Navigating Narcissism and Wellness: Insights from Richard Blake on Michael Donovan's pod

Curious about how biohacking can transform your wellness routine? Join us as Dr. Richard L. Blake shares his insights from his recent guest appearance on Michael Donovan's podcast. We promise you'll walk away with actionable tips on optimizing your health, from the power of red light therapy to the benefits of conscious connected breathing (CCB). Richard also opens up about his breathwork study and his most-read Medium article on the unexpected links between ayahuasca and narcissism.

Ever wondered how to balance cutting-edge biohacking tools with natural wellness practices? Listen in as we explore the latest trends, including the practicality of portable devices like the Flex Beam for red light therapy and the contrasting simplicity of grounding. I, Andy Esam, reveal my travel-friendly biohacking routine and share our thoughts on the efficacy of oxygen bars and the intriguing potential of ozone therapy. We break down the essentials for a well-rounded wellness regimen, integrating both high-tech solutions and time-honored natural methods.

Discover the transformative power of conscious connected breathing and other breathwork techniques. Richard recounts his journey from fitness modeling to studying psychotherapy, highlighting how breathwork has revolutionized his approach to mental health. We delve into different methods like the Wim Hof technique and pranayama, and explain how CCB can facilitate deep emotional healing and even mystical experiences. Tune in for an episode rich with scientific insights, practical advice, and spiritual wisdom—all aimed at enhancing your holistic health.

Find us on Instagram
Richard @The_Breath_Geek
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_gOq4wzRjwkwdjYycAeng
Webiste - www.TheBreathGeek.com
Please leave us a review, like and subscribe.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Laughing Through the Pain and Navigating Wellness with me, andy Esam, my co-host, dr Richard L Blake, and today we're trying a slightly new formula. Or to put it another way, rich has been cheating on me because he's gone on Michael Donovan's podcast, who is a physician and is focusing on people who have transitioned, so changed their life path, if you like, and we're going to listen to that, but before we do, I'd just like to ask you a couple of questions. Was it? Do you ever get worried going on someone else's podcast because you can't really dictate the flow?

Speaker 2: 0:36

Yeah, a little bit. I think most podcasters are pretty civil. There is that whole civility porn thing. People criticise podcasters for everyone's polite and they avoid a lot of controversy. I think we try and court a bit of controversy here, which is why we're so popular and see that podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:55

Well, yeah, it does. It does feel a bit disingenuous to get someone on your podcast beg, borrow and steal, get them to carve out an hour and a half, two hours in their diary and then completely going on. So I think it's probably nice to be on the side of positivity and kindness.

Speaker 2: 1:10

Yeah yeah, well, yeah, I think we don't want to ambush people. I think we we've said we are going to ask some controversial questions, but when we do, we're going to give people a chance to prepare them and ask them. It's okay, but yeah. So, yeah, I was on michael donovan's podcast. So michael is someone I met at the biohacking conference. He is releasing his own podcast. He's a physician, so he's done a lot of work with. He worked for the us government and now he's transitioning to being likea performance coach and a podcaster. So, um, he I'm appearing on on his podcast and you're going to hear that now and then in a few months, we we got him booked in come on laughing through the pain so we can interview him about himself fantastic, did you?

Speaker 1: 1:52

did you get any questions you were not expecting?

Speaker 2: 1:54

perhaps I got a few. Yeah, like eventually with the magic of editing I was able to edit out of the long corded. But yeah, he asked me a few quick fire questions about my take on nutrition, my take, my favorite book and then my favorite biohack, those types of things. Then we got more into the meat of psychology, my phd. We talk a little bit about my breath work study. We talk a little bit about narcissistic personality disorder, because that's a book I just read and it's I've mentioned this piece I wrote for medium. That's the most, the most red thing I've ever written about ayahuasca and narcissistic personality disorder. You'll hear a little bit more about narcissism and, um, why that's relevant to everyone, because I think people, just some people just think narcissists is it's just the boy he fell in love with it for reflection.

Speaker 1: 2:39

But it's much more deep, it's very complex well, let's perhaps dive straight into it and then afterwards I'm going to ask you about anything you might have learned and key takeaways all right, here we go.

Speaker 2: 2:51

Enjoy, listener. Don't enjoy too much because I'm not in it. Hey, listener, quick favor, quick favor. Do you like my steven bartlett impression there? Do you know? What would really help us is if you could share this podcast with someone you love, if you think it's good, and if you don't think it's good, share it with someone you don't love. Either way, we get more listeners, which is good for us and will be good for you in the long run, because of karma and going to heaven, maybe. So, yeah, maybe. Share that you are listening to it. Share on Instagram, take a screenshot of our episode and put it out there and maybe we'll give you a shout out as well, richard, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3: 3:33

Thanks a lot, michael. Thanks for having me, Absolutely so. I'd like to start off with three things. The first is an intention. So what would make this conversation a win for you?

Speaker 2: 3:43

Oh, good one. Yeah, I think, getting across my message, getting something interesting across to my audience and or your audience and, yeah, having them learn something they didn't know and think that was worth listening to awesome.

Speaker 3: 3:59

The second one is a fun question what's your walkout song or your walk-in song?

Speaker 2: 4:06

Ooh, the first thing that pops into my head for some reason is I'm a real American, the Hulk Hogan one, but I'm not a real American. But I feel like maybe one day I'll get citizenship and I can walk out to I'm a real American. But until then, I don't know, maybe Englishman in New York by Sting is a bit more appropriate. That's actually what came to mind when you said that.

Speaker 3: 4:22

So till then, I don't know, maybe englishman in new york by by sting is a bit more appropriate. That's actually what came to mind when you said that. So that's awesome, all right. And then I like to do some like short answer, rapid fire questions. So the few of them are like a this or that.

Speaker 2: 4:33

So meditation or breath work oh, breath work all day long. Obviously I'm a breath worker and that hooberman study showed that breath work was more effective than meditation for reducing anxiety.

Speaker 3: 4:44

So there we go awesome morning routine or evening ritual lost us both, surely?

Speaker 2: 4:51

yeah, you can't have a good evening routine that doesn't start in the morning. Circadian rhythm starts first thing in the morning, so getting that sunlight in your eyes is a part of your evening routine, effectively. Beautiful cold plunge or sauna, can we again? Can we not do both, am I not both? I have both? Yeah, I love both. But okay, from the perspective of someone new to biohacking and wellness, then I'll answer that question. What would I spend money on? First, probably the cold plunge, because it's cheaper and probably requires less time. You can get results in just two minutes. Maybe a month, once a month you have to maintain it.

Speaker 2: 5:27

I have the ice barrel. I think the ice barrel is the is the best intro level product. One because it's cheap and two because I much prefer the position of that squat compared to the bathtubs. I've never been comfortable in an ice bath, like obviously you're uncomfortable because of the temperature, but at the in an ice bath, like obviously you're uncomfortable because of the temperature, but at the same time it's just like you're holding yourself in place. You don't want to sink any lower. You may start if you try to relax, surrender, you'll just sink completely underwater and you don't want that, whereas the ice barrel or any barrel, you can just be in that squat and just completely let go and just try and focus on the focus on your breath and overcoming that pain and surrendering to the cold awesome plant-based or omnivore diet omnivore yes, omnivore I had.

Speaker 2: 6:14

Most of the people I expect are on your show will prefer the omnivorous diet and think that meat is better. I think it's dangerous when you get into an ideology I think a lot of people are becoming. They believe that veganism is the way to go or they believe carnivore is the way to go, when they shouldn't really be believing things. They should be thinking about things critically. And the problem is with all these diets is there's research on both sides. There's research showing that you know, processed meat is sort of meat is bad for you. I did just see a study come out a few days ago that showed that both people who are eating processed and non-processed meat had worse biomarkers of cardiovascular health. So that really got me thinking like, how bad is is meat? Obviously not obviously, but I certainly think that eating meat is a part of a nutritious diet and if you go completely vegan, the cons outweigh the pros. But I'm also.

Speaker 2: 7:10

I also had the debate the other day with someone about lab-grown meat and whether or not I would eat lab-grown meat because that takes away the suffering and some people just no way would I eat lab-grown meat. That's disgusting. You don't know what it's going to do to you. But my perspective is well, once they've done enough research to show it is identical to regular meat and it can be a part of a healthy diet and there are no side effects to it, then yeah, I probably would eat that meat because it would create less suffering. And I think then there would come a point where you would say there's no good argument for slaughtering animals when you can just get it from lab-grown meat. But I think there's a lot more research to be done on that topic before anyone can really say anything definitively.

Speaker 3: 7:55

Yeah, and a thought that came to mind when you said that is, when we talk about an alternative right to meat, to dairy milk and things like that, right, we're comparing it to what the the mean like the average thing, because quality goes out the window. Right, it's just this nebulous thing of meat right, which there's a we know from nutrition science research that there's a difference in. You can sometimes visually even see it without even testing it and whatnot, but between there truly is between grass-fed and free-range and organic and these kinds of things versus those that are corn-fed and grain-fed and don't move at all right, and the hormone content and things like that don't move at all right, and the hormone content and things like that. So I wonder if we'll, when we have lab-grown meat, if we'll have those variations of it and it's this is the, the, the one that was grown in this lab, and so that's inferior, if we'll have this hierarchy of meat when it's lab-grown or if it'll even the playing field yeah, yeah, I think that's really interesting.

Speaker 2: 9:02

Yeah, I think we need to to niche down in the research. Yes, this study I looked at the other day was processed meat versus regular meat. But yeah, what kind of meat is that? You know, factory farm chicken, battery hens, that kind of thing ends that live in terrible conditions. Or is it regeneratively grown pasture, raised grass, fed grass, finished meat? We really need to test those hypotheses further to make these conclusions.

Speaker 3: 9:29

Yeah, nutrition science is super complex, a lot more than I think we appreciate. But anyway, we'll move on. What's your go-to biohacking tool?

Speaker 2: 9:39

Okay, I guess I can't say sauna or ice bath or breathwork. I probably should say breathwork. I did just do my PhD in it. But if I had to come up with another one red light, I think, is popping into my mind right now.

Speaker 2: 9:55

At home I have the big juice panels, so I have two full body one and that's a big part of my morning routine. I go in front of that, I do some neurofeedback with the Sense AI and take some methylene blue just before that, to biohack my mitochondria, as they might say, and whilst I'm traveling I'm on the road. At the moment I have the Flex Bean, so that's one of the few biohacks I can take on the road. I can't take my ice bath on the road with me the Flex Bean, it just goes in my suitcase and I, just when I do my doing oxygen advantage breath work in the morning. That's part of my morning routine and I just wrap that around my my elbow where I've got a little sprain, and it's just so easy. I just sit there, do the breath work and let the red light do its job.

Speaker 3: 10:38

Awesome so what's a wellness trend or a biohacking tool that you think is overrated?

Speaker 2: 10:44

it's overrated. What have I wasted the most? And the charm, a lot of things that are rated. Well. There was that oxygen baths, I don't know. Oxygen, yeah, literally bars.

Speaker 2: 10:56

I remember going to. I think it was like reading or leeds festival, like a music festival in the uk many years ago, and they were advertising these bars where you would sit like a bar of an alcohol barb. Into the alcohol you would have a cannula they would go up your nose of just regular oxygen and the idea was, yeah, if you breathe in more oxygen you get, you oxygenate your cells. But now, as I've learned more about breathwork and hyperbaric oxygen therapy one you have the Bohr effect. You cannot carry, the blood, cannot carry more oxygen or release oxygen to the cells without the presence of carbon dioxide. So just simply putting more oxygen into the system isn't going to have an effect. Plus, I think it's the Thomas effect I may have to chat GBT that under oxygen, under pressure, the blood can carry more oxygen. So that's why hyperbaric oxygen is is so effective is because that pressure means the blood carries more oxygen, then that oxygen gets released in cells and that oxygen can be used for whatever it needs to be.

Speaker 3: 11:57

So yeah, oxygen without pressure, I would say is a biohack that probably doesn't work while we're talking about oxygen, let's talk about a variation of oxygen, which is ozone, because that was another thing that around probably that same time, I feel like 10 to 15 years ago, there was a big push and I haven't heard a lot about it recently. We were also talking about radical oxygen species and those kinds of things a lot more in that time period, at least in in graduate school for me. So have you had any experience with the ozone?

Speaker 2: 12:33

I'm sure you do I do, actually, and conversely, I find that oxygen is, or ozone is, something that's becoming more trendy. It's something I hadn't heard about it for a while, but over the last couple of years I have been hearing more about oxygen and where we met the biohacking conference, I tried oxygen and I think it was the oxygen. Might have been a cannula, it might have been up the nose. It's something I've been looking into. I have something I haven't spent the money on yet because I'm still unsure of its benefits. I know it's supposed to be very good for. Know it's supposed to be very good for cleaning. It's supposed to be very good for cleaning swimming pools.

Speaker 2: 13:07

If I've had a swimming pool, I'd probably look into ozonation or hot tubs and cleaning around the house as well. I've heard it's difficult to Well one. You don't want to breathe it in because it creates a lot of reactive oxygen species. As you mentioned a lung, do not have a high antioxidant capacity, so breathing ozone is very bad. So maybe I didn't do the cannula of ozone because I would have been breathing into the lungs and I and I'm just saying that was bad can't remember what I did. I think in.

Speaker 3: 13:36

Yeah, I think in those it's oh right, right, right and it's bubbled in water that's circulated and it's a little more complex. And I first did it like a decade ago I had a friend who was I guess maybe he was on the leading edge of it. He was doing it more for people that go into festivals and Burning man and those kinds of things.

Speaker 2: 14:03

Well, yeah, one of the things that I think makes it interesting, the cause of vaginal and rectal insulfation, the delivery method. I think well, one, supposedly two of the best ways to get it vaginally and rectally, and I think that catches headlines. That makes it popular. People probably giggle vaginal rectal insulfation, but I'm not against that kind of thing. Vaginal rectal insufflation, um but um, I'm not against that kind of thing. I plan to do a parasite cleanse. Coming up, I'm going to be doing a lot of coffee enemas, which is obviously rectally administered. So, yeah, I feel like that sometimes. I think with biohacking it's like the weirder it is, the more people think it's really useful. So, being in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, people think, oh yeah, you're just like michael jackson. He's one of the weirdest people around or was around. This must be really powerful and maybe for the oxygen, ozone and sulfation reptile people. That grabs a lot of headlines in podcasts. But does that mean it's any more effective than simply taking your shoes off and standing in the grass and grounding up? I don't know.

Speaker 3: 15:07

Right, right, right right, well. Well, a couple more quick questions and then we'll really dive in. What's it? What's the most impactful book or uh podcast you've recently listened to, I think?

Speaker 2: 15:15

about this fuck. I read a lot of books and a lot of them just go in and out uh, in one ear, out the other. I guess this is a specific one. But romani de vasula, it's not you, and she was just on stephen bartlett's diary of a ceo podcast and she is a expert in narcissistic personality disorder and I'd watched a lot of her youtube.

Speaker 2: 15:39

Many years ago I wrote a paper on can ayahuasca cure narcissistic personality disorder? Because it's supposedly the the hardest thing to cure narcissism much harder than than other things. Because, well, one narcissist will never go to therapy and when they do go into therapy they don't stay long enough for a proper diagnosis. And well, the hypothesis of how npd narcissistic personality disorder develops is it's trauma and their personality is just a shell protecting them from this wounded individual. And you can never get through that shell. But supposedly ayahuasca can get through that shell and, yeah, that's probably one of the most certainly the most impactful thing I've ever written. It's gotten many thousands of views and reads on Medium and then I finally found her book and, yeah, it really helped me to understand narcissistic personality disorder and how to deal with it, how to what it's like to be in a relationship with someone, have a family member or a lover or a friend or a boss, because npd is out there and not. It's not often, it's not full-blown narcissistic personality disorder, it's just people with highly narcissistic traits. And yeah, things to say about narcissism.

Speaker 2: 16:48

I think some people just think you know narcissists write the Greek myth, the boy who fell in love with his reflection. And people misconceive or misperceive what narcissistic personalities are. They don't necessarily love themselves, they just think they're more important than others. They just think that their needs matter more than other people. And they can be very manipulative. Have lots of gaslighting, lots of games, silent treatment, hanging up phones, that kind of thing, and you really make you doubt your existence. That's what gaslighting can do, why it's so cruel if people really start to doubt themselves. But when you read a book like dr dervasula's it, it can be very soothing to be like oh no, I'm not crazy, this person was doing these things. It's written here in this text book and all the people around them.

Speaker 2: 17:33

Narcissists often have a lot of enablers. You can see. Oh yeah, when someone says to you you're just too sensitive, it's not that you're the victim of narcissistic abuse, it's your fault for being too sensitive. You've got it written in that book. You're like oh yeah, see, I didn't think it was because I was too sensitive. I think it was because I was being mistreated by by this person, by this boss, by this, whoever it may be in your life. So for that, it was for me. It really impacted me because it was just like, wow, I'm not crazy, thank god, awesome awesome.

Speaker 3: 18:00

So, as you said, we met at a biohacking conference. I know you just finished your PhD in breathwork, but I can tell by that last response that was just what book have you read recently that you have a strong foundation in psychology and in the mind and I wonder if you could talk about that. And I think I always like to back things up to the fundamentals and the foundations and the first principles and I think really establishing that enriches and sometimes clarifies the other things. And so could you talk first about your background in education and just your story, your journey, before we dive into the breathwork and the most recent kinds of things that you've been doing?

Speaker 2: 18:52

Yeah, so I started my undergraduate at the University of Leeds in history, then did a master's at Reading University in real estate and then, yeah, I worked for five years as a chartered surveyor, as we would call them in the UK, and then, whilst I was doing that, I was fitness modeling, so I was trying to be in well, I was in mental health and I was got an agent, I was doing photo shoots and I developed an eating disorder because that extreme dieting brought out this eating disorder. I don't think when some people be like I remember speaking to someone about tracking with my fitness pal and I was, I track a lot at that time and I still track now. But someone said to me oh, my, my family member did my fitness pal and it gave them an eating disorder. And I was like you may not give them an eating disorder and they have revealed an eating disorder, but I don't think it's the direct cause. And, yeah, then for me, the fitness modeling, the trying to get down to five percent body fat, the extreme measures I had to take to do that, revealed an eating disorder in me. And yeah, during that time I was working as a child at spare batting eating disorder, learning a lot about nutrition and helping friends. A lot of friends would reach out to me and be like, hey, can you write me, write me a workout plan, hey, can you write me a nutrition plan, those types of things, and I would just do that for fun. And then I realized this is a lot more fun than being surveying, valuing commercial real estate like industrial warehouses in the worst parts of London, quite literally.

Speaker 2: 20:18

So I pivoted to psychology and nutrition. I started in nutrition at University of Westminsterminster. I did like a one-year foundation when I was certain nutrition is not quite my thing. I think it's psychology. So then I went to regent university, london to study psychotherapy and it was during that time that I discovered conscious connected breathing. So when I say I'm a breath worker, yeah, I really teach conscious connected breath work, which is the type of breath work that's akin to a psychedelic ceremony. It's like a healing thing. It's not necessarily like you're stressed, you're at work and you wouldn't do conscious connected breathing if you're stressed at work. This is like you do it deliberately in a ceremony with facilitators. It's a very tricky technique and it has the the habit of emotional expression for a variety of reasons. So people you know, have these emotional releases and often mystical experiences as well.

Speaker 2: 21:11

So whilst I think talk-based psychotherapy is is wonderful for many people, it is not effective for a lot of people, I think, especially for men. It's not as effective as it is for women, and I think there needs to be a lot more research done in that area to see I actually yeah, women it really does help them reduce their cortisol levels and they feel better after it, whereas for men supposedly there's the work of john gray and a guy who was on my podcast called brian park when men have high stress, they have high cortisol. Talking about their problems actually doesn't bring down their cortisol and cortisol has an in-birth relationship to testosterone. So when cortisol is high, testosterone can't be high. So what men need to do is go and raise their testosterone and then, once their testosterone is back at normal, healthy levels, they can then go into processing. They can then go into talking about those things.

Speaker 2: 22:04

And, yeah, I think breath work is another thing that is super effective for men, and during my psychotherapy training I discovered, okay, only 48 percent of people respond to cbt for anxiety and of those 48 percent of people, 49 percent relapse within a matter of months. So maybe it's only you know 25 percent of people really get anything long lasting for those things. Some people will criticize that and say, well, cbt is not the best method of psychotherapy and other things. Fair enough.

Speaker 2: 22:33

My point was I discovered breathwork it really helped me with my eating disorder and I just discovered there was no research on it, or very little research, and on the research that had been done just wasn't really rigorous enough. There was a lot of pilot studies, a lot of small sample sizes, a lot of studies without control groups. So I was like right, I'm gonna do something about this and I packed my bags and left london and moved to california and transferred onto a phd program at cis california institute of integral studies, where the founder of conscious connected breathwork and stanislav groff was a professor back in the day. So, yeah, so my phd is not in breathwork, my phd is in transpersonal psychology, but I did my research in breathwork. I conducted the largest ever randomized control trial on conscious connected breathing. So that's me, just finished, that I'm still in the publishing process. I'm probably going to publish, or hoping to publish, three papers that came from my study. And yeah, now that's next awesome.

Speaker 3: 23:36

Well, there's lots to dive in there. I was just having a conversation earlier this week about psychedelics and those kinds of experiences and therapies and when someone anecdotally said that they had a family member who was alcoholic and had one ketamine treatment and no longer had interest in alcohol. And I think it's interesting when we anecdotally or we colloquially say, oh it changed my mind about that, right, like we change the way that we think about something. But these kinds of things like psychedelics and breathwork, and especially in the ceremonial way that you're describing it, can literally change our brain, change our mind. So I'm not super familiar with conscious, connected breath work and so how do you define and explain the concept of that more ceremonial to someone that's unfamiliar with the practice?

Speaker 2: 24:34

yeah. So there's a lot of different types of breath work. I don't know most people will think I don't know what most people think. Probably the most famous one is wim hof breath work which is is is tumo, it's an ancient buddhist technique of hyperventilation and then breath retention. Intermittent hypoxia is one way of saying it. That's not what we did in my study. The other one when people hear I'm a breath worker, they think they I'm going to teach them how to breathe. I just at rest, functional breathing, which is more in the realm of the oxygen advantage, the pateko method and patrick mckeown, which I also teach. And, yeah, I, I love and I do that. That's what I do in the morning. At the moment I'm working on carbon dioxide tolerance and then other people think of pranayama, people think of yogic breathwork, like that, the lion's breath and things that you might do in yoga. All wonderful, all have all been different benefits.

Speaker 2: 25:24

I do think conscious, connected breathing is the most powerful, hence why I did my study in it. So conscious, connected breathing, as I say you would do it in, you do it lying down because it really does alter your consciousness and they've shown that. Put people in fmris and in eegs quantitative electroencephalograms and shown that conscious connected breathing changes, brain waves and cerebral hemodynamics, which means blood flow in the brain, by as much as a moderate dose of psilocybin mushrooms. So it really is doing things in the brain. It's not just a placebo and so, yeah, the way it would work is you would probably go for a ceremony. Most people do it as a group also do it teach it online. My study was online. It was the first one to be done online and showed that it was just as effective in person. The reason I did that was because of the pandemic, because where I designed my study we were still really in lockdown. So, yeah, the way it happens is there's a teacher. You need someone to teach you this technique.

Speaker 2: 26:20

It is quite complicated, it's not relaxing at all. It's quite effortful. So you're inhaling and exhaling through the mouth and you're breathing more than normal. You're not really hyperventilating. Some people hear the word hyperventilation. They go terrible. No, well, chronic and acute hyperventilation, yes, probably quite bad for you. Lots of problems with that.

Speaker 2: 26:40

This is voluntary hyperventilation. It's different, it's fine. It doesn't have any side effects that we've found so far. So there's this voluntary over breathing. Some people prefer to call it over breathing. So it is breathing nor more than normal and then you're doing a much shorter inhale than your inhale and yeah, that's very stimulating, it's activating the sympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system and it can be quite confronting. It can be quite challenging.

Speaker 2: 27:04

So it's really hard to do it on your own and that's why you doing in a group is helpful for that sort of social contagion. That's that effect of other people are doing it, so I can do it as well and, plus, you normally have facilitators. So you do it lying down and normally be relaxing music, evocative music, emotional music, and you would do it. For maybe in my study we did about 40 minutes some holotropic breathwork, which is the originator of that. They do two to three hours of these ceremonies and people will have different experiences. People will have emotional releases, people will have mystical experiences, transpersonal phenomena such as feeling of one and being connected to nature or connected to the universe, or they meet deceased ancestors or they meet god or they're god and those types of things. And yeah, also people have like real euphoria as well, like feelings of just, like love and gratitude and things like that. So they're saying get high on your own supply.

Speaker 2: 28:02

It applies to breath work. So, yeah, it is like it's a therapy. Really, it's not just like meditation, which is just, you know, training. You're practicing regulating your nervous system. You're practicing bringing your mind back to a focus point. This is more like, yeah, you're going deep, you're working on your stuff and you're coming out ultimately fundamentally changed in many cases. You said it.

Speaker 3: 28:26

Something about it being equivalent to one like a dose of psilocybin. Is this usually practiced like one in one ceremony, or is it a do ayahuasca, as often you could just do one, but sometimes the ceremony is three or four days. What's the sort of typical protocol for this?

Speaker 2: 28:48

yeah. So the study design that I used was six 90 minute workshops over the course of six weeks, so one per week, and other studies have shown that it wasn't point a to point a found yeah, point a. Point a found that just one session increased hrv and reduced anxiety on the state trait anxiety scale, so just one session is enough to have an effect. We found, with six weeks, clinical and statistically significant reductions in anxiety. So people going from moderate diagnosis of anxiety down to normal levels of anxiety over six weeks. Another study by there's a Brazilian study. I can't remember the name of the authors right now, it'll come back to me but they did a clinical case study with someone with ptsd and they had eight sessions over the course of eight weeks and they found complete remission of ptsd. And there was this other study by garum. They just found that it is dose dependent, so they affected.

Speaker 2: 29:43

The more ceremonies you do, the better the results people got. However, this is where it gets complicated and the research starts to become a little bit blurry and you get into the role with the realm of instagram influencers all telling you different things that maybe one in ten are right. So you are over breathing when you are over breathing, you are affecting your carbon dioxide sensitivity. You are creating a tolerant, an intolerance to it, which is not good for your health. So doing too much over-breathing is not good. We don't want people to be doing too much. How much is too much? Someone needs to do that. Someone needs to do that research. I would love to do that research. If anyone listening is an academic and works at a university, I am looking for postdoctoral fellowships right now. I have funding as well, so please get in touch with me. Let's do some more research on this.

Speaker 2: 30:34

What I also found in my study was that 10 minutes of self-practice daily did not affect people's anxiety results. So we ran kind of two experiments. So we had the 90 minutes once per week, the big ceremonies in a group. That also gave people a 10 minute guided recording of me guiding them through 10 minutes of conscious, connected breathing, and I told people do it every day, you don't have to do it, but I encourage you to because I think that will help with integration. And then at the end of the experiment we asked people on average, how many times per day per week did you do this self-practice? And we found no difference between the people who did it every day and the people who did it zero times, so that that brings up a lot of questions is well, is it that 10 minutes is just too short? You can't activate the deeper mechanisms of conscious connected breathing with just 10 minutes. I think that's definitely a part of it. When I do sessions with people, I normally see they start to have those emotional releases after about 30 minutes of conscious connected breathing. The other thing is is there a social factor? How much?

Speaker 2: 31:39

Some people in the qualitative feedback that we took from the study said um, I really didn't get as much from the recording because I just preferred to be in the groups. When I was with the groups, I felt like we were all in it together and that helped me to motivate me, carry on and go to go to the difficult places in my life. The other one was the presence of a live facilitator. Even though I was encouraging people on this recording, people would just they. This seemed like they were able to filter that out, whereas when we were doing these live sessions over zoom, I would say to people michael, slow down your exhale. Michael, if I saw you struggling on the verge of tears, I'd be like it's okay, michael, accept this surrender. It's safe to feel my emotions and I think that's a lot more impactful for people when they have their name called out and it's a live person there.

Speaker 2: 32:25

Other hypothesis that I've put out there is that there's a type of saturation effect in that you cannot get any more benefits than 90 minutes once per week. That's all you're going to get diminishing returns. After that point it's saturated, or at least for anxiety, because we were only measuring anxiety level. Maybe, if people have, were trying to do something else, I don't know adhd or depression eating disorders, something else? Excuse me, it would have ADHD or depression eating disorders, something else, excuse me, it would have affected it. But yeah, we're not sure. Is it clear you?

Speaker 3: 32:56

mentioned the mechanism. Is it clear? What the mechanism, by which this? No, it's not clear.

Speaker 2: 33:02

Absolutely not. There's a lot of different hypotheses and I can go over a few right now. One is increased brain-derived neurotropic factor, so increased bdnf in the brain, which is over breathing. So my idea is that when you have increased bdnf, your brain is functioning better and you're able to work out what's causing your anxiety. In that heightened sense of focus you can go oh yeah, I just need to quit my job, then I'll be less anxious. Oh yeah, I just need to eat less sugar, then I'll be less anxious. Whatever it is. Mechanism number two I've probably got mechanisms of about 100.

Speaker 2: 33:36

But let's go back to mystical experiences, because they've already been mentioned. So we do know that psychedelic enabled, mystical experiences lead to changes in people, whether it's changes in depression or anxiety. We know that when someone has a mystical experience on a psychedelic, they are fundamentally altered. They go to a place and they come back different than they come back with, often healing from these many things. There was a recent study that robin carhart harris was an author of. He's a famous psychedelic researcher, but they did a study on breath work and they found that, yeah, when people had mystical experiences, they had improvements in I can't remember what measurements, but improvements in their mental health. So that's one mechanism. Ccb opens you up to mystical experiences. Who knows whether that mystical experience is generated in the brain or if you're downloading information from the universe or God is speaking to you or Allah, whoever? Whatever you believe, I don't know, but certainly we know that mystical experiences have positive effects on people's mental health.

Speaker 2: 34:40

The other thing deep diaphragmatic breathing creates lymphatic drainage. It could be that people are just detoxing. It could be these people are just so. Their bodies are just so stuck and so dunked up with toxins. Whatever. That means that the deep diaphragmatic breathing helps them detox. They, their mitochondria start functioning better, their redox starts functioning better. Their inflammation goes down. That's another mechanism inflammation. So there was a really cool study done back in 2003 with about 40 people where they measured salivary immunoglobulin A, which is a marker of inflammation, and they found that conscious, connected breathing improved markers of salivary immunoglobulin A. So it's improving immunity and reducing inflammation, and more and more research is showing that inflammation can be linked to things like anxiety and depression.

Speaker 2: 35:27

But there's a couple of mechanisms of action for you. I think the other main one actually to mention is emotional expression. Uh, so there is this hypothesis called transient hypofrontality that ryan wyman williams talk about in their 2007 paper and their idea is when you do this over breathing, you're blowing off carbon dioxide. When you blow off carbon dioxide, the boar effect means that the hemoglobin holds on to the oxygen longer and when there's less oxygen available to the brain, the prefrontal cortex get down regulated. So where the prefrontal cortex one of its jobs is to protect us from pain, whether that's emotional pain, real or imagined, it still wants to protect us.

Speaker 2: 36:10

So when you go into talk therapy and let's say you want to talk about a traumatic event, the experience, your prefrontal cortex goes yeah, I'm going to speak about it, but on the surface, but I'm not really going to feel it because that could be really painful. Whereas in conscious, connected breathing, when the down regulation that prefrontal cortex happens, you can then access that deep, painful emotion, maybe potentially the traumatic memory. So emotional expression that is another mechanism of action that makes CCB so special, because I think my personal experience, I could talk about my problems all day long, but I couldn't really feel them. I didn't know what to feel. I can describe them in perfect detail, but when I did conscious, conscious, connected breathing, that thinking part of my brain gets down, regulated and the feelings come up for processing and I can move on from there so in those mechanisms and you said you have a longer list, so I want to see if there's one that you didn't mention that might be on the list.

Speaker 3: 37:03

We talked about physiological, emotional, psychological. This is terms we use in the west in medicine and in science, right, and if we go towards, like eastern medicine, that's sometimes considered a little more woo, and talk about energy, right, not metabolism and the glycolytic cycle, not that kind of atp energy, right, but the energy of the body and where we hold things. And I wonder, when you were talking about in-person versus recording, anyone who's done a good bit of yoga, as I've done for the last 25 years we know there's just a different experience, even if it's exact same instructor, right, if we took the recording of the class versus being in a class with other people that shared energy of that space, you could just feel it sometimes walking into to a class and I wonder if you could speak at all to to that sort of perspective, that experience as a potential mechanism yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:10

So we try to create a kind of sacred space. Some people may roll their eyes at that, but the music we choose is deliberately designed to get people into that kind of that sacred space. And I think there's more research coming out showing that awe is really important for mental health. Seeing our own place in the universe, seeing how small we really are relative to the mountains, the ocean, to god, to the planets that can be really good for our mental health. And yet the music I use is often quite spiritual. It's not necessarily hymns from the choir, but I've trained it in a little apprenticeship with the shipibo tribe in peru, with ayahuasca, and we use a lot of their music. It's very spiritual. I can evoke these types of experiences, that kind of energy in people. So I think that's definitely a part of it. I also think, yeah, with energy.

Speaker 2: 39:02

So when we were at the biohacking conference, do you remember there was that machine that could measure people's chakras. Did you have a go on that, michael? Yeah, I didn't. Yeah, I didn't try it out, okay. Well, I have a friend. She was actually on my podcast recently. She's a podcaster as well and she is. She has one of those machines that can measure your chakras. I think it's called like cerulean photography or something like that and we did an experiment just her and I and her friend I think her friend actually owned this machine and we measured her chakras before and then we did a conscious connected breathing session online, with me guiding her through it and I could see her chakras.

Speaker 2: 39:43

It was like light in time they were. So the way the chakra imagery works is like you'll have a. They have chakra systems like a line from sort of your sacrum up to your head and, depending how healthy they are, if they're really like far apart, like to the side, like out to the far right or the far left, there, that means you're not centered, that means your chakras are misaligned, and we could see that her over the course of this session, her chakras started to become more aligned, those colors started to come back into the middle and, yeah, their her energy changed massively before and after this session of 40 to 45 minutes of conscious connected breathing. So something is happening with people's energy. According to this photography machine that can measure chakras, how effective it is, what crombeckax alpha it has, which is something we use in in research to to measure our instruments, I don't know, but yeah, I think that was a pretty cool thing to witness absolutely.

Speaker 3: 40:41

You mentioned spirituality and ceremonies and things. Tell us more about that, your personal experience and how you see for those that have not participated or been exposed to those kinds of things. What's the benefit? Why are you, I know, passionate and keen to do more in the future?

Speaker 2: 40:59

yeah, my spirituality flutters quite a lot. I'm, as I said, just like with nutrition. I go back and forwards on a lot of things. I don't believe in anything really. I think I'm more of a scientist. I have seen some insane things.

Speaker 2: 41:14

I've experienced some insane things from being a breathwork facilitator, but I guess, in my own practice, one of the things I found most useful is just coming to terms with the darkness inside of me and the darkness inside of other people, and I feel like that's one of the most liberating things you can do is just really experience your own pain and really experience how tragic it may be that you know we're all going to die someday and there's a very high possibility.

Speaker 2: 41:43

That's it and there's no reincarnation. And then, on top of that, you can layer things like okay, maybe there is reincarnation, maybe there is a god, maybe there is an all-loving entity that is looking out for us. But I feel like, if you're spending your whole life going, oh, I don't want to feel that pain, I don't want to, I don't want to be that sad, I don't want to be that scared you're just going to be running around like making stuff up in your head, making bad decisions, whereas, yeah, if you actually face these things and accept that they're possibilities, I feel like you'll be a lot more happy. I'm a lot less anxious now that I've done face that darkness, but yeah, that doesn't mean there's not a lot of amazing things in the world and yeah, there's light and shadow everywhere your breath work, from the ceremonies or that you've conducted, or maybe that you've participated in what's the most dramatic transformation or effect that you've witnessed through the, particularly through breath work?

Speaker 2: 42:40

yeah, well, obviously there's a lot of anecdotal stories, but I have data to show the, this amazing thing. So we use the in my study, the zoom self-rating anxiety scale, which was a questionnaire with a high convex alpha, which means it measures what it's reliably measures, what it sets out to measure, and we had some huge changes people with extreme levels of anxiety, so up in like the 70s. So I should say that the zoom self-rating anxiety scale has a. It's a score of 80 to 20 20 the minimum, the minimum, 80 to higher and, yeah, people went from like true levels of anxiety in the 70s down into sort of the 20s. And that data to me is amazing. But it's also supported by, like qualitative feedback and I have screenshotted some of these messages just being like thank you so much for putting on this study.

Speaker 2: 43:30

I cannot believe that this. I did not believe this was possible. I did not believe it was possible to feel normal. Uh, breath work is my thing. I'm going to keep doing it for the rest of my life. Where can I get more breath work? Um, so, yeah, certainly I know that it. Some people are much better off from this breath work and then other mystical experiences. Some people shared that things like I did this breath work and my deceased sister came to me. We had a conversation. It was like she was there. Can't believe how real it was. She told me I need to let go of her and I grieved her and and now I feel better about darkness. That dark cloud that hung over me for so long is gone. Thank you so much. I can't believe this just happened from me doing some breath work Wow.

Speaker 3: 44:20

Have you adopted or adapted your own wellness routine or habits through what you've learned from your PhD research?

Speaker 2: 44:32

No, not really. So I yeah, I think conscious connected breathing is it's medicine really. It's not a practice that you do every day. It's like when you're sick or you need something, you go to it. So I think it's like something you do for, let's say, three months. You do a three-month program where you do weekly sessions with a facilitator and then after that you maybe go to monthly session. So to me it's medicine. It can be overdone. As I say, it is voluntary breathing. It can affect carbon dioxide sensitivity.

Speaker 2: 45:05

So for me, saying this, I had depression, I had suicide attempts, I had anxiety. I had anxiety. I had eating disorder. I dealt with that, lived with that for the majority of my life. From about age 14 I was depressed and it wasn't until I was about 30 that I really got rid of all these things and during that time that was the majority of my life I had those conditions. I just thought this is luck, this is just what it's like. I can't't get any better and it has gotten better.

Speaker 2: 45:33

It was a lot of work, a lot of pain, a lot of struggles, but with conscious connected breathing and the help of my mentor, alan Dolan, my therapist or former therapist, simon Matthews, I was able to recover from these things and I didn't think that was possible. But I don't need that medicine. My life is great. I have other practices now that keep me going. So ice bath, sauna, exercise. I'm working on my functional breathing now. So, yeah, I still do conscious connected breathing. So I'm dealing with something quite difficult in my life emotionally right now. So I've actually been doing a little bit more conscious connected breathing, just doing ceremonies with my wife. She's also a facilitator, yeah, for me. Me it's like you do conscious connected breathing because you need something. It's like surgery.

Speaker 3: 46:16

You don't just go and have surgery for fun a lot of biohacking and one of the questions that comes to mind is is this something that ai could replace that? If these are facilitated sessions and they can be done remotely right, could ai replace this? And I think we're always looking, often looking for a technological solution that will make it easier for the either the person that's delivering that or that we can, as you said, take on the road with us and the hack in a way, and I like to think about what the future might hold, and I think oftentimes when we look at the progression of something, especially things that are trending or they grow slowly, and then there's inflection point and it just takes off and technology sometimes is the reason for that inflection point. So, a long way to getting to the question how do you see technology intersecting with these kinds of more holistic practices?

Speaker 2: 47:19

So I definitely think there's a place for AI in mental health services. I think those chat bot can be quite useful for talk-based therapy for some people. I don't think it's going to work for conscious, connected breathing, as evidenced by the fact that the 10-minute guided recording did not have the same effects as the live in-person sessions. I think I was listening to a podcast the other day but they were saying like statistically, the keys to happiness are like connection, and for connection you need physical contact and eye contact. Without those things, you don't get the oxytocin. You don't get these things and I just don't. I'm curious to know whether or not you could get oxytocin from a connection with an ai replica. Certainly not ai in its current format. Maybe if there's ai, but actually it can give hugs in the future maybe, but yeah, that may be a fair few decades off, who knows? The other thing I would say is yeah, someone said to me was a part of the studies. Now, this is amazing. It's just a shame that it's not scalable. It's just a shame that you need a human. I was like a shame for a shame that you need a human. I'm like a shame for a shame that you need a reference to anything. He's thinking financially. He's thinking how do we make this cheaper? How do we? How do you make? He was he's a friend of mine. He was thinking how do you make more money from this? Like? I'm not into the money, that's for sure, but it is scalable relative to what we've got. No, it's not as scalable as headspace or calm at those good billion dollar companies. Whereas I'm comparing this to talk-based psych, a talk-based psychotherapist, I say it's 200 for one hour and the average number of sessions you need for a breakthrough in talk-based therapy is 20 sessions. According to some research, we here had up to 25 people in a session. I had one facilitator, so we had a ratio of 1 to 13 people. So that's a lot better than one to one which you need for talk-based psychotherapy, and we got huge, large effect sizes statistical significance in reduction in anxiety in just six sessions. I don't want to compare this to cbt because it's not one of my study, but I'm going to do it anyway for the sake of your podcast. A big meta-analysis done by Kweepers showed that CBT showed mild or small effect size and, in some cases, no effect size. Compared to a placebo, this CCB showed large effect size. You can't get any larger than large. There's no extra large. Showed large effect size. You can't get any larger than large. There's no extra large. If we had, if we could have, extra large effect size, gcb would be an extra large effect size. So it is.

Speaker 2: 49:53

I think it's better than current treatment and I think it should be a part of mainstream medicine. I'm I'm, I'm in the process. I'm trying to find a way of getting this into the national health service in the uk. Health service in the uk very different to the us. The uk. There's not enough money to pay for things, so people go to their primary care physician and then they're turned away or there's like an 18 month wait list, whereas here it's yeah, good, what's your insurance? How can we rinse you for as much money as possible? So in the uk this is going to be really popular. I think it should be really popular because it's going to save costs for the government and it's going to save costs for people. And it means, as I say, you don't need just one-to-one therapist, you just need one breath worker and up to 13 people. And this is another problem. Psychotherapists are in massive shortage short supply in the US, a shortage of 8,000 psychotherapists. The uk probably similar numbers. Uh, they need a lot more psychotherapy problem there is.

Speaker 2: 50:48

Training to become a psychotherapist is really difficult. Uh, one. You need to be fairly academic. It's a master's level program. You need to be pretty rich as well. It's not very accessible for people who do not have the money to pay for an education and to pay for not be able to work for for many years. It's also pretty grueling emotionally. You have to do your own work. I think there is a place for training conscious, connected breathwork facilitators to be a starting point for people with mild anxiety, and then we free up psychiatrists and psychotherapists to deal with the more severe cases, and I think that could be a really useful solution to the mental health crisis I love that of the.

Speaker 3: 51:29

One of the challenges with therapy as well is that you need, I think, to for it to really work, you need rapport and connection with that person right, and I think there's a lot of therapists out there. We still have too few, but there's a lot out there. We still have too few, but there's a lot out there, but there's a small percentage that are really good and even small percentage that are great, and so to find a really good one who you can also develop rapport with and, if you want to be in person, who's also nearby you right, is a limiting factor for sure. So even having more of them if we had, if we were talking about physical medicine as opposed to psychological things, if you had lots of doctors but they weren't well trained or they they just were not good, that doesn't really help the the healthcare, that doesn't boost the healthcare system. So it's great to have alternatives in mental health yeah, and you are exactly right.

Speaker 2: 52:23

The evidence does show that the two predictive factors of whether or not someone is going to have a successful outcome in talk-based psychotherapy is the rapport between the therapist and the client. The other one is the motivation of the client to change. So there's that joke how many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? And you say, I don't know, just one, but the light bulb has to want to change. And that's the problem. You cannot change someone. Just one that the light bulb has to want to change, and that's the problem. You cannot change someone.

Speaker 2: 52:49

And I know a lot of psychotherapists. I know quite a few in training our family members in psychotherapy and I think a lot of people go into. Some people go into psychotherapy thinking all I need to do is just give people the therapy and they'll be healed. They won't be, they won't be sad anymore, they won't be depressed, they won't have their mental health issues or they. They work with homeless people and they're just like oh yeah, we just need to give these people the therapy and some love and they'll be fine. Unfortunately, that's not reality. I mentioned about facing the darkness of reality. Some people do not want to change and I think a lot of psychotherapists burn out because they think they can change everyone. And psychotherapists are not god, certainly not, and neither are breathwalkers, of course. And yeah, we can't fix people who don't want to be fixed, and we just have to acknowledge our own powerlessness at times I can tell anyone can tell by listening to you that you're very inquisitive and someone that asks a lot of quality questions.

Speaker 3: 53:44

so if you had a, if you ran your own lab, you have the Dr Blake laboratory at some prominent university and you have a team of graduate students or researchers working with you, what are a few questions that you would tackle when you're writing the ROI, ro one grant? What are those compelling questions that you really want answered? Fast forward a decade and it's, you know, 2034, and we look back on this and like I'm really glad you know I put that out there so that this person reached out to me and we got that funding to answer those questions.

Speaker 2: 54:21

Yeah, a lot of questions. So, yeah, I'll lift them up because because they're they are written down in my dissertation. But yeah, I'd be really interested to know how contra-connected breathing affects carbon dioxide sensitivity and whether on what's the right amount of conscious connected breathing to do, and how much functional breathing do you need to do to offset any changes in carbon dioxide tolerance from the car. The ccb on disconnected breathing, that would definitely be one. Another one is does it work for other things? Does it work for depression? Let's do a study on depression. Uh, another one is in-person breathwork better than online breathwork? I think there's a lot of like trade-offs between the two. So you know, a lot of my participants in the study were in london. So let's say they had to come into a yoga studio in central london. They go into an altered state, they meet god in this thing. Then they have to get the underground, the train back and they're crammed and they're sweaty and they have to go through that miserable experience after their mystical experience. Does that negate the the benefit they've had? Whereas when they're doing online, they do it at their own home. They can just roll over and lie down and, for an hour or two, just integrate that way. So, yeah, I'd like to see a comparison of in-person versus online.

Speaker 2: 55:36

I'm also very interested in sports as well, sports psychology so I I have have put this idea to an academic who works with professional footballers in spain. But I would be interested to know whether nasal breathing predicts success in penalty shootouts in in football, in soccer. So actually, before we came on this call, I am I've been recording every copa america and euro game and every game that has a penalty shooter. I'm looking at who's nasal breathing and who is not nasal breathing. I've only got two data points so far.

Speaker 2: 56:11

One of them is ronaldo cristiano ronaldo, arguably the most famous footballer in the world. He scored his penalty and you know what I noticed? He took a big nasal breath before he went into it. So it'd be that that's some research I'd like to know. I'd also like to see whether or not functional breathing, oxygen-advantaged dial breathing, improves markers of athleticism. So this could be with professional footballers, it could be with runners, it could be with NFL players. Does improving their carbon dioxide tolerance lead to they run further in the game? They recover quicker after games, they're less injured, they execute more because when they are really fatigued they can tolerate that carbon dioxide and they can think more clearly.

Speaker 3: 56:53

So yeah, I would like to do some research on that too I think that's a really fascinating idea and I'd love to have some other podcast guests on and talk about the this crossover between breath and sports science. And I wonder you also do crossfit sometimes, and maybe an avid crossfitter, and would you do you consciously think about breathing ever when you're doing high intensity?

Speaker 2: 57:18

work? Yeah, absolutely so. I things I do is, during training, I'll be nasal breathing as much as possible, especially in the warm-up. I will try and stay with nasal breathing as long as I can. Then, once I can't stay with nasal breathing, I'll go nasal in mouth out, and once I can't do that, I'll do mouth in mouth out.

Speaker 2: 57:37

Other things I think about is, let's say it's a workout where there's rest programmed in.

Speaker 2: 57:42

I'm thinking what's the best way to get my breath back, and that is usually nasal breathing, slowing down the heart rate as much as possible, still breathing a big breath, but I'm trying to relax myself as much as possible between sets so that I can, yeah, be ready for the next thing. So there's a lot. You can do a lot of exercises to improve carbon dioxide sensitivity, just like in the warm-up on a fan bike. You can do things like, let's say, you you're on the fan bike and you pedal normally for one minute and then you pinch your nose and you hold your breath and you see how many pedal counts you can get before you have to breathe in and this is, for most people is, three or four with that fan type thing and then you recover for a minute and then you try again and if you can get go from four pedals pedal rotations to six, six to eight, to twelve and yeah, see how long you can hold your breath for what is the advantage of that?

Speaker 3: 58:39

what's the benefit of doing something like that?

Speaker 2: 58:41

so increasing carbon dioxide sensitivity. So tolerant, so as we exercise more and more, we build up carbon dioxide. And if you are tolerant to carbon dioxide, you can effectively do more with less. So you can run longer. You can do more in an anaerobic state, so it's increasing your capacity for work and being more efficient with the energy, which oxygen is a form of energy.

Speaker 3: 59:04

You're doing more with that fuel the breath is so powerful and in so many ways, and I think we spend so much time talking about oxygen. It was I think it was the book breathe that was published a few years ago that really emphasized carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide sensitivity and things like that, which often gets overlooked. We focus so much on oxygen. If we have a few more minutes, are you good with time for a few more questions? I know another side of you. One of the many hats you wear is you fancy yourself an investor in some things. I'm joking, but you've been a successful investor in various areas and one of them that you're currently focused on, I think, is in evaluating and investing in wellness startups. Is that correct?

Speaker 2: 59:53

yeah, yeah, always looking out for the next big.

Speaker 3: 59:55

Thing yeah, so I'm interested with your scientific mind. How do you, in wearing your investor hat, from a business standpoint, evaluate startups?

Speaker 2: 1:00:08

not very scientifically, it's to be honest. I've read a lot of investors books in a lot of blogs and podcasts and things like that and I think most people just be like if anyone really thinks they they know what they're doing, you're probably lying. Most of it is luck. So I don't do too much analysis, I really just go on, feel it really is gut and intuition and I think I've got a fairly good eye for what's trends, things like that.

Speaker 2: 1:00:33

I can remember when the whoop first came out and I have family members who work with professional athletes and I was like you've got to get your team's whoops and they were like whatever. Now Cristiano Ronaldo and all these players are wearing whoops and things like like whatever. Now you know, cristiano ronaldo and all these players are wearing whoops and things like that. I should have told you all those years ago should listen through. I've probably got a lot more wrong than I have right, but um, I think I've got an eye for those types of things. So is that something that can really be taught or explained? I don't know. Am I actually very good at it? I don't know, do I?

Speaker 2: 1:01:05

I think, yeah, having an eye for a trend and then also getting a good feel for ceos. Someone can have the greatest products but then they just can't execute on that because they're not very nice people and they can't manage their staff or they things go to their head and they start spending more money on their business class flight and then research and development and things like that. So, getting a good feel for the ceo, the team, that kind of thing, is this really as far as I go? Do I like the people? Would I work with them? Would do I want to spend money on this person, because generally it's the person and then do I think what they're doing has is doing something that other people aren't? So yeah, I'm probably not the best person to teach those types of things, but there it is well it brings to mind.

Speaker 3: 1:01:49

I was just rereading the almanac of naval ravikant and he talked about four types of luck. Right, and I think you're talking about, if you say I'm lucky and investing, what you do is really gain an appreciation for recognizing trends early and evaluating the team and these kinds of things. And so what you might attribute to luck is probably, or even intuition. It's probably a lot of that work behind the scenes that you may just maybe you're a natural at doing those things, and so it becomes easy and effortless to do that, because once you're in that position, you just know, and you don't know how necessarily, but that's what comes to mind when you describe that.

Speaker 2: 1:02:34

Yeah, no, that's a great book. I read that a while ago but I don't remember that bit.

Speaker 3: 1:02:37

But maybe you're right. So, with all the amazing experiences you've had retreats and your PhD and fitness modeling and all of the things what's next? Oh?

Speaker 2: 1:02:48

good question. So more research. I'd love to do some more research, teacher trainings on breathwork. So I'm already doing teacher training, so teaching breath workers to to be breath workers. I work with alan dolan, breath guru. My wife also does some work, for that is in Spain and then most of the clients from the UK. So we travel back to work with them and regulating the breathwork industry. So this is something I'm quite passionate about. So the breathwork industry has been described by many people as a world where there are people teaching breathwork who have never had a training at all've just done breathwork and they're like this is cool, I'm going to tell everyone and start charging people. There are also many trainings that are not fit for purpose. Breathwork is incredibly powerful tool and some people just don't realize that it's the dunning-kruger effect. People do a bit of breath work and then they think they know everything. But you know, as you learn more and more you realize how little. So I am involved with a few organizations as the UK breathwork alliance is the global practitioners breathwork alliance and we're trying to raise standards of the industry, raise standards of certification processes and, yeah, also, as I say, talking.

Speaker 2: 1:04:06

Coming back to that theme of darkness and light. There are bad breath workers out there. There are people who should not be teaching breath work. There are people they are sexual abusers convicted sexual abusers who are teaching breath work and they should not be allowed to do that. And other industries that are regulated, like doctors and psychotherapy. These people would not be allowed to work, but they are allowed to work in breath work and so, yeah, more needs to be done to confront the shadows, because we can all be like, yeah, love and light and breath work is healing and people have mystical experiences, but also some people can take that power and just abuse it and we've got to be real about those things and you've got to got to do something about it.

Speaker 2: 1:04:44

Other I do my podcast. I'm growing my podcast, laughing Through the Pain, navigating Wellness, with my co-host, andy Eastsap. That is also on the agenda. Writing a book as well is on the agenda as well. Turning my dissertation into a book is also something I'm trying to do at the moment. So, yeah, quite a few things, quite, a few pans in the oven, pans on the burner nothing really concrete apart from the podcast at the moment awesome well, yeah, other than your uh podcast, what's the best way to find you?

Speaker 2: 1:05:18

yeah, so I'm on instagram. That's my most active platform. I'm at the breath geek, so that's the underscore breath underscore geek. And yeah, my, my website as well is the breath geekcom. And yeah, come check us out on the podcast as well, laughing through the pain, navigating wellness, where we are my co-host. He's not a biohacker, he's not. He has an undergraduate degree in psychology. But, like me, I met him on my real estate course. He works in commercial real estate and he's a comedy writer as well, so we have a little bit of a laugh as well. Excellent.

Speaker 3: 1:05:54

Excellent. Was there any final comments before we wrap up today? No, I think that's it. Thank you very much, michael. Thank you Absolutely. Thanks for being with me today.

Speaker 1: 1:06:05

Richard. Well, welcome back, listener. I think we can agree. That was actually very interesting, as much as it pains me to say it, given my lack of input. I thought you covered such a broad range of topics. I sometimes feel that when we're doing art we don't have enough time to get into certain things. You cover pretty much everything in the wellness space, pretty much that you're interested in anyway. But was your like key learning key?

Speaker 2: 1:06:28

learning. Well, yeah, learning about different ways of doing podcasting and quick fire questions. I think that uh kept me on my toes. Hopefully for you, andy, and the listener, that was interesting to hear me squirm a little bit and then be put on the spot. But yeah, I enjoyed meeting michael and we will learn more about him in his future podcast what's his motivation for doing it?

Speaker 1: 1:06:51

do you sense, like, what's he trying to get from the podcast?

Speaker 2: 1:06:55

probably money, just like you and me, and he just trying to make the big bucks yeah, completely disingenuous chasing money, all right okay yeah, exactly being a shill for I don't know money?

Speaker 2: 1:07:07

no, he's definitely not. No one is in podcasting for the money, that's for sure. I think he's trying to grow his practice as a coach, a performance coach, and apparently he is like an absolute beast of an athlete my friend george. When I first met him he was like oh, michael, is is really fit and way, way fitter than you there are a lot of people a lot fitter than you.

Speaker 2: 1:07:25

That's good. I've heard there are a lot of people a lot fitter than me. George does that because he's my partner and we're a partner in CrossFit, so he tries to wind me up and he's pretty good at it.

Speaker 1: 1:07:35

So fair play to him. Nice Well, yeah, I thought Michael came across really well in that as well. I thought that very knowledgeable but also very kind of focused on you, which is good. As a guest I'm at the risk of sounding too nice which we've talked about in podcasting. I'm looking forward to having him on?

Speaker 2: 1:07:53

Absolutely yes, we will look forward to having him on and maybe we'll look forward to having more guest appearances from other people and maybe Andy will go on a podcast and we'll feature that.

Speaker 1: 1:08:04

People will ask me on a podcast, but I'll do it if anyone's out there who wants me on there I'll do it.

Speaker 3: 1:08:08

What's it like?

Speaker 1: 1:08:09

being so close to richard l blake. Well, got some insight. Yeah, relentless. No, that was awesome. Well, I'm rich. Good for putting our name out as well. I heard my name check. Thanks a lot. Yeah and um, yeah, good good news for, uh, getting your knowledge out there further and wider than our podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:08:29

Sweet, all right. Well, thanks for listening to that, andy, and thanks for listening to this listener, and, yeah, we'll see you next time then, cheerio, bye, bye.