#13 Leif Harrison, Dir. Bus. Development for Elixinol

Hello listeners out there. It’s a gut check project here with your host Dr. Ken Brown. I’m Eric Rieger and of course on gut check project you check your egos at the door and nothing’s off the table. This is episode number 13. Doug brown what’s up number 13

I missed that Music Man. We actually had to travel a little bit so we missed last week. We did a rerun on that one but I love that Music I just get my little get my little groove on whenever I hit. I’m like, oh, we’re gonna have some fun today.

Yeah, you know, it’s it. You know, it reminds me of that you say you miss that music. The music that I remembered when I was younger on Thursdays was Cosby Show.

But we’re not going to be putting anything in anybody’s drinks. So it’s just me and you. It’s a

great way to open the show.

Table. Talk about

the World Cup. Oh, boy. We don’t about sweaters anymore.

It’s definitely not about sweaters. So let’s, let’s touch on that last week. We’ve been trying for two and a half years, three years to get into the Institute of Functional Medicine Show. And this year, we got our first chance to be a part of it. I would say a line being drawn to Toronto, and we were joined by Mike Logsdon, and I think the three of us unanimously decided that that not only was a great exposure for Until we connected with people that have been using altran to for a long time. And on top of that, I think that we found a lot of new fans who
just basically wanted new explanation on how our deal could fit into their practice. They love the fact that it was less expensive. It was an all natural solution for bloating. And then of course in Canada, we can say IBS.

And you always have to say afterwards a IBS a.

But not IBS, C and IBS. d. It’s IBS. A. But it was what do you think I thought that the exposure to that level of really involved in caring practitioner was huge.

Well, so we the IFM. This was the international IFM meeting. We’ve been trying to get in there for a long time. What I learned from that was Holy cow. There are a lot of very smart doctors who are now adopting this functional approach. Yep. Because the system that we have right now where we just treat diseases It’s breaking the bank completely. It is a broken system that needs to feed on itself. So these are a group of doctors that have flown in from all over the world. And they are trying to help people at the base level so that we don’t have to get to a point where they’re being prescribed opioids are where they’re being prescribed this, we’re going to give you this thing and so have a booth there without trying to and then have all these doctors that already knew about us was such a cool experience.

Speaking of all of those physicians that were there, think about some of the other people that were there talking about their new delivery systems, or, for instance, Kiran Krishnan. And just so everyone knows, we’re going to do a quick reset right here, if you don’t mind. Last week, we didn’t have a show. So because we were on the
road and we didn’t have the ability to do remote show because we were doing a completely different setup. That being said, Quran Krishnan of megaspore or actually, it’s microbiome labs, the makers of megaspore is a fantastic probiotic. And we ended up doing a recording which will be released later this month of interviewing with Kiran,
those kinds of innovative minds. That’s what’s all over the IFM. Its new ways to deliver health and wellness at a savings to the patient, using, in most cases, natural approaches, and they work. They have science that backs it up. That’s really super exciting.

And that was so cool. So first of all, thank you get on, for taking yourself. Yeah, he took us out to an amazing Peruvian Asian fusion restaurant. And we just had a blast. We did. And I love being around like minded people
and entrepreneur, who’s a scientist. He’s a microbiologist in his training. When he came to the house, we did the podcast, he kicks some crazy knowledge, absolutely phenomenal as to why you should be using In a spore based probiotic, and not a traditional probiotic, based on plausible science, replicated in the lab, that is what is amazing he is all about. Well, that makes sense. Let’s test it. He is a researcher first, entrepreneurs second. And that’s kind of the model that we have without Tron teal is because really, we’ve got some science to back it. And that’s why we developed it. And that’s why I think that we’re going to be able to possibly work together to really help a lot of people using the combination of the two.

Yeah, he’s, he’s, uh, he’s pretty amazing. And the way that he talks about science, it’s like he’s talking about a friend. Oh,

but he’s just, I mean, he describes the you’re gonna have to listen to this episode because he gets so into it that it’s so cool. But we come from bacteria. Make no mistake about it. Yeah. And we have lost sight of that. And we have developed a world that kills what he calls the Holo biome, which is a term I’ve never heard. He said,
we’re a rain forest. When you take out the canopy, things die. And we have systematically been destroying our own God given reason why we’re here, which is our microbiome. And we’re all about the microbiome also talking about polyphenols. Talking about probiotics protecting the microbiome, a recent study just came out. I just saw that yesterday where they were looking at how the microbiome affects aging. And if you have a healthy microbiome,
it’s an anti aging situation.

Yeah, man. It’s really when you start digging into the science that Quran and always butchering his name. So Quran uses to back up, where why spore based probiotics are not only more efficacious, but actually more natural. And then you begin to look at how the microbiome itself benefits from having a spore based probiotics make its way to the colon. It’s it really the mystery is no longer a mission. It makes sense and why you need to care for that for your body. And you’re basically a vehicle for bacteria. And if you’re keeping them healthy and happy, you’re going to be healthy and happy. It’s the signals. We talked about that. Well, we’ve always talked about microbiome. And this we talked to two episodes ago were in TCU, that did the study, where they injected people with lipid polysaccharides. And they showed that the neuro inflammation, created impulse problems, they lead to anxiety, all kinds of stuff. So he’s brought up LPs. That’s exactly what he talked about was a better marker. Remember that instead of just using C reactive protein and other markers to find true long term inflammation in order to find out if you could heal the gut. LPs was a better marker. And you could speak to this too. Is that something that current practitioners through traditional medicine are using?

No. Traditional Medicine does not look at LPs. I do have a science article today. We’re going to touch on that a little bit. Okay. Because remember, we talked about the leaky gut, leading to the Deep Brain, right? Well, I’ve
got a really cool article just published this month 2019, June 2019, we’re going to look at how CBD and a cannabinoid like Endocannabinoid called PEA, actually some really cool science on that. And that’s what we always come back to. It’s bridging the gap. We’re going to try and take some science and bring it over here. Karen was
talking about that the whole time, because this doesn’t make sense. why people are doing this with probiotics when we should be doing this, because this makes a lot more sense. We don’t want to ruin that episode, because I think it is one of the coolest, funny nerdy episodes where we get way into it. Because just like you talked about, he talks about the spores like there’s little baby.

Do this and that. I mean, he loves those things.

