strength." Well, yes, but nope.

[01:14:40] I want you to get rid of anything you think you know about what hand grip does. I was on another podcast not too long ago, and the host set this entire thing up, which is why I even asked you before we started talking, like, what's your lead in? Tell me where we're going.

[01:14:55] Because we ended up in this podcast, on live podcast stuff, and he's doing this whole thing about grip strength being associated with longevity. And I'm like, "Mm-hmm. That is true. People with higher grip strength tend to live longer." I took the conversation and was like, "Yeah, but that's an effect of a cause rather than a cause to an effect."

[01:15:17] People with higher grip strength scores, I would arguably say is because they've led to this type of exercise, which has ultimately led them to have cardiovascular fitness rather than, because I have a high grip strength, I live longer. It's more of a grip strength is symptomatic of something else, and that's why you've ended up with greater longevity.

[01:15:39] But it's a counterintuitive device. I don't look at it and understand it, and there's no intuition behind it, which is why when I've got the opportunity to talk to audiences who believe you, I'm like, "Great, let me talk to you. You tell them I'm believable." Because the reality is that--

[01:15:59] Luke: To give myself a little credit, I have a pretty good bullshit meter.

[01:16:05] Mark: Totally. That's what I mean.

[01:16:06] Luke: I could do seven podcasts a week if I wasn't as stringent about what I think would be helpful to people.

[01:16:13] Mark: 100%. And that's why this--

[01:16:15] Luke: There's so much shit out there that just is a waste of money and a waste of time.

[01:16:19] Mark: And that's why these long-form type setups where we're actually able to sit and have a conversation and explain it. Because from a marketing perspective, man, you get two seconds to grab somebody's attention. We're in a fast scroll world.

[01:16:33] I don't get the opportunity to sit and chat about this for an hour with people unless they're listening to something like this and they're like, "Oh, wow." And there's an intellectual curiosity that leads them to go, "Hmm, that's interesting. And wow, you unpacked that in such a way that it made sense."

[01:16:47] I know Luke doesn't want bullshit on his podcast, so this must be legit. There's that endorsement. There's all of that stuff. I love getting the opportunity to talk about it because I love things that are counterintuitive. There's part of me that just likes disruptive things. I'm like, "It's so disruptive because the reality is, there's a lot of stuff that we just know and feel. This isn't one of them."

[01:17:11] Luke: Right?

[01:17:11] Mark: This isn't one of the things that we're like, "Oh, I get it."

[01:17:14] Luke: You get in a sauna, you're like, "Ah, this feels really good. I feel different." Before and after, there's a marked change in your whole outlook and the way you feel and all that.

[01:17:23] Mark: And I'll say this. There's an expectation for people because I want to get-- I'm going to tie together our psychological conversations with cardiovascular health.

[01:17:33] Luke: Bookend it, baby.

[01:17:33] Mark: Yeah. So I recently had a nurse come to my office because I made a change in a life insurance policy. They got to come out. They got to do all your stats. How much do you weigh and how tall are you? And blah, blah, blah. So you got to go through all the whatevers. And I'm like, "Just come to my office. Do it all there."

[01:17:50] And they're like, "You sure you wouldn't rather--" Just come to my office. That's cool. You do this kind of stuff. And their fear is always, well, but you're going to be in a place that's stressful and all this other kind of stuff. So nurse comes in, she does the blood draws, she does whatever, and she takes my blood pressure.

[01:18:04] And true story, she immediately grabs her pen, and she puts the pen right down to her form after she finishes my blood pressure. And she looks at me and says, “What medications are you on?" And I looked at her. I went, "None." And she goes, "No, no, no, no. I mean blood pressure. Nothing like because you've got some kind of acute disease thing. But just chronic, what medications are you on?"

[01:18:28] And I'm like, "Still none." And she looked at me, she went, "But your blood pressure was 110 over 72." And I looked at her. I went, "And I think that's what it should be. No?" And she doesn't know about my association with a cardiovascular fitness company. And I'm like, "But it should be that. No?"

[01:18:49] And she's like, "Well, sure." I'm like, "Okay." Almost sarcastically, I'm allowing this pregnant pause in the conversation. I'm like, "So you're going to have to fill me in on what I'm missing here because I'm not channeling here with you." And she goes, "You're almost 50 years old."

[01:19:08] And I went, again, very aware, "Uh-huh." "But your blood pressure is 110 over 72." And I'm looking at this woman, and again, she wasn't stupid. She was a very nice lady, but it was so unbelievable to her that a 50-year-old man, almost-- and she's like, "But your blood pressure is 110 over 72."

[01:19:28] I'm like, "As it should be." And then she used the words that I want removed from the English language. And she says, "But that's unusual at your age." And I looked her. I'm like, "I need you to unpack the words "at your age" for me." And I said, "Is isn't 110 over 72 the right blood pressure for any age?" "Well, yes. Of course."

[01:19:54] And I went, "So why would it be different for me?" "Well, it's not different for you." And I'm like, "I'm not trying to put you in a trick box here." And I'm like, "What I'm trying to point out to you is that healthy is healthy. Healthy blood pressure should be the same no matter how old I am.

[01:20:07] "Healthy blood sugar should be the same no matter how old I am. Healthy vision should be the same no matter how old I am. Healthy exercise habits should be the same no matter how old I am. Healthy is healthy." And if we're deteriorating with age, it's because we're not putting the inputs in. Again, how do I get back to factory settings on a lot of this stuff? And that's the biohacking community. I hate that word. It drives me crazy.

[01:20:34] Luke: Me too.

[01:20:34] Mark: 0Because it's so loaded for so many people anymore. But you get what I'm saying when I say that the functional health community, the natural health, the natural--

[01:20:43] Luke: The word I've found is just a blanket term, wellness.

[01:20:47] Mark: Wellness, there you go. The wellness community.

[01:20:49] Luke: It's a little soft, but I like it because it encompasses your spirituality, your mindset, your physical health. It is like if you're well, it means there's an absence of dis-ease.

[01:21:03] Mark: Fair. And in that, in the wellness community, we are accustomed to understanding that it's like I need to go figure out what the stimulus is that would lead to the outcome I'm looking for. It's that root cause type stuff. How do I go back to what's causing this problem and then get rid of that? Because if I get rid of it in this upstream fashion, I don't have downstream consequences.

[01:21:28] As opposed to constantly dealing with downstream consequences. And I look at the medical community and it's like you're like little Dutch boy just plugging holes in the dam all the time because you won't figure out what's causing the leak. We're better off figuring out what causes the leak, because then you can walk away from the dam for a while.

[01:21:45] It's okay. There's going to be breakage. There's going to be things that we're going to be-- we're all exposed to environmental toxin. It doesn't matter where you live. There's things that cause damage. We get it. Oxidative stress is coming from us on every angle, but what are we doing to fight against that sort of stuff? And in her mind, at your age just meant this was normal.

[01:22:07] Luke: In her day-to-day life, she's dealing with that 46%.

[01:22:11] Mark: She is. And I'm going to say, the 46% that we talked about--

[01:22:16] Luke: That's of all ages.

[01:22:17] Mark: That's the adult population of all ages, which means 55.

[01:22:21] Luke: So the percentage of 50-year-olds is probably exponentially higher. Yeah.

[01:22:25] Mark: And that is the truth, that--

[01:22:27] Luke: To her credit.

[01:22:28] Mark: To her credit. It's what she deals with every day in the medical community. Our community in the natural health and wellness space, as you said, your friends are healthy. So are mine. It's like we are weird. But I'm reminded on a regular basis my dad recently, who's also very much into the health and wellness space, and we've got a lot of mutual people here and whatever.

[01:22:50] And I laugh because he and I will just nerd out on peptides and all the other stupid stuff, but he made a comment the other day-- he's turning 68 next week, and he made a comment last week, and he's like, "I'm just getting at that age. I need younger friends." And he's like, "Going and visiting my friends or visiting my family members who are of equal age," he goes, "it's like it used to feel going and visiting my parents."

[01:23:15] You go over. You sit on the edge of the couch. You talk for 15, 20 minutes and ask how they're doing and listen to the complaints and so on and so forth. And I laugh because it's like my dad, like me, has zero concept of age because I just have zero interest in talking about how old I am.

[01:23:33] It's not because I'm embarrassed by my age. I told you very freely how old I am, but it's like, I just don't have any interest in letting that define anything about me, physiological or otherwise. He just set a Guinness record for being the oldest rookie year race car driver.

[01:23:46] Luke: Your dad?

[01:23:47] Mark: Yeah. Isn't that funny?

[01:23:48] Luke: What? My dad used to be a race car driver.

[01:23:50] Mark: Oh, no kidding.

[01:23:51] Luke: Yeah, he raced stock cars.

[01:23:52] Mark: He absolutely loves it. And I'm laughing because next week is his birthday, and he lives in Detroit, and I'm going to be up there for Easter. And I'm like, "Hey, we're all going to go out for your dinner for birthday, your birthday dinner. And I made a reservation at a restaurant and whatever." I'm like, "No, yesterday I canceled it and I sent a group text to everybody in the family." I'm like, "We're going to do something different." I'm going to make everybody go go-karting. We're all going to go go-karting because that's dad's thing, is race car driving. You know what? We're going to go do something.

[01:24:19] Luke: He's going to smoke all you guys.

[01:24:20] Mark: Exactly. In a go-kart, right.

[01:24:22] Luke: Do you think his interest in cars has anything to do with being from Detroit?

[01:24:26] Mark: Possibly. My whole family's been that way for--

[01:24:28] Luke: I've never been to Detroit, but I know it as not any longer, but when I think of Detroit, I think of a few rock and roll bands.

[01:24:35] Mark: Motor City.

[01:24:36] Luke: Yeah. But yeah, I think of like all those abandoned auto factories and stuff when it was once like this thriving production hub of cars

[01:24:45] Mark: I say Detroit is a great place to be from.

[01:24:48] Luke: Yeah. I've met people though, and they're like, "Oh, it's coming back, man. You can get cheap real estate." And there's a burgeoning cultural rebirth there because--

[01:24:58] Mark: Pre-COVID.

[01:24:59] Luke: Huh?

[01:25:00] Mark: Pre-COVID.

[01:25:01] Luke: Did COVID kill a lot of that?

[01:25:03] Mark: It's second renaissance. You had a lot of Compuware and General Motors and all of them centralized downtown, and they put all the new stadiums downtown because that's the funny thing. The stadiums in Detroit were 40 minutes away from the city.

[01:25:17] Now they're all centralized downtown with Ford Field and Comerica Park and the new little Caesars arena for the Red Wings. All of that stuff is now very, very central downtown. So they put in a bunch of brownstone housing and a lot of offices and everything else.

[01:25:34] COVID, I'll say, took it out. For wherever anybody falls politically, it was very blue state management, which was very much locked down. Stay home. Don't go anywhere mindset.

[01:25:48] Luke: It's what sent a lot of people like me out of California to Texas and Florida.

[01:25:51] Mark: Yes. And I live in Florida. I lived in Florida prior, but I was glad [Inaudible]. But yeah, it was very much a lockdown state, as you know, Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

[01:26:02] Luke: Oh her. Oh God. I didn't even know where she's from.

[01:26:06] Mark: Yeah. There you go.

[01:26:05] Luke: I've seen her speak a bit--

[01:26:07] Mark: We're aligned.

[01:26:08] Luke: On social media. I'm like, "Whoa, dude."

[01:26:10] Mark: We're aligned. But yeah, she very much--

[01:26:13] Luke: Dark energy, man.

[01:26:13] Mark: Causing a lot of that lockdown. And so even friends that I have that work at Compuware and General Motors and stuff like that, and then Blue Cross Blue Shield, everybody went home. So it's like all the restaurants downtown died, so on. It's like they're trying to get that back because people are going back to work now more so. I hope it does because when I grew up, Detroit was just a scary place. That was what it was.

[01:26:41] But I had one of my best friends, growing up, parents were Detroit police officers. So I didn't grow up with a fear of Detroit because I was always around the cops. So it was never a weird thing. We'd go to the police station and go to the gun range down in the police station and stuff.

[01:26:58] Luke: Oh, wow.

[01:26:59] Mark: Detroit was never scary to me because of that angle. I don't know if that's where his love for cars comes from though. But my grandfather, great-grandfather, they were all crazy car people.

[01:27:10] Luke: Oh, cool.

[01:27:10] Mark: But the point is, 68 means nothing.

[01:27:14] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[01:27:15] Mark: He's saying that it's like going and visiting his parents to go visit his best friend from high school. And people accept it. And again, I'll go back to the quit speaking negativity into your life. Speak life. Speak life.

[01:27:30] Luke: I like your attitude around that, is not normalizing dysfunction and disease. My dad would share the same thing too. He was 81 when he died, and toward the end, all his friends were dead. He's like, "Wow." He still loved his wife and had a good life, but he is like, "Yeah, there's nothing to do."

[01:27:51] There's no one to hang around with because they've all croaked because they didn't apply some of the changes that he did in his life and make any effort or even have the awareness that there was another way to live, another way to eat and exercise and all the things.

[01:28:05] Mark: I chuckle because when I said to my dad-- he made the comment about, I'm at the age where I need to get younger friends. And I was like, "That's why you hang around with me more now." And he's just like, "Yeah, you're borderline. You're getting up there."

[01:28:18] And I'm like, "All right, that's fair." I'm too old to hang out with my parents. So I thought that was funny. But it's a mindset, and it's a digging under the hood to find out what's going on. It's figuring out what stimulus is causing this response and rooting it out in that upstream pattern than dealing with a downstream consequence.

[01:28:40] Because we can bounce all over the place, but as it relates to Zona, it's making sure that you don't end up with the situation from a preventative standpoint because you're providing upstream support for that muscle that needs you.

[01:28:53] But even if we're dealing with a downstream consequence, this is a way that we can row against the tide that is anti-hypertensives and the cardiovascular drugs that are being created. And God bless the pharmaceutical industry because there's a lot of great things that they do.

[01:29:09] If I go into the ER and my leg is falling off, by all means you are allowed to give me whatever painkillers you have on stock. But the people who just live on stuff like that or live on the sleeping pills, figure out what's going on. Pharmaceuticals are not meant, in my opinion, to be life sustaining in that respect.

[01:29:27] They're circumstantial and they're good in their usage. But even if a person is on anti-hypertensives and they're dealing with that, that downstream consequence of a bad cardiovascular fitness up until that point, it's like the heart problems at 60 didn't start at 60. They started back at 40.

[01:29:47] We need to row upstream a little bit still and find out like, sure, I understand a drug may fix the pressure reading this afternoon, but we can still row back upstream a bit. We can still go back upstream and find out what are the ways that I can get involved in this? Medical community, if you got high blood pressure, what do you need to do?

[01:30:08] Well, we need to first deal with a low-sodium diet. I'm like, "Okay." The problem is your body physically cannot have too much salt. Because if your body has too much salt, what ends up happening? It just pees it out. You can't over salt your body. The issue beyond over salt in your body is that people are consuming too much sugar.

[01:30:31] The salt retention is happening. The reason why you're measuring for too much salt is because of sugar consumption. It's not because you have too much salt. But we tell people go on a low sodium diet because that's creating the blood-- no, it's because we won't deal with the sugar epidemic that's happening in our culture. Deal with the sugar problems.

[01:30:52] Luke: I forgot about that low salt stuff. And even thinking about, thankfully in the past few years, unadulterated natural sea salt has come into trend where it used to be just chefs knew about it, because of the flavor profile. But my whole life, salt was like white sugar. It was a highly processed, refined version of sodium chloride, not like actual salt as nature designed it.

[01:31:17] Mark: Yeah. It's Morton's. It's Morton's table salt and--

[01:31:21] Luke: Yeah. And then I think they put iodine in it, iodized salt. It's like, well, if you just had natural salt, it would already have iodine.

[01:31:28] Mark: Correct. We wouldn't need iodine. But to that point though, it's like we give people this wives' tale kind of advice that's not scientific, but we haven't asked questions. Science itself, and I know we all know this, and five years ago we all got the lesson in spades, the scientific process itself is literally asking questions.

[01:31:52] But there's so much that we just assume we understand and we never question it. And because of that, it's like we know stuff because it's just folklore conversations that have taken place over the years. We all grew up in the 120 over 80 world. Now it's different. And oh, by the way, salt is not killing you. Or salt is killing.

[01:32:10] Luke: Oh, and saturated fats.

[01:32:12] Mark: Trans fats and--

[01:32:14] Luke: So many scams. Think about the food pyramid, dude. It's actually upside down.

[01:32:22] Mark: Completely upside down, literally.

[01:32:23] Luke: It's crazy.

[01:32:24] Mark: And you know what? I love voices like yours who have audiences that you've built even before all of this is happening. Again, I don't care where people are politically-- I care a little-- but the RFK world right now has opened up so many questions for people.

[01:32:43] And I think there's so much misinformation that is being questioned all of a sudden. And I would say five years ago we all got a painful lesson and misinformation anyways. So this distrust in everything is, again, probably creating a bit of a sympathetic nervous system response for a lot of people.

[01:33:01] But now I'm being told that the food pyramid's wrong. And RFK just announced, what, yesterday or two days ago or something, that he's going to rewrite the food pyramid. Well, what, are you going to change all the textbooks from seventh grade? Now we got to redo all of this stuff. And people are like, "That doesn't make sense, what's happening."

[01:33:18] And we need those voices who are trusted, who are pre-qualified to listeners as, okay, this guy's no bullshit. He wants to hear the answers here. How do we get that information out to even more people from credible sources? Because I think people are looking for those true norths and trying to find out what is real, what's not real.

[01:33:41] Because bullshit meters are going off left, right, and center right now. And it doesn't matter what news network you're listening to, they're all going off everywhere. And I think people are looking for real stories. They're really trying to find that stuff out, and I think that's where we are.

[01:33:59] Luke: Yeah. That's part of my job. It's funny. With Bobby Kennedy, he was on the show a couple years-- a few years ago now. I think it was in mid-2020. And I've always admired his work so much, and I was very hopeful as I think many people were when he got involved in government. And I forgot what happens when people get involved in government.

[01:34:21] A couple of days ago, he tweeted something and I'm like, "This had to be an intern or something. Where's the retraction of about MMR vaccine is the best defense against measles." And I don't know if you've seen this, but people are completely shitting themselves now.

[01:34:36] Understandably so because it's such a 180 and it's so interesting what happens when someone who was formally seemingly of integrity gets involved in politics. And of course, there's things going on behind the scenes we have no idea of. But I think as positive as things are, it's like we take a few steps forward and then a couple steps back.

[01:35:00] I just want to create more awareness. So people that listen to this show on a regular basis, they're going to be totally on board with most of what we talked about and get it. But my goal is to reach new people who are like, "What? I'm on this medication. You mean there's another way to go?" Yes. Boom. That's the person that I really want to hopefully impact.

[01:35:18] Mark: 100%.

[01:35:19] Luke: Or someone, as I said earlier, that shares it with their parents or something like that, where you can turn the ship around for someone just by giving them new information.

[01:35:29] Mark: Correct.

[01:35:30] Luke: Because they're just going with whatever information they had, which might have been actually fraudulent information, just like the food pyramid and fats are bad for you, and don't eat salt and whatever.

[01:35:44] Mark: We can only teach what we know.

[01:35:44] Luke: Yeah, exactly.

[01:35:45] Mark: We go to doctors for all their advice, and the reality is that most of the advice we get from doctors is what their professors in college taught them. That's all we can do. I actually spent most of my career prior to doing what I do now as a college professor. So I spent most of my career in higher education, and I would literally start classes by telling my students, I said, "I'm going to make a couple of disclaimers before class begins." To put my disclaimers on the podcast.

[01:36:12] I'm like, "Here's my disclaimers. One, I'm going to offend everybody in this room at some point. That's good news, and I'm going to apologize to you once. I'm not going to deal with it for the rest of the semester. You're probably going to be offended at some point. And it's not because I'm trying to be offensive; it's because I'm going to make you think.

[01:36:26] "And sometimes when we think, that's actually really hurtful to us, because it challenges what we already believe, and I don't care what you believe. I'm going to challenge you on it. And one of two things are going to happen. You are either going to become more resolute in your belief system, which is a good output, or you're going to realize you were wrong all this time, which is a good output. So challenging your belief systems only has good outputs.

[01:36:48] Luke: Yeah. But in today's world, man, especially in the universities, we have this "words are violence" concept

[01:36:56] Mark: Yeah, I can't. And I would tell them. I'm like, "That's then word thing."

[01:37:00] Luke: Your words are hurting me. You're hurting yourself with the meaning you're creating out of a sound that just came out of someone's mouth." It's crazy. So people are too goddamn sensitive.

[01:37:12] Mark: I can't even anymore.

[01:37:13] Luke: I'm Gen X, right, If I'm 54?

[01:37:17] Mark: I don't know what I am, to be honest with you. I'll be 50 in a couple of months.

[01:37:17] Luke: Is he Gen X too?

[01:37:17] Mark: Is that Gen X?

[01:37:22] Luke: I don't know the gens. Anyway, my generation, of course, is the best of all time, but I don't know. I'm from an era where you can choose whether or not you get emotionally impacted by someone else's sounds.

[01:37:40] Mark: Yeah. It's past me and I'm past even trying to figure it out.

[01:37:43] Luke: Not that it doesn't get me. Every once in a while, someone will troll me and I feel my ego flare up a little bit and I go, "Dude." What they think of me is none of my business. Whether they worship me and think I'm the greatest thing ever, or they think I'm a piece of shit, it says nothing about me. It says everything about their consciousness, and they have every right to--

[01:38:01] Mark: In their free time.

[01:38:02] Luke: Yeah, they have every right to feel however they feel.

[01:38:05] Mark: And I would tell them, "You're going to be offended." I said, "And the second thing is--" I had one particular class on this. You're going to find this hilarious. I was that professor. I was like, "Every test is a take-home test. Part of a take-home test is you obviously have your book because I can't police you in doing that.

[01:38:20] "I don't care. Take it home this Saturday. Bring it back next Saturday. That's how you get graded. Because here's the deal. I'm going to spend the four hours a week I get with you trying to get you to think. Because I don't care that you memorized what year Sabanes-Oxley passed. I don't care. We live in a world that it's in your pocket.

[01:38:39] "You can look up any amount of data on your pocket just by grabbing your telephone. I don't need you to come to class to memorize. I need you to come to class and learn how to think. I need you to come to class and learn how to be able to challenge your own belief systems."

[01:38:54] I'm like, "And if you want to take your test home and go read all the answers, I said, I will guarantee you at the end of the semester, I will pass out. 60% of the class will get A's. 40% of the class will fail." I'm like, "The reason is because 60% of them understood that all I have to do is go home and look up all the answers in the book, and I can turn in a test, and the other 40% will just not do it.

[01:39:16] "I'm not going to quiz you on memorizing. I want you to think." And I think when you mentioned the Bobby Kennedy stuff, it's like I agree with you. People get weird in politics. Sometimes all of a sudden, I'm watching it happen right now with Ben Shapiro. I don't know if you follow Ben Shapiro.

[01:39:32] Luke: Yeah. I know the guy with the bigger eyebrows.

[01:39:35] Mark: And he's suddenly taken this twist lately that has completely shocked me. And I'm like, "Hmm, that's interesting." I'm like, "Rather than just being like, wow, I disagree with what you're saying, how about if I go, hmm, what, what caused you to change your story on some of this kind of stuff? What made you think differently? Or why do we disagree on this topic? We normally agree on so many of these other ones. What's going on?

[01:40:00] Take that data. Figure out what's going on there. Challenge it because you with the Bobby Kennedy example, yeah, may maybe somebody got corrupted in politics. Maybe it was an intern. I don't know what the reasons behind all of that stuff are. I'm just happy that people are asking the questions.

[01:40:17] Luke: Totally.

[01:40:18] Mark: I'm just happy that people are asking the questions because, and this is always my takeaway from anything, my health and my longevity is zero other people's responsibility than mine, and only one person pays the price if I do it wrong.

[01:40:35] Luke: Yes, yes.

[01:40:36] Mark: If my doctor prescribes--

[01:40:37] Luke: This is one of the biggest problems we have right now, I think, is from the beginning of the plandemic, so many people have woken up and said like, "Okay, we're being screwed really bad here. We need to do something about it." And the doing something about it is like, we need new rulers to come in and replace the bad guy rulers.

[01:40:57] And it's like, how about no rulers? How about you become your own ruler and take responsibility for your own life, whether it's Bobby Kennedy or Hoop Trump or anyone else. It's like, dude, no one's coming to save you. No one is coming to save you. And if they claim they are, they're probably a Trojan horse for someone who wants to hurt you, just like the first group did. Whether they even know it or not.

[01:41:20] Mark: In the wellness space, I've used this comment a lot with conversations, particularly shareholders and all this other kind of stuff. And I'm like, "Look, here's the deal. Since COVID, I'll look for the silver lining and whatever, and it's like, I'm so excited that there seems to be a mass, I would say a pivot, if you will, that this big question mark that now is over everybody's head that maybe the insurance company and maybe the government don't have my best interest at heart.

[01:41:47] Luke: Yeah, you think?

[01:41:47] Mark: I'm like, "Okay, I'm glad we got there. I suppose it seemed pretty drastic on how we got there." But the fact that we at least can agree that-- and that even relates to Zona. Probably the most asked question that we used to get, we still do, is it covered by insurance?

[01:42:10] And no, it's not. We are FSA and HSA- approved. We actually go through TrueMed. You know TrueMed with Calley Means? I know Calley through other circles, people who watch stuff, but it's like TrueMed's actually his company that actually does FSA and HSA stuff. But we're approved to [Inaudible] through health spending accounts.

[01:42:29] That's fine. But no, it's not insurance. And this belief system that, well, if insurance doesn't cover it, it must not be good. And it's like, so you want to put your health in the hands of what the insurance companies will cover.

[01:42:40] Luke: Oh my God, it's the opposite of that. Anything insurance covers definitely sucks.

[01:42:43] Mark: Correct. I can mathematically point out that using a Zona is exponentially cheaper than buying blood pressure medication every week for the rest of your life.

[01:42:53] Luke: Or buying the most expensive insurance plan.

[01:42:56] Mark: Also true. Or you can just make a decision to invest in your own health. The stuff that's best for you is probably not the stuff that the government's promoting. It's probably not the stuff that the insurance companies provide. No, make a decision. Make it independent.

[01:43:12] There is that big question mark that's over people's heads right now. And as I said, even speaking to shareholders, I'm like, "I hate how we had to get there, but people are now starting to come to the realization that my health is only my responsibility." What goes in, my fault. If I'm eating processed food, not FritoLay's problem. That's on me.

[01:43:36] We can sit and argue about all the food dies, and I understand the consequences of children being marketed to, and I'm 100% on board with knocking some of that nonsense off, and I'm with all of the changes, but they shouldn't have to be government mandated. because to your point, we're just asking for a different king. How about if we just didn't have a king?

[01:43:58] Luke: Also, it gets into anti-free market too. We need a free market. That's what brings about new ideas and innovation. The more restriction you have, the less innovation. So to me, the answer is not make red food die illegal. It's just create transparency so that if a parent's buying their kid that cereal, they know it causes cancer, and they can still decide to do it or not.

[01:44:28] It's like, I eat shit all the time that's not good for-- not that often and not that bad, but I pounded a pint of ice cream last night at 2:00. I couldn't sleep. Woke up. I was like, "Hmm, ice cream sounds good." Ate a whole pint of-- granted it was A2 two milk. It was the best ice cream you could get.

[01:44:45] Mark: I ate Pringles for dinner yesterday. You don't need to apologize. I was stuffed--

[01:44:47] Luke: And I'm eating it and I'm like, "I'm feeling guilty." And I go, "No, man. Don't do a double jeopardy here. Actually enjoy it." And I rolled with it, but it's like I know if I am harming myself, I'm doing so voluntarily. I'm opting into that with an awareness of what I'm doing. Now, would I have eaten, I don't know, some MSG Doritos or Pringles? Probably not. I don't care how hungry I'd be.

[01:45:14] There's a certain line that I won't generally cross. MSG, some of this aspartame shit like that. But I think it's like all we can really do, advocates like us for wellness and wellbeing and all of that, is just share information and just leave it up to people to make decisions for themselves.

[01:45:35] And it's like each little incremental move any one of us makes toward a better choice has a huge impact down the line. You're talking about incremental better choices for the course of your 80, 90, 100 years.

[01:45:51] Mark: Incremental progress is all--

[01:45:51] Luke: I've been on this path almost 30 years of just becoming healthier in all the ways. And it's like, there's things I did 10 years ago, I'm like, "Oh my God, if I would've known, I would've never done that." And so it is just like a matter of refinement and refinement and pretty soon it becomes generally simple. It's like, turn the Wi-Fi off at night, don't look at blue light at night.

[01:46:12] Just basic stuff that sounds complicated and a pain in the ass in the beginning. And then eventually it just becomes how you live. There's just certain things you eat, certain things you don't eat, and you hold it loosely and find a happy medium.

[01:46:27] Mark: 100%.

[01:46:28] Luke: I'm not looking for Bobby Kennedy or anyone to come save me. Sure, give me some information, but it's up to me to make the choices for my life. It's not up to the government to tell me what to do with my body or my life or anything else.

[01:46:41] Mark: And again, we're in total alignment on all of that, I think, obviously. But it's a matter of, yeah, give people information. Get the message out there that people can do it. But more than anything, I always say that, my message, Socrates used to call himself the gadfly of Athens.

[01:47:00] And the gadfly is like that little fly that's always flickering above a horse that makes his ear twitch even when he's sleeping. And he used to call himself the gadfly of Athens because it didn't matter how comfortable the place ever got in their complacency. He was going to constantly antagonize to make them see all of the things that could still be different.

[01:47:22] It doesn't matter how comfortable we get in our lifestyle. People need challenged, a constant challenge of, why are you doing this? But why are you doing this? And laughingly, we look back in our past. I'm like, "I was totally that kid." But why? But why? but why?

[01:47:37] And I remember as a kid being told, because sometimes it's just like that. That was never okay for me. I needed to ask why, because I want to reverse engineer and unpack and take it apart because I want to know what's going on there.

[01:47:48] And when it comes to something so substantial as our health, you get one shot here. And the consequences are pretty permanent. What is it we're doing? How do we continue? How do voices like yours just continue to challenge people? Continue to ask the questions.

[01:48:07] As you said, 10 years go by, you can only teach today's knowledge. 10 years from now, we're probably going to both be looking back at this podcast going, "What in the hell were we even thinking back then?" Probably not entirely. But the truth of the matter is we're going to just have 10 more years’ worth of knowledge and experience and 10 more years of science and 10 more years of learning and 10 more years of health issues and 10 more years of processed foods.

[01:48:30] Luke: 10 more years of unlearning too.

[01:48:32] Mark: 10 more years of unlearning.

[01:48:35] Luke: That's why I like to always talk about holding ideas loosely, because there might be something about which I'm so certain today. I'm so committed to it. And that's going to actually trap me in something that could be either erroneous or just a limited point of view. So being open-minded, to me, it's like a saloon door. It swings both ways.

[01:48:56] I can let new ideas in. That's important, to be receptive and open-minded. But part of the open mind that's so critical to me and my own experience is being willing to let go of things that I was grasping and clinging to that might not even be wholly wrong, but there's more to the story. And I think obviously you and I share, I want to know as much of the whole story as possible and be willing to let go of whatever isn't serving me.

[01:49:24] Mark: Yes.

[01:49:25] Luke: God damn. I had no idea this is going to be such a deep and beautiful conversation. All right. So I want to let people know, if you want to check out Zona, here's what you do. Go to zona.com/lukestorey, and holy shit, we got a LUKE-- Usually it's like a LUKE10, LUKE20. We're going LUKE100.

[01:49:42] Mark: That's a dollar amount, not a percentage.

[01:49:44] Luke: Yeah, no, it's 100 bucks. Yeah, yeah, 100 bucks.

[01:49:46] Mark: It's 100 bucks.

[01:49:47] Luke: LUKE100. It's free.

[01:49:48] Mark: Exactly. Luke, 100% off.

[01:49:51] Luke: zona.com/lukestorey. The code is LUKE100, and you save $100 off the Zona Plus. All right. Before we bounce, I've got two things. One is, talk to me about the protocol on-- because you do two sets of two minutes on each hands. Did I get that right?

[01:50:06] Mark: Yeah. From the start of when you push the button to when you're done is about 11 and a half minutes.

[01:50:11] Luke: Okay. Oh, that long.

[01:50:12] Mark: 11 and a half minutes a day.

[01:50:12] Luke: I haven't been doing it long enough. No wonder I'm not feeling. [Inaudible].

[01:50:16] Mark: 11 and a half minutes a day is what it takes to do the protocol.

[01:50:19] Luke: And you do it in one sitting.

[01:50:21] Mark: Yeah, you're going to do it all at the same time.

[01:50:23] Luke: And what's the recommendation on terms of how often to do it? Is this like a lifetime thing where you're like, "Cool, I'm going to do this until I'm 130?"

[01:50:31] Mark: You can't do it too much. It's like a treadmill. You're not going to over treadmill.

[01:50:36] Luke: There's no diminishing return.

[01:50:37] Mark: There's not necessarily a diminishing return because all you're doing is trying to go back to normal. So you can't become extra normal. You're just going to go back to normal. The benefit of doing this is like, is somebody going to do it for the rest of their life? Sure. I suppose.

[01:50:52] If I got to my ideal weight, would I quit working out? No, because if I got to my ideal weight and then quit working out, I'd gain weight and then I would get back to getting myself back to my ideal weight again. Same thing here. If you stop doing it, you're going to notice a change because you stopped exercising.

[01:51:12] How do you solve for not exercising? Start exercising again. It's that easy. It's not that big of a deal. The benefit is for people who live on medications specifically, if you miss a day, you notice. Things start to go haywire. Using something like this and doing isometrics is actually reprogramming your body.

[01:51:33] Your body's not going to go into haywire because you didn't do it one day. And you don't have to do it every day. And you don't have to do it consistently for the rest of your life. Most people do it for 6, 8, 4 weeks, somewhere along those lines. They start to see the benefit. They continue doing it for a while. They go on vacation. They forget it at home.

[01:51:51] Doesn't matter because ultimately things are probably running pretty normal at this point. Over the course of a few months, things start to move around again. They're like, "Oh, where did I put that thing? They bring it back out. They use it again. And people ask questions like, what if it breaks. What is the warranty? And it's like the warranty is a, we call it a two-year warranty, but literally, it's constructed so that you can put it in your hand and crush it every day. Pretty hard to break.

[01:52:19] Luke: Yeah.

[01:52:19] Mark: We get them broken because someone cracked the screen or something like that. We don't get them broken because you squeezed too hard, I assure you. The reality is it's a good habit. Our clinical trials are all based on using it only three times a week. We tell people to use it five times per week simply because if I tell you to do it five times, you'll probably get three in.

[01:52:43] Luke: That's what I was getting at. I'm already thinking when I asked the question, like, what's the bare minimum I can do?

[01:52:48] Mark: Exactly. Not that it's hard, but it's like you got to sometimes choose between your different practices.

[01:52:54] Mark: You're in a hurry. I try to do it in the morning, but I woke up late today.

[01:52:58] Luke: It's unfortunate in my case that I don't drive a lot, as I was telling you earlier. Because I feel like once you got the hang of it, it'd probably be good just to keep it in your center console and on your commute, you're already sitting there anyway. Could you do it driving or is it--

[01:53:11] Mark: You could.

[01:53:12] Luke: Is it too distracting?

[01:53:13] Mark: I'm not going to recommend that--

[01:53:14] Luke: Because you have to look at the screen when it beeps to see if it's too much or too little you're squeezing.

[01:53:19] Mark: Yeah. I don't know that I'd recommend it during driving for that reason.

[01:53:22] Luke: I haven't tried that. I'm always thinking of ways I can stack. It's like if there's the 20-minute thing, whatever it is, that's good for me, I'm going to do the four, 20-minute things all at once if I can. So I'm trying to think--

[01:53:37] Mark: Mine is, when I'm reading my email in the morning.

[01:53:38] Luke: Huh, what can I do while I'm doing that 11 minutes?

[01:53:40] Mark: Yeah. Mines when I'm reading my email in the morning because I can read an email and do it even if I'm not typing a reply. Because most of the emails I get, I'm reading and deleting. I'm going to do that if I'm actively doing it. Some people do it. It's the reading the newspaper. It's the having the coffee. They're sitting outside for a couple of minutes getting their sunlight before the day begins.

[01:53:59] Luke: Oh, that's a good idea.

[01:53:59] Mark: It's that active meditation time because, for some people who tend to-- there are some of us who don't relax by just clearing our minds of all things. I don't know that I've ever told you I've ever cleared my mind. And I can tell you that I don't believe that that's ever happened.

[01:54:18] I used to practice yoga quite a bit, and it was probably the most thinking I ever did in a week. Because there was nothing else to distract me, so I was stuck in a yoga pose with my own thoughts. But for some people, that active meditation is actually what deescalates them.

[01:54:32] It actually is what creates that vagal response, if you will. That vagal conditioning doesn't happen through clearing your mind. And it's like a lot of it is Zona that moves you from that sympathetic, parasympathetic, sympathetic, parasympathetic, sympathetic, parasympathetic. It's like the back and forth of using it, then taking the minute between exercises, then doing it again, then taking the minute break actually helps vagal tone.

[01:54:57] Luke: Really?

[01:54:57] Mark: True. Because your body actually gets that-- if people don't know what that is, they can look it up at this point.

[01:55:02] Luke: I did a show on that recently with vagus nerve stimulation.

[01:55:06] Mark: Okay. So like Pulsetto and that kind of stuff?

[01:55:08] Luke: No. What's it called? Oh my God. How embarrassing. I use this freaking thing every day. What's it called? Oh my God. I just had a total brain fart. You put it on your throat right here. Jarrod, what's the name?

[01:55:23] Jarrod: Truvaga.

[01:55:23] Luke: Truvaga. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. It's super cool. That thing is amazing too, because it's like huge impact and it literally takes one minute.

[01:55:31] Mark: Yeah. And what it does is it downregulates your nervous system so that you can be in that rest and digest mode, that parasympathetic state more. This actually helps your body understand how to come out of it. So on a conscious level, not necessarily, but on a subconscious level, moving back and forth is an exercise for the nervous system in and of itself.

[01:55:51] Luke: That's cool. I'm glad you mentioned that because I wouldn't have even thought of that particular part of it.

[01:55:55] Mark: Yeah. Weird, right?

[01:55:55] Luke: So I think many of us that start to look into the nervous system, we think most of us are probably sympathetic too much generally. I know I'm definitely that way. But I think we have a misinterpretation of the science there that we think, "Oh, we should be super chill and parasympathetic all the time.

[01:56:13] It's like, well, how do you get anything done? So what you're speaking to is giving the body the inputs so it knows when it's time to switch back and forth and doesn't get stuck in one or the other.

[01:56:23] Mark: Yeah. Being in sympathetic nervous system is not necessarily a bad thing. It's being in the sympathetic nervous system at the appropriate times. When the lion comes up out of the jungle and starts to chase me to the field, I definitely want to be in sympathetic nervous. It's a survival system that shuts down everything except the essentials.

[01:56:41] The problem is, when I'm sitting, just watching the TV at night and trying to calm down, and I'm still sitting in that heightened fight or flight mode, and my body is causing metabolic dysfunction because my digestive system thinks that we're in a state of emergency, so it's not even going to touch the food, that's a problem. And then I go to sleep and I'm not even sleeping properly and my HRV is in nine, because whatever. Those are problems.

[01:57:11] Luke: You just described last night when I said I couldn't sleep and I had that ice cream to lull me to sleep. I was on a roll and I was like, "Dude, it's 8 o'clock. You should stop. You're not going to be able to sleep. Because if I work past 8:00, it's a wrap. I won't be able to fall asleep. 9 o'clock rolls around. It's still coming out. The muse is here.

[01:57:32] Dude, I stopped at 11:00 and I was like, "I'll just take a bunch of supplements and knock myself out." Went to bed, totally sympathetic, totally hyped, just laying there. My mind's just going on and on and on. I was like, "God, damn it. When am I going to learn?" But anyway, for the greater good. But to your point, yeah, being stuck in sympathetic is very disruptive to life.

[01:57:51] Mark: And the thing is that a lot of people don't know, but something that I love is like, we don't even have a complete understanding of how this type of stuff, and I'm pointing at the Zona and saying like, "Sure, it helps with sympathetic nervous system."

[01:58:04] Yes, isometrics will lead to regulation of blood pressure potentially, FDA. But the reality is, think of anywhere that blood flows. The secondary reason that we get people who buy this type of device on a regular is erectile dysfunction.

[01:58:22] Luke: Oh, really?

[01:58:23] Mark: Yeah. We don't talk about it all that much because--

[01:58:26] Luke: We should have started with that, dude.

[01:58:28] Mark: We started with generosity.

[01:58:31] Luke: Actually, that makes sense with the nitric oxide

[01:58:33] Mark: It's all blood flow.

[01:58:34] Luke: Yeah. That's what the Viagra and all those things work with, right?

[01:58:38] Mark: 100%.

[01:58:39] Luke: Yeah. A friend of mine took it once. That's how I know.

[01:58:42] Mark: It makes sense.

[01:58:42] Luke: I would never need it.

[01:58:44] Mark: I got a question for a friend. Asking for a friend. But the reality is the idea that if it's a blood flow problem, then fix it with blood flow. That's the answer.

[01:58:56] Luke: You know what else works for ED that I didn't know?

[01:58:58] Mark: Did your friend tell you about this?

[01:58:59] Luke: Hyperbaric chambers.

[01:59:01] Mark: Hyperbaric is amazing.

[01:59:02] Luke: And I honestly didn't have that problem, but I was doing hyperbaric for brain function--

[01:59:06] Mark: It's okay, we're safe here.

[01:59:07] Luke: Yeah. Let's just keep that between us. And then I started noticing that response and I was like, "What?" I asked my friend, Dr. Scott. Sure. I was like, "Dude, I'm getting excited in the hyperbaric there and I'm all alone." No one can join you in there. And he goes, "Oh, dude, this is the number one natural treatment for erectile dysfunction because of the blood flow."

[01:59:30] Mark: Hyperbaric is incredible for so many reasons.

[01:59:33] Luke: So many cool things out there that--

[01:59:34] Mark: So many cool things

[01:59:34] Luke: You wouldn't know about unless you are curious.

[01:59:36] Mark: Right. And then it's that accidental discovery, again.

[01:59:38] Luke: Yeah, totally.

[01:59:39] Mark: Trying to do this and then all of a sudden that, and then you start leading down that path. And I'll go back and put on my marketing hat here real quick and back to the basics and say every time I'm working with a client, particularly those that actually are here in the health and wellness space, the founders' story, I laughingly say that I can write that page on their website like a Mad Lib because the Mad Lib on so many of those stories are, I was struggling with problem-- fill in the blank, and nobody in western medicine could seem to come up with a solution.

[02:00:11] They told me-- fill in the blank. But that wasn't good enough. And I went on a journey to find out how I could solve this problem myself.

[02:00:19] Luke: Those are like those ads I get fed on YouTube.

[02:00:23] Mark: Yeah, totally. Like I said--

[02:00:26] Luke: I'm like, "Who falls for these?" And every once in a while I'm like, "Goddammit, I do." I have that problem, and I click on it.

[02:00:30] Mark: And they're true. And the thing is knowing all the founder stories. And it's like I told you. I know most of your guests, and they're telling the truth. It really is their story and it's their passion. And it's their passion because they had a scarring issue and they needed skincare. They had a mineral deficiency. All of the things, all are cool.

[02:00:51] Luke: Dude, I just thought of a genius marketing idea in terms of the Zona and erectile dysfunction. I know you don't market it toward that, but you could, and you could call it the Boner Zona

[02:01:01] Mark: The Boner Zona.

[02:01:03] Luke: Get into the Boner Zona.

[02:01:04] Mark: Somebody on my team listening, please go check for the url bonerzona.com.

[02:01:09] Luke: All right, dude. We got to get out of here. I got one last three-part question for you. Who have been three teachers or teachings in general, Philosophies, books, people that have influenced your life in a positive way?

[02:01:21] Mark: See, you're back to generosity on me. I like it. I like it. This is a mentorship moment. Wow, this is tough because anybody I put in there is going to have to compare because obviously, I've got to put Jesus in there. That's no brainer right at the top.

[02:01:35] But if I were to pick three people who were non deities, I'm going to say, I had a mentor one time professionally who challenged everything I ever believed. His name was Neil [Inaudible]. And he was a COO of a company I worked for years ago, and he was Master Yoda.

[02:01:53] And I absolutely loved that because he was someone I knew who spoke life and at the same time challenged every single thing I ever thought. I'm going to say that I love the inspiration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I think is--

[02:02:09] Luke: Mm. Not familiar.

[02:02:10] Mark: oh, really? You've never heard of Bonhoeffer?

[02:02:12] Luke: No.

[02:02:13] Mark: Oh. He actually was killed in a Nazi concentration camp, but I want you to look up his stuff. He was an incredible human being

[02:02:19] Luke: Someone will, because it'll be in the show notes at lukestorey.com/zona.

[02:02:23] Mark: Funny enough, I just heard that there was a movie that came out about him. Do you know the name of that movie, off camera? I think it's called Bonhoeffer, but incredible. There's an author by the name of Eric Metaxas who talks about him. And I'm going to recommend to you because in the book, Radical Generosity, I actually talk about some of his life.

[02:02:42] Luke: Oh, cool.

[02:02:43] Mark: And I'm going to go crazy and say that those people, one is a person I really know. Another one is someone who threw his tenacity and fight, but I'm going to actually end with, I'm going to say, Mother Teresa. And the reason I'm going to say that is because I don't understand her because I don't think we could be any different in terms of human beings. And I love learning from and challenging myself with people who are different from me.

[02:03:11] Luke: Beautiful.

[02:03:12] Mark: There you go.

[02:03:12] Luke: Awesome, man. Thanks for joining me today.

[02:03:14] Mark: Appreciate it, buddy.