Yeah, he does. And you’re right. We don’t want to we don’t want to spoil that episode because we will release it here in a couple of weeks. However today, on today’s episode, we have an incredible guest who’s got a Great
journey and his story on how he got to where he is today. That’s life. Harrison now currently is an executive for Director of Operations for ilecs. And all and we know him quite well from that. But he’s got so much more depth than just somebody who looked into being in a frontier industry. In fact, one of the coolest things about life, and the fact that he’s in the hemp industry is this is a man who has a military service and the Naval Academy was in Annapolis. He was trained by the army on becoming a parachutist. He’s got tactical training, not only in the Navy, but as a civilian. He worked at Boeing. I’m not going to ruin his whole biography, and we’ll let him do it. But the man has got lots of exposure from the military from a large corporate structure and now working and literally the wild west of a very legitimate industry, which needs legitimacy. Absolutely. And that’s one of the reasons why we have teamed up with Elixinol Because I really think that they are just a step above everybody else. We’ve had joy decrement on that they brought on and she is a procedure and policy expert, Chris who song with the marketing, he’s been involved in that. Listen to those two episodes, we’re going to have Dr.
Paul Blair on where we’re going to talk about the science, PTSD and all that what we have with lave is this business background. Really smart guy coming from incredible background to say no, you need to legitimize this, because this is real. It’s not going away. And people need this. We talked about healthcare dollars, we talked about functional medicine. CBD is not going away. And we just need legitimate companies producing great products.
Yeah, without question. So stay tuned. Life will join us in the next half hour. And well, let’s see here. Real quick paying the bills. Go to love my tummy calm if you weren’t at the IFM conference, and you would like to learn a little bit more about adran to love my tummy calm slash boonie use code spoonie save some money and you’ll see everything that Mike can and I talked about while we’re down in San Antonio with the IFM and we will definitely be back next year that was a fantastic get together that was really cool But seriously, I want everyone to commit to this please go to that website support everyone because this supports spoony the supports functional medicine, the support doctrine to which word also doing research, we’re teaming up with people we’re meeting all kinds of stuff so love my tummy, calm slash spoonie sp, NY last thing before we get into Dr. King’s corner is going to be we keep getting responses of people who have now decided to subscribe to iTunes. I do want to remind everyone you can also subscribe to gut check project on YouTube where you can enter again. And of course, if you subscribe screenshot that you have subscribed, go ahead and leave us a review. And in July, we will be awarding at least five winners a free month supply I have Atrantil as well as KBMD CBD of your choosing either natural or
cinnamon cinnamint flavor. And funny story about that real quick before I finish out how you can enter and that is we have a friend whose son as he was a bull rider suffered a brain injury and

has seizures now. So, this is completely anecdotal. I don’t want to make a huge claim here but however has been struggling on what’s the correct diet recipe for myself to not have these issues has a neurologist that he sees out of Wichita Falls and he recently began using kBm dcpd. Just last night, that mom of that that young man, let me know that he doesn’t go anywhere without his kBm dcpd now and he doesn’t have nearly the exacerbations of
his have a seizure activity. Absolutely love that love hearing stories like that. These are real is not a subjective Oh, I feel better. This is not a placebo effect. This is somebody that has objective data showing that they have improvement in something, not a disease claim. Everybody gets so scared about saying that. But what we did
learn from the get on is that you can say what it helps but not the disease. So if we can decrease neuro impulsivity, which leads to a seizure, sure, that’s, that’s really the marker that we can do. And that’s the kind of science that we need to get out there.

Absolutely. So just to continue if you want to win your own free trial and teal and KBMD CBD, so subscribe, screenshot, share, write a review, send a notification to us that you’ve done that at KBMD health.com, or gut check project. com just go under Connect. You’ll see the drop down menu, you can let us know that you have subscribed and you will be entered and then you can be a winner. That’s it.

Everyone wins. Everyone wins. So, Dr. Brown, what’s going on? Now much? So, you know, we talked about the IFM. That’s really cool. I have not been sick and years and years and years and I finally got like my first cold slash. I don’t know what it was. It was bad, and years and it’s fun. So I did not go during the proliferative stage of the virus. I made sure that I secluded myself. Fortunately, it happened on a Friday and I could kind of hide and let that go, but then kind of developed little bronchitis afterwards and then had to go do a show right where you talk.

So Nate,

yeah, it’s perfect

recipe. Yeah. We were in beautiful San Antonio for IFM. Over near it was held at the JW Marriott. Great little Airbnb we stayed at that was cool, like right off property. So that was neat.

Yeah, it was nice. You kind of scheduled the wrong day.

So there’s a little funny story to this and I’m gonna let you tell it because I’m a little embarrassed. So I’ll throw it back to you and you can describe what happened.

So, basically, can you told me that, Eric, I’ll meet you down there, I’m flying, you know, you’re driving, you’re taking the equipment down. And I did. I went checked in. And then I went to the location where the home was forced to stay. And I rang the provider and just as you said, I should she’s incredibly friendly. And she said, Hey, how you doing? It’s like, I’m fine. And so this is Eric, we’re going to stay at your house. You said yeah, yeah, I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. And I said, Well, that’s cool because I’m here today and she couldn’t have been more accommodating. She laughed, she got everything ready within an hour. home was beautiful. So we had we
had a great stay but she was able to scramble around and get everything up and running. If you’ve never done a home share things like Uber I mean vrb and Airbnb are both super easy to use and huge house very, very comfortable. And not really that expensive for us using it for four days

considering the free to stay in hotel or something in between. You know, because we’re working on convention we’ve got you know, a few people meet you and Mike. It was pretty funny though, because that’s what happens when you’ve got two people that are busy doing a bunch of other things and just sort of Oh, yeah, I have to book that place. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Ba ba ba and you move on. And so it probably would be better if we just had somebody to be handling that kind of stuff for us. So

yeah, man. Well, it’s okay. Everything turned out well.

Oh, it turned out perfect. And so we went to a beautiful San Antonio, like I said, Get on took us out to a great dinner. We had a wonderful time. That’s actually why I did my training. So I’m, I’m very fond of San Antonio. That’s where I met my wife. That’s, you know, all that stuff. So going back there is always fun. I got a lot of people there. But that was a great, great conference. I was awesome. While I was there. quick update on the family. Carla actually had a tennis tournament and she killed it in Dallas in the Dallas area. She won the whole thing. So she’s starting to really hit stride right now really proud of her. And, you know, she’s realizing that there’s a lot of both physical skill but when you get you in tennis you really have to put the mental with it because you’re out there alone and she’s really hitting our groove right now and and we’re going to be having some national tournaments coming up where both kids are now playing on the national level so I’m very proud of Carlos You did awesome. Lucas appears to be going through a growth spurt because he did absolutely nothing. He just slept in a

I don’t blame you Lucas and good job Karla.

Nice work. So and then of course, myself got hit with the cold and you know, Lord has basically has to make sure that the kids get to these tournaments. So how about you guys

got everything on our home front is great. breeze business with her Wellness Center continues to grow and gage had 17 had his wisdom teeth taken out. I guess it was two and a half days ago. And he’s recovering but he’s doing well. I mean, we expect good things and I think that he’ll be back to his normal self probably about a day or two. And then Mac. We had several several yards here in early summer that need new sod around town. Around Decatur. So, Matt went out after basketball practice on gets it was Monday and Tuesday. And basically he’s, he feels like he’s a new entrepreneur because now he’s walking home with 200 bucks a day throw inside drone saw.

Yeah, that is not easy. I did that when I got my first home in San Antonio. Yeah.

So he’s pretty pumped about that nice little change in his pocket, and not enough time to spend it. So that’s the best way to do it. And for 15 year old, it’s, that’s not too bad. Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Now that’s it, though. It seems like they’re we’re moving on with summer.

Yeah, that’s cool. Real quick shout out to Melanie Avalon and Gin Stevens because I did the intermittent fasting podcast again, love going on their show, had a great time talking about all kinds of stuff. One of the things that we did hit on which I actually had to do a little research was the carnivore diet. Oh,

tell me about it.

Well, the carnivore diet. It’s basically me. Oh, I’m gonna get me. All right. And While I was doing some homework on that you actually pointed Jordan Peterson out to me, right? Yeah. How did you find

Jordan Peterson in the work he was doing originally actually it was. That’s a tribute to gauge gauge is a big he just spends his time reading about different things all the time and he finds Jordan Peterson to be somewhat
interesting just as the personality himself it just so happens that Jordan and his daughter I believe, suffer from his daughter definitely suffers from some autoimmune issues.

I think she’d been the most outspoken person with this correct Michaela, right?

It’s a I believe that’s her name. And so she and Jordan both had at least some type of autoimmune issues. They both reset and decided to go and try the carnivore diet. They had been reading about it. And according to them, they don’t have those issues anymore. And I think that he’s 18 months into it, or something like that. It’s around that timeline. I can’t remember exactly. But I have heard his interview

on Joe Rogan and a few other different podcasts where Rogan is the one that sticks out the most, because he’s has the longest format. Yeah. And it’s really interesting to hear someone make that transition. I love vegetables. I love fruits. So I don’t know what the carnivore diet is for me. But you see the Joe Rogan Shawn Baker one, the
orthopedic surgeon that’s doing the carnivore diet as well. No, I know. He’s quite outspoken. Also, I’m not really on Instagram much. But I’ve seen that he’s pretty prolific and basically showing that he likes meat. He likes meat. Similar thing where he went, he’s an orthopedic surgeon, really smart guy. He’s doing strictly
meetings eaten quite a bit of meat. So I had my first patient on, we had a long talk, and we’ve tried a bunch of different diets still struggle with with some stuff. And so I put him on a carnivore diet for the last two weeks.
He feels good. Really? Yeah. So my knee jerk reaction would be no way like everybody else, like every other diet that’s out there. As a traditional doctor, you look at this and you go, What what? paleo now then you go, oh, wow,
that’s kind of interesting. Check out keto know now keto. I’ve tried keto. I’m mostly paleo tried keto, I it’s difficult for me to stay on what I do. And we talked about this on the podcast. So that comes out next Monday, I believe. Well, i fP Yeah, yeah, intermittent fasting podcast that she’s gonna release that next Monday. We talked about all this, but the problem that a lot of people do like I do is dirty Hito. You think you’re Kido and then you kind of cheat and you ruin everything. And I kind of screwed basically screwed some things up doing that. So we look at these different diets. Well, the initial reaction is, oh, the carnivore diet. That’s crazy. I mean, meats bad. You have all this meat in your colon and john wayne died with 20 pounds of meat with colon whatever, completely untrue. And there are certain primal lineage people that really survive purely on meat during certain times of the year that you would astronauts, for instance,

right, not eating vegetables. Now, it’s just strictly meat. And then Shaun Baker had some examples of some tribes in Africa that really only have meat and they are extremely healthy. So I’m looking more into it. And that’s how come Melanie wants to talk about it. So we get we get into that a little bit. That’s first time. I love doing on podcasts like that right to do little homework, kind of like doing this thing every single week, we try and
do a little homework, we try and bring everybody up to speed. And so that we can all get a little bit better at something. And that’s just another example. Looking into it, I got my first patient experience with it. Let’s see what happens. Hey, if you’ve tried the carnivore diet out there, and your listener of GCP, or you know, someone that has shoot us an email, I’m really curious to see what it’s like and what that transition is like, and how do you feel how long did you do it? What is it like it? Whenever you talked about the keto diet and doing dirty
keto, I can certainly relate and I didn’t realize I was relating. In the same way I feel like I’m avoiding carbs, I’m avoiding sugars. But something that I wasn’t taking into account was I was offsetting some of that by consuming probably more protein than I should have. And you can probably speak to this if you over consume the protein in terms of the protein ratio to the fat, your body can actually just go through glucose. The agenesis and basically use the protein and turn it into circulating glucose. You can’t throw yourself out of keto itself, right.

Yeah, it sounds. It sounds counterintuitive. But Dr. Shaun Baker actually talks about this. he’s a he’s a power lifter holds a couple records at his age group. And he got an arguments with other doctors where they said, No, you won’t have enough glycogen in the muscle to do this. Well, the fact that you break down the protein, the amino acids, and then you form glycogen in the muscles, that’s fuel. So people do keto, but they take too, too much protein in and then you actually stored glycogen in your liver and in your muscles. And then when you work. In
fact, you when you and I were fasting. We did a little experiment with you where we were actually working in between patient. Oh, yeah. And we did the we have a keto Mojo. We checked your ketones, right? ketones were up blood glucose was 58, somewhere around there. And I’m like, hey, let’s try something. Why don’t you do a bunch of squats? Yeah. And what happened that

I think we checked the glucose again, was it 10 minutes later? And now was it 76?

Is that correct? Yeah, your glucose went up and your ketones went down a little bit because I burn the ketones as fuel and you mobilize some of the glycogen a muscle. Yeah. So a lot of this physiology takes place and people don’t realize that that’s actually going on. I did remaining in technical ketosis because that’s point five, I believe on the keto Mojo hundred percent. And so one of the things is, did you actually just burn some ketones? Or did you mobilize glycogen? I think a little bit of both, probably. Yeah. And so that kind of stuff goes on. The

interesting thing, too, is kind of motivated by intermittent fasting. Just the idea of it. And you know, this most days, I only consume bacon and eggs for breakfast. And so I typically stay in moderate ketosis in the morning until we finally get to lunch. But that’s the first half hour that was really fast holy cow I got so much more
stuff to talk about ladies gonna hop in but we’re gonna get to the to the study and run it by him and see what he thinks and trust him a little bit new doing that, but Anything to add before we take this break? I

just want everybody to take this break and go to love my tummy calm slash boonie

Yeah, yeah, you should totally do that because there’s there’s some real everybody wins there don’t think hundred percent winners. all right we’ll be back with Leif Harrison here in just a moment. Stay tuned gotcha project Episode 13

Dr. Ken Brown here host of gut check project with my co host Eric Rieger. Eric, we’ve been seeing Mojo guys over there and over here it’s boonie talking about trying to for a bloating I’ve seen in my practice that I’ll try
and tell us a whole lot more than just the building product.

Yes, it does a whole lot more than just fixed bloating because of the polyphenols that you find in Atrantil

you’re exactly right. The polyphenols are those molecules that we find in the Mediterranean diet. It makes vegetables and fruits very colorful. What are some of the things that these polyphenols do? These Bali females can actually stop inflammation they can help you have more energy they can help you with anti aging and Polyphenols are great for athletes it sounds like it’s going to help a whole lot more people than just loading tell me how everybody should be taking outruns you if you want to dose to it’s

two capsules three times a day basically with your meals but if you aren’t bloated and you just want that Polyphenol and take every day to three capsules a day will work for you go to love vitamins.com slash spoonie

Alright, we’re back for the second half hour. It’s gut project episode number 13. And we were talking as we close out the first half hour about fasting. And then I had to ask life Don’t say anymore because he chimed in and said I tried some of that fasting and I was going to think how long did you do? It was like four or five days like I did because that was really hard. And he said no, I did one that was how long 40 days and 40 nights that is

Was it is that the Daniel fast?

Which one is? No, that was just the irresistible call by God the fast

route.

Yeah. So I just did some quick internet research on like how to even attempt it. And I settled on. It was all water with a little bit of organic fruit juice in the morning and a little bit of organic veggie juice at night. And I just ran with that the whole boy 40 days. Yeah,

that’s the longest I’ve heard anybody doing anything. It’s

looking back on that. This is probably maybe four years ago. Literally not possible without God.

Really, I

don’t think I don’t think a human being can just sit down and knock it out on their own.

Wow. Did you have a regimen of prayer that you were doing with this? Yes. Ramadan the way that they that that is done?

Yes. I think it was probably two three times a day. I had some note cards. prayers that I had written down in advance. And I just worked through those with with issues I in my family were dealing with at the time and we just worked through that the whole time. That’s amazing. There’s when you look at fasting, it’s in every single religion really, if you look at it,

oh, yeah, but the only other person I can remember that’s even come close to as long as life is Rita Marie Lizcano. Oh, that’s right. She went to and for the almost the same, the same motivation. She went and she went to a so called resort but it’s basically a place that they facilitate people that are going to do long term fast and they give them coaching, they give them support, they make certain that they don’t have to move too much while they do it. They make sure they have water that are hydrated, but she I can’t remember if she said she did four weeks, five weeks, something like that. Did you have a die off period or some period where you went through like a keto flu or that stuff that people don’t have.

So I don’t have any terms for it. But you go through multiple stages during the whole process. So my experience was probably about every four to five days, you would switch from one aspect of it to an entirely new one. And so it started out with incredible headaches. And then those past and then this is my understanding, I don’t know if it’s valid or not. But it appears that maybe there are a bunch of heavy metals stored up in your body. And that in the course of an extreme fast, they are your they’re being released, and hopefully flushed out. But apparently, they tend to then collect in the larger muscle groups. So you go through things like extreme thigh pain, extreme back pain, that type of thing. And that’s the only correlation I can make to why you get those kinds of pains. But then again, over the weeks of the fast, they tend to be the focus, and then they tend to move on from that.

Yeah, you’re really selling this

Like I said, it’s not something that can be done on your own, in my opinion. So this

is, yeah, holy cow. So I’ve done I’ve done a five day fast. You’ve done a water fast. Five days I’ve done the prologue fasting mimicking diet I’ve done fasting, in my opinion is the greatest life hack you can do that what you did is like Navy SEAL stuff. That is that is tough.

Yeah, it’s a my opinion. It’s a God inspired and God supported. So I don’t think it can be done on your own. And for the for those scripturally sound people out there. I’m well aware that the Bible speaks to this is not something you brag about. I only share it because that was just a process I went through, and maybe somebody else can relate to that. Yeah, that’s an incredible journey. I mean, a mean, and I don’t think you’re bragging at all. I mean, it’s just it’s an experience for

so yeah, no, you’re being very honest headaches. Yeah, muscle aches tough can only do it if I focus on prayer. Now that’s, I mean, I think that that is there’s a lot of people that need to reset and I do the fast I fast for the five days, usually around trying to do it four times a year. And I find a lot of habits that I’ve developed that I go, oh my gosh, that’s more of a habitual thing of having that snack or having that glass of wine at night or whatever, when you start paying attention to it. And one surprise at the end, I didn’t need to come off it. I mean, when I finally hit the goal,

I I could have kept going, but I stopped, but I wasn’t expecting that part. Wow. That is that is that is very impressive. And you said a word that I like is reset. So it sounds to me like life. You You were inspired to do it and you had your own motivations one of them that you didn’t specifically mentioned, but of course, the body being a temple, it would only make sense What type of away from the spiritual benefits? What type of

body? improvements? Did you notice at the conclusion of the fast? Did you feel healthier? Did you sleep better? Did you find it maybe even during the fast, you began to just have better periods of rest and clarity? I’m just kind of curious. I don’t know that I can speak to any of those specifically, you know, what little reading I did on it, leading up to it, and then trying to kind of understanding it. After all, all that happened, was it you know, if, if losing weight is a goal of your fast, then I’m under the impression that you really don’t want to be in a caloric deficit more than about 300 calories per day, when you’re doing it, and at that level, you tend to compensate for that deficit, your body tends to burn way more fat than switch to muscle for calories. When you do an extreme one, that sort of 9010 ratio becomes more like 5050 and so You take hits across the board. Yeah. So it literally came out to I think I was 39 pounds lighter after 40 days.

39 pounds. Wow.

right but a lot I lost a lot of muscle mass in the process. Sure. Yeah. I mean it’s a sacrifice though for you know for going for going through it. I mean, nothing like that comes easy but I do think that there’s a spiritual reset there’s a family interaction reset,

did you do it with with with your wife was was you alone? No, I told her in advance and then we because I just I told her I just kept feeling this pole. And this, not preoccupation with it, but it just wouldn’t set aside. And then I targeted a date for the future to start it, but I was just like, I think I’m just going to start now. And so I just warned her because this would be you know, I didn’t know what was coming and it would affect you know the family for a good six or seven years. weeks. But I basically just started about a week or two after having a come Top of Mind and just did it.

That’s impressive. because let me tell you what I’ve had periods during those five day fast. Each one had different issues, but it I wanted to, I wanted to day three, I’m like, Okay, I’m done. You know, I want to know, this is I am hungry.

Definitely.

Did you go through so both Eric and I experienced there is a hormone called orexin. That when you get to a certain point, your body’s telling you to get out there and go do something. Did you have a surge of energy? At some point, day four day five of the first

No, but I appreciate the people who do shorter fast go through experiences like that. So I think mentally I was in this for the long run to the best that I could be. So I wasn’t thinking of it in short chunks. Plus I was dealing with the fact that sort of various kinds of pain were coming and going and that would really absorb a lot of the moment But I do know that people who do three day five day type runs. It’s almost I don’t know if it’s almost like a runner’s euphoria. But there’s there’s there are things that can kick in during that time. That can make it pretty special. And it’s hard to access those other ways.

Isn’t that fascinating? Because mentally your body, your body knew that it had to do this. So the reason why this actually kicks in it’s, it’s, it’s an evolutionary thing. Where if you’re, if you’re part of a tribe, and you need to go out and get food, you haven’t had food. By day three or four, you get this surge of energy. And we all did, I woke up at 1am and started cleaning the closet. And it makes sense because this hormone kicks in, because it says, look, you need to get you need to get food, you need to go get a surge of energy. When you get beyond that when you get into a longer fast that ends and then you’re actually in the starvation mode. You actually went to a starvation point.

Yeah. What’s also interesting is you think about people lost at sea all kinds of situations. You know, civil unrest, something where when food and water become an issue? Yeah, there really do seem to be some hard stops and heart stops tend to be like three days max without water. Or you’re, you’re in serious trouble. But you could go 30 days without food. And so I don’t know I’m sure most people aren’t prepared to try to do that. But it seems like physiologically you could do that if you had to. Wow. That’s just impressive. That’s super impressive. And it’s in not so much the faster the duration. It’s the commitment that life was able to put himself into see him. So we’re going to

get into your background, which is really cool. And very clearly, you’re a very mentally strong person, but you don’t own it. You say now I can only have done it with prayer and through God.

Yeah, it was a it was a irresistible pull. It was never something I thought about. It just happened and then about two weeks later, decided to just go for it.

You know what, I’m going to be more like you from now on. I’m going to start With this also can you stand up for a second real quick?

Oh, there’s an irresistible pull. Here’s

an irresistible pull it we’re gonna take a quick picture time. That’s good. The reason why I just took a picture because I want to be more like life. Well, Amazon just launched a brand new thing. I think it actually started yesterday called

style snap.

And you can look at somebody.

And here is a picture of life that I just took there. Yeah. And then Amazon will build your outfit. For me. It’s called style snap.

Somebody has to

I know so I can get

there we go. I’m going to get a Tommy Hilfiger shirt that I can get from Amazon. So basically, my wife’s been trying this for seven years

at Amazon to fix that problem.

Yeah. And then I get some Kenneth Cole pants and I will look exactly like you. So it’s called style snaps interesting. So Amazon has not done very good about breaking through the clothing market I saw news article on it yesterday yeah just came out so you can walk around the city and be like, that person looks cool take a picture and then just order the whole outfit to your house right there.

I don’t know if that’s cool or creepy as hell it’s creepy at that I mean it it’s cool as a Tinker

Yeah, that’s I could see me at day seven looking just like that be like no my muscles my head or screw this I’m

really what if you take a picture of somebody who’s really really stacked and it doesn’t show a shirt. It just has a bunch of waits for you to order

a treadmill or something like that. That’d be awful male males you a blender and some protein.

A couple of videos. Yeah, that’s pretty sweet. Life Do you mind sitting in while we while we attack? This week’s research topic? Let’s do this. Alright.

Alright. So every single week, we always I always try and pick up something that’s relatively new that I find interesting and Most of the time, it gets really sciency and really geeky, so I try to dumb it down. But this is really cool, because few weeks ago, we talked about leaky gut. And a lot of my colleagues in the traditional medicine space, they don’t even acknowledge leaky gut, they don’t even say that we could get exists. They say that there’s no intestinal permeability. We really do know that there’s a lot of evidence out there. The article that we described that time was leaky gut, leaky blood brain barrier, right. And now we have some evidence that all timers and dementia can actually be caused by intestinal health. So this article just came out. It was published in the inflammatory bowel disease, June 2019. very recent, very recent, and what they actually looked at these researchers some really cool stuff that comes out of the UK. And they looked at it’s actually one article including two different studies, one in in vitro study. which means they do things outside of the body in a lab. And then they use that knowledge, to piggyback on an in vivo study. And the invivo is when you look at humans, and you look at certain and outcomes. So this is really cool. And what they looked at is that we all know that the tight junctions and the intestines, it’s a selectively permeable barrier, you have to be able to absorb and take in calories. And you know, unfortunately talk about fasting. There’s a lot of people with a lot of intestinal disease where they fast even though they don’t want to, because they’re not actually absorbing all the food that they’re actually taking it right. So in addition to CBD that we always talk about, right there are other Endocannabinoid light compounds and the definition of them and we’ve talked about that like, Red Zone is one of them, right? But another one is called p e. a, or how MIT toy less than Olamide This is an A typical Endocannabinoid that is actually found in food. So it’s found in soybeans, some found in eggs and our body actually produces it. It increases your own endogenous inanimate levels and it actually binds to certain receptors. So little sciency, but it makes sense. So this article looked at CBD and P a. p A is one of those molecules that depending on how you want to use it, but it is an entourage molecule so it actually works together with CBD and your own endocannabinoid system. So they have shown that pa can bind to something called p par alpha, which is just a receptor similar to an Endocannabinoid receptor. Just keep that in mind. Okay, so this group had previously shown that inflammation actually causes an increase in the permeability of the intestine. So these guys are on the forefront of leaky gut and have always been on the forefront of this. They looked at how CBD in previous animal models could have actually helped this and they publish this big meta analysis, looking at animals on how CBD and PTA can actually correct leaky gut. Based on this, they went down this path. And this is the study that they actually just published. So when we had kid on on the show, he geeked out like crazy, right?

Yeah, he definitely did.

This is my geeky out because this justifies a lot of the stuff, and why a lot of the reasons why all health begins and ends in the gut, why we become sicker as a society. And we’re going to talk about that Chris kresser article that Oh, yeah, that you got from him, and it makes total sense now. So the in vitro part of this is that they took intestinal tissue, human intestinal tissue, and they soaked it in these inflammatory cytokines. So these are cytokines that your body produces when it’s exposed to toxins, specifically, like TNF alpha, interferon gamma and things like that. They showed that this inflammation caused an increase in leaky gut. And they looked at these very specific cell parameters where they could show Oh, look, this size of molecule came through. And they did it in a very elegant study.

So is this tend to be outside molecules penetrating or inside materials leaving.

So what they did is they soaked the tissue in these inflammatory cytokines. And then they used immunofluorescence, to show that it actually was going through from one side to the other. So inside two, Well, technically the inside of the lumen, crossing the barrier into the inside of whatever that they had. But in this case, it was just another medium, but it would normally be crossing into the lamina propria, where your body would react to it.

So essentially, what you’re saying is the particles that shouldn’t have been making its way to the bloodstream, are now being sampled by the bloodstream in this

piece of tissue, right? So it’s the first time I’ve ever read an article where somebody looked at this and said, lead He got does exist when you cause inflammation this actually happens. Okay? So then they added a PA, okay? The molecule that has a cannabinoid like receptor that is found in a full spectrum, hemp product, so it’s going to be one of the entourage molecules there. And they showed that the PDA markedly decreased the penetration of these molecules. Alright, that’s good. So then I said, Okay, well, that’s objectively kind of cool. So then they blocked the receptor, the PDA binds to copy part alpha. So they did that with another molecule, the leakiness continued, continued. Impressive. So now we know so we sit there and we talk about where’s the science in the CBD and cannabinoid industry there’s people like this publishing this and nobody’s talking about this. Absolutely amazing because they said, Okay, look, it stopped it. Then we blocked where it works and it happened again. Keep that in mind. Alright, so the Then they added CBD, this also markedly improved the permeability stop the permeability, then they’re able to bind the CB one receptor. And it happened again. Okay, so they’ve got a molecular model where they showed, oh, this is where it’s happening. It actually prevents leaky gut. This, in my mind proves on a subtle level that inflammatory markers alone can create intestinal permeability or leaky gut. But now we have a mechanism that I can tell my patients Look, this is why I like to use these products in the symptoms that you have. We now know that when somebody comes in and they’ve got bloating, and they hurt, they’ve got a bad diet, a highly processed diet. And they say things like I have brain fog, I feel fatigued. I’ve developed Hashimoto, I’ve got this. We know that you’ve now opened this gate and your body is reacting to the outside. World specifically could be reacting to bacterial components to antigens, things like that. So many of these people, this is how I got into talking about CBD in the first place because I was seeing such incredible improvement. Sure, like, I don’t really know why you’re getting better. Now we have a reason why

don’t you feel like that these levels of validation in terms of discovering what the MLA, I’m sorry, what the mechanism of action is, in part is, is one of the key pieces that universally the hemp industry just needs for the validation. And actually, it’s not even about the hemp industry that it could be the diet industry. It could be anything where there’s a clickable beyond anecdotal improvement. It’s just how do I piece together the science to show that what we’re doing is going to actually work. And I think that we can do that with studies like that,

when you have a study like that where the plausibility of it makes sense. And these guys clearly are deep into the weeds and this kind of stuff. This share a passion. And they’ve already done that analysis on on animal models. So they kind of had a pretty good idea. Look, we just need to prove it on some level. So then they kicked it up a notch in the same paper, which is fascinating because it’s basically two different studies, right?

Yeah. It’s pretty fascinating.

Then they decided, Okay, this is cool. Nobody’s gonna believe us. Let’s see what we can do in humans. So the same group took 30 individuals and gave them high dose aspirin. Aspirin in itself, can actually create it’s an inflammatory thing. We know aspirin creates ulcers. I’ll see people who come in with gi bleeds, and you know they’re on aspirin. Aspirin does some good things, but it also increases intestinal permeability. Okay, so the way that they prove this is that they got people they gave them aspirin. And then they did what’s called a lactose mannitol test. And it’s an interesting old test. That manataj is a very small molecule, and it’ll go through and be absorbed and then you pee it out. lactulose is a big molecule. And technically you don’t absorb it and you’ll poop it out, right? If you have intestinal permeability, that lactulose mannitol ratio comes closer, so you start paying some lactulose out, right? So they gave aspirin till people start paying lactulose out, which I thought was pretty impressive.

Yeah, I’m a good baseline for dumbing things down. And I think I followed that sweet. I like that.

They did reference this is kind of funny. They did reference other science articles as to why they use aspart as opposed to other things. And they reference a few trials in Europe where people tried to give them straight lipopolysaccharides which is bacteria, and people went septic. So they’re like, No, we can’t do that. So although this is not an ideal test, it’s the closest you could get something like this. So once they determined that they had leaky gut and once they determined that they were peeing out this lactulose they randomly this was a randomized placebo controlled trial, gave them CBD p Or placebo. Okay, now they did give them pretty high dose so CBD at 600 milligrams and p a 600 milligrams per day. Yes per day and they admittedly said it was sort of, we’re just gonna give them that dose and sure happens. They tried to base it off some of the ratios that they soak the tissue in in the first study, but they admittedly say we’re just trying this to see what happened. They didn’t they didn’t have a placebo control, though. They did have a placebo correct. So they were able to show that the addition of CBD NPA dramatically reduced the lactulose mannitol ratio. Okay, so in humans, they showed that at least with this particular test, leaky got improved. They took it one step further. And these guys are I mean, it’s like it like I would have published the first part. Sure. I’ve been Eureka. And they do this one, and then they’re like, wait, wait for it, right. Let’s take molecules which are the exact size of bacterial lipid panel saccharides Okay, without causing sepsis. Yeah, it’s important. So they found these dextrins, called mt four and Mt 10, which I just love how science minds works, where somebody just goes, let’s get the exact size because it’s a size thing, right? And if it crosses, then we know that they’re going to react to the lipid polysaccharide. Or they’re going to react to the bacteria. These happen to be very similar to the size of eco lie, and I can’t remember what sakra I remember what the other one was, but basically very common gi pathogen, okay, that we would actually react it. Both CBD and P a reduced the FT for an ft 10 transfer as well. So people weren’t paying that out. So they were using it like a lactose mandatory test. And why this is relevant is because this is the first time in humans that two compounds have a mechanism to repair mucosal induced leaky gut.

That’s impressive

and they believe is Through changes in the tight junction receptors and something called Aqua porn three in the ilium. I’ve not heard of that. I’ve not heard of it either. As it turns out Aqua porn three is something that in Crohn’s disease gets up regulated to try to absorb more water so you don’t get dehydrated. So it’s a it’s a mechanism that the body knows that the gut is inflamed. And you want to absorb more water so that you can survive longer because you can go three days without water or if you have too much diarrhea that’ll you’ll deplete it share, you know, the 30 days with food so it’s an incredible mechanism that you can’t beat Mother Nature. It you you give it you give what the body needs, it’s going to do this. So what they theorize it This is why it may be really useful inflammatory bowel disease. So in my space, this is an incredible finding where we’ve got you know, I’ve got a lot of Crohn’s and colitis, I’ve got a lot of people with that. I can at least look Look at them and say, Look, I think that this might help because of this mechanism. When you look at the research with megaspore biotic, it’s not a disease claim, you’re talking about mechanisms, the mechanism makes sense. And many of my colleagues don’t even believe in leaky gut. So it’s very hard to actually talk about, hey, I want to tell you about a disease process. And then I want to tell you how this molecule that you probably don’t know anything about is going to help that. And this is what we’re going to get into in the next half hour. You know, the whole process of how you sit there and educate and where people come and that’s what life’s gonna get into. He’s got a great incredible background, but how do you educate someone on a benefit when they don’t even know that the disease exists? That’s that white noise that we were talking about.

So life we’re going to go through your your history and how you got to where you are, but just we’ve got just a couple of minutes. What do you think, since you are Director of Business in the hemp industry, when you hear new levels of validation for the application of hemp products, It’s not it’s not just subjective. This is objective data. What does that do to embolden the effort of education in and around CBD? Yeah, I think two things come to mind. One is there’s just a vacuum waiting to be filled bigger than we can imagine, for science backed argument for what’s going on that many, many people can just anecdotally Express, but don’t know what type of context or framework to put it in. And then number two, its communication. There’s so many people waking up to what this seems to be. And in doing so, few sources to go to and also buyers in the CBD market needing a a, a a simple message that resonates, that speaks truth, above all the noise in the market. That is confusing it. And probably in itself based on a lot of nonsense. It’s it’s difficult to explain, but it’s just stressing that everybody coming in and taking a look needs to be brought in, in in a way that that is anchored to truth to the best of our ability so that they can make the best decisions for themselves.

And I think that so we I have a graduate student that helps us and she sends me articles like this weekly. She’s like talking about this on your show. This is really cool. And this is a thick, thick, thick article. So every time I talked to people, my colleagues, traditional MDS, they go, there’s no science behind that. I’m like, Oh, no, no, no, no, yeah, I’ve got thousands of articles. Looking at the science, you just haven’t taken the time to do it because you haven’t had a drug rep show up and go, Oh, here’s the detail piece. We have been Pavlovian trained that we shouldn’t look at anything unless you have lunch, and you’re tempted.

That is, that is a truth but so that is going to round up this half hour. Going to be back here in just a moment. But what we’re going to bring back is some context behind life Harrison car and just a couple of minutes.

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breaking news this hour from townhall.com. I’m Wally Hines. The world is marking the 75th anniversary of D day by honoring its survivors and the fallen June 619 44. Operation Overlord the massive allied land and sea invasion of the French coast that began Nazi Germany’s downfall and helped end world war two a year later, to the Americans that fought there you are among the very greatest Americans who will ever Live speaking near Omaha Beach the president called them the pride of the nation. French leader Emmanuel McCrone said his nation thanks them and the other allied troops who broke Hitler’s hold on France.

We know what we

do you veterans of freedom I’m saga Mac on before heading to Normandy, the president telling reporters in Ireland he’s not worried about threats to block his plans to impose tariffs on Mexico

don’t Mexico. The tariffs go on

and I made it. And I’m very happy with it. And a lot of people senators included. They have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to terrorism. No, absolutely. No idea president says he’ll go ahead with those terrorists on Monday unless talks in Washington between the US and Mexico aimed at curbing illegal immigration bear some fruit, a power outage at La x last night scrambling check ins and forcing dozens of flight delays diversions of cancellations. Katie belamis spoke with K NBC TV In the

restroom when I noticed lights went off and then got back out and all of the restaurants all of the lights were out and we got to the escalator to walk down

to baggage claim and that also wasn’t working

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Ken brown here host of gut check project with my co host Eric Rieger. I’ve seen in my practice that I’ll try and tell us a whole lot more than just the bloating product.

Yes, it does a whole lot more than just exploding because of the polyphenols that you find in Asante. What are some of the things that these polyphenols do air these polyphenols can help you have more energy and polyphenols are great for athletes.

It sounds like it’s gonna help a whole lot more people than just load and go to La vitami.com slash spoonie

Welcome back. We are now going to start the second hour of gut check project Episode 13. I’m joined by your host, Dr. Kenneth Brown. I’m Eric rigor and today’s guest is leaf Harrison. He has quite a journey to his current position as Director of Business Operations for helix and all and before we get too late, just need to remind you that if you would like to grab yourself some otra to go Love My tummy.com slash spoonie use the code spoonie save some money that is power packed with polyphenols happens to be the only NSF certified for sport indicated over the counter product for IBS and bloating,

Ken, what does that mean? Well, that means that we have done rigorous testing on it. So if you happen to be an Olympic athlete, a college athlete or somebody that wants to make sure that what you take, there was a recent study that just came out yesterday on how they were warning teenagers. Lots of increased ER visits where teenagers are trying to do weight loss products and sports supplements that they’re finding lots of nefarious ingredients in there pharmaceutical stuff. And that’s NSF guarantees that none of that stuff exists. And so that’s how come if even if you’re an athlete, these polyphenols can help you recover. They increase nitric oxide to the muscles, and they get rid of reactive nitrogen species and reactive oxygen species.

And here’s a quick story. Did you know last week at IFM there were Two physicians that deal with athletes. And they they saw the NSF moniker which doesn’t always mean a whole lot to everyone. But when you’re with athletes that it matters to they came up and they said, that’s really cool that you have that. That means that we can use that. And I didn’t know. I knew nothing about NSF until I was contacted by the Registered Dietitian that was on staff from the Oakland Raiders, and wanted to know if I could sell them in bulk some odd Tron to for them to distribute amongst the coaches and the wives of players. And I said, Well, what about the players? And he said, Well, if you’re not NSF certified, there’s not anything that we can do with it. And that’s really what threw me and I learned that they have a collective bargaining agreement with that includes the recommendations from physicians and dietitians that work in the MLB NFL most NCAA sanctioned which McAllen schools. They have to adhere to NSF for for cleanliness.

And the other thing we always like to geek out a little bit the polyphenols and are trying to do something really cool related to the endocannabinoid system. That is,

well basically you have your own endogenous cannabinoids that your body uses to stimulate your ECS. And it just so happens that FA H is one particular enzyme that breaks down those endocannabinoids where they are supposed to function. And if you are light and your polyphenol intake, that enzyme may be a little bit more reactive than you needed to be. And so your ECS or your endocannabinoid system, tense not function at its optimal level. So having enough daily polyphenols can actually enhance the ability for your CBD, both your oil your CBD that you may be taking but as well as your endogenous cannabinoids to work better.

So one of the things we talked about was NSF certification and ultra until one of the reasons why we’ve teamed up Powered by ellickson all kBm the health CBD is because they do everything right from the beginning to the end soil to bottle. There, they have Certificate of analysis. And we have our guest today, leaf Harrison, who happens to be the what is your official title, Director of Business Development, Director of Business Development, and his pathway to get there is really interesting. Yes, it is. And what you’re going to find out when we get through all of this is that a company like elix, at all is really finding some very intelligent, very well rounded people to bring some legitimacy to this industry, which really, although it’s been around, it’s been referenced since Chinese medicine 2400 bc or whatever it is that we talked about on one of those shows. Right now it seems fairly, fairly new, and there’s a lot of people out there, it’s kind of the Wild West and so they tracked it down like you down and we’re going to go through because I think one of the coolest things is your background. We talked about your 40 day fast and the mental discipline, and you’re calling by God to go ahead and do that that shows your character. But where you come from, I think is absolutely amazing. So

yeah, now so you filled out a little questionnaire like we asked everyone to do and you were born in Phoenix. And then I know that you ended up in Annapolis in the Naval Academy. So do you mind telling us a little bit about what what drove you to join the naval, the Naval Academy and what that experience was like, in the 80s? Well, this was the 80s. So it wasn’t exactly spoke. I was spicoli without the marijuana.

I actually grew up in the Midwest in Ohio. But believe it or not, I grew up a competitive sailor from probably age eight on and did well enough that by the time I got through high school, and gotten enough accolades to actually draw the attention of the sailing coach at the Naval Academy. At the time, they were like multi year NCAA champions. So minus the sailing. Well, it’s probably was probably a combination of two things that got me on one was the sailing. And one was this was right in that sweet spot of the Reagan, Lehmann Navy build up for the, for the 600. Ship Navy at the time, so they were just allowing more people in. Sure. And

can I ask you a quick question? Because whenever people come on the show, like I’m curious, like when we had Robo on, like, how did you become a professional rodeo guy? How does one get into sailing? And like, where do you start with that?

Right? So my dad was an extremely gifted mechanical engineer. And through a Job Change to Ohio, he got surrounded by other high end engineers who were actually in this very high performance sailing world. And so they sailed this one type of boat called a 505. And this boat was very technically demanding. And so for an engineer who could, like Tinker on it at the same time, that’s what his draw was. But they actually my parents became very good sailors and then I was just brought in that world 24 seven, what’s that five of five is that chemical catamaran? It’s it’s actually it’s metrics. So it’s stands for like really 5.05 meters, that was the length of the boat. It was just called a 505. But it was very similar to some of the high performance boats they would say look in the Olympics at the time. And

so you didn’t like start out like when you find like when people become Formula One racecar drivers, they start out in go karts, and they work their way up to this as a as a kid you do.

So there are there are many different kinds of boats to fit many different kinds of capabilities and goals. And so you can really progress and sort of graduate almost like you know, tadpole to minnow, you know, liking and going up the dolphin, you know, get your badges along the way sailings a lot like that. And Then coincidentally at the same time was when windsurfing was born. So my folks again just happened to be at the right spot where there were less than maybe 8000 wind surfers in the entire world. This was right at the beginning in the mid 70s. But they had them. So I learned how to do that at the same time. So I was obvious parallel paths. And then again, by the time I got to high school, I was good enough to you know, finish well at national championships and things like that. And then from that, unexpectedly get the attention of the coach at the Naval Academy. And the next thing I know is essentially, I did just well enough on essay T’s and all the other requirements everybody else had that I had the opportunity to go

to that is no joke Naval Academy is I mean, when you say that, it’s just immediately total respect. I mean, that’s, that is an impressive place to get your education

without question and then so your experience the Naval Academy, were you on or competitive on the sailing team for all four years or?

Yeah, I did it for three Three and a half, three and a half years, I decided just in the last semester to just shut it down. But it was it was a it was a that was some schedule. I mean, so if you go from being sort of spoliation High School, okay, right to then bang, you’re on the other other extreme of hard regimen, hard academics, hard hours commitment. You know, I was probably between between academics and sailing. I’d be lucky to have a few hours a week. You know, to myself,

we talked about it with our kids, your your son gage is 17. He’s looking at colleges. My son’s a competitive tennis player, and you start realizing, wow, when you choose to take that scholarship to a college, it’s a job. And no matter what it is, roba was talking about it. He went and did rodeo at his college. Yeah, and you’re just like, I don’t care if it’s football sailing rodeo, no matter what you’re doing. That’s a job.

It’s a job. Yeah. The sport probably took 35 to 40 hours a week just on the sport. Wow. My goodness, what? So you’re experienced in the Naval Academy beyond the sailing? degree? Yeah. Math, I got a Bachelor of Science and Mathematics. That’s fantastic that that that

that’s probably why they brought you into it looks at all right, your math document?

I don’t think they’d say that.

Well, so but probably a lot of your experience along the way is the reason that they brought you on. And I know when you’re in the Naval Academy, you you did become a parachutist. And so what did that entail once you are trained to jump from planes and what kind of training that right so part of the professionalism the military professionalism you undergo with the Academy is a are the sort of summer experiences that are required. So if you think of a normal through three months of summer, they fill it up with two in terms of various kinds of training, depending on what grade you’re at at the Academy. So, one of the summers generally one of those two months that you have to do is set you’re on, you’re either on a ship, or you’re getting a variety of sort of worldwide naval experiences, submarines, aircraft, the Marines, all kinds of things very cool. But the other month is more elective. And if you could pass the required tests, you could do things like go to army airborne school, at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the soldiers go, or you could get scuba training or jungle training and Panama there were all kinds of things at that time.

This is your elective

don’t want to jump out of a plane. Do I want to be in a jungle? Do I want to Yeah, that’s cool. Man was bowling.

So you, obviously you selected to go to Georgia and to jump on a plane? What was that like?

It was okay. I mean, you know, it’s the army way. So they took three weeks to teach you something You could learn in a week.

So I did just a quick side note, in San Antonio, when I said that we were we were just there, but I did my training and so we would have to rotate here in our fellowship at Wilfrid Hall and Brooke army base, and they would totally crack jokes like that the whole time on each other.

Yeah, it’s inevitable, it never stops.

So it’s funny because, you know, you go through this training, and it’s, you know, it’s the army world and you just have to play ball for a few weeks. But it’s also the same training that that seals would go to after buds because it was the only sort of real formal, basic parachuting school to go to. Like the army would send their Rangers to or their airborne guys to that type of thing. Those guys would just stand there and laugh the whole time. I mean, the army, you know, sergeants running this program. They didn’t even know what to do with them, but this was just some box of seals had to check Normally there’d be you know two or four of those guys standing around and you wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole but you know you’re just trying to like not let the young soldiers notice these other kinds of guys out there and just try to keep them focused you know, because they’re they’re more instilling for their own people. You know procedure, repetitiveness, focus discipline that type of thing and you know, for for Navy guys at any level it was it was a different experience. I’m curious, since you’re doing this through the military and doing it their training do they teach you on different types of canopies? You know, you see the, the the jumpers from World War Two, they had the round canopy, we obviously there’s much different mord right. So again, it all goes back to the pool analogy. There’s the tadpole badge and the you know, the middle badge and the dolphin badge and with the army you start out with that very world war two classic round parachute with a little bit of steering capability. And so at in that three week program, you get five jumps and you Gotta you know, you want to land as many times as you jump out the door, you know without breaking breaking anything. Five john Scott, you the sort of traditional silver parachute wings, you might be familiar with him, you see him on some people’s uniforms. Then there’s opportunity later at least on the Navy side to get more advanced training. And then at those higher levels are the more demanding type of equipment or the super high altitudes with oxygen, all kinds of things. So it’s it’s very much a step by step process to become an expert in your field. Have you continued skydiving or anything like that since you left the Navy? Nope, I ended up just doing the the 10 jobs necessary in the Navy to get your goldwings but afterwards, this is a billion only one job since then. So you’re, you’re probably not up for doing the squirrel suit or anything else like that. Or that rebel guy that jumped from the atmosphere? Bob Gardner. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Hey, that guy’s fascinating. Go ahead. On down that fast he was spinning. Oh my god, I watched a documentary on that then I’ve saved that ever since there’s something about jumping just flat out from the just space. It just fascinates the hell out of me.

We talked about this that I am a there are I realized now that you’re everybody’s brain is different and I was referenced the free solo guy that you know climbed right El Capitan?

Yeah. in California.

Yeah. And they looked at as amygdala and it was very small. I’m all amygdala so the thought of jumping from the atmosphere.

Air of terrified to me

Yeah, man. That was crazy though. He I can’t remember how many records that he broke. He almost broke the longest tree fall. That was like the only one that he did. And I think he was the fastest in speed. I don’t know. I didn’t know you’re gonna bring him up or I would have look that stuff up. But

yeah, it

was I did not know that. We were going to talk about making fun of Army guys.

We could do that all day.

So after after Naval Academy what what kind of industry Did you hop into?

So when you come out you had a, at least a five year minimum commitment to the military as a junior officer. So I did, I had a great opportunity to do a very, very small niche thing, which was cryptology. And that’s just sort of a subset of Naval Intelligence in general. And I had very arduous duties in Scotland in Hawaii. plus, plus some cool opportunities to serve on British ships and go chase Russian submarines around and and do cool stuff like that at the end of the Cold War.

Now, just to put this in context, so at the end of the Cold War somewhere, we’re talking to you are doing the chasing the submarines post 88 is yes post 88. So think the Soviet Union fell around. Was it

about 92 ish

And so I was right at the tail end. So I had a, an academy experience that was 100% focused on the Soviet Union at the time. So hundred percent, you know, that was, you know, 4050 years of Well, probably 40 years at the time of Cold War. So that was, that was the mindset.

I mean, the mindset 50 years of just ingrained, like there’s people who spent their whole career and that was the one thing that they focused on. Then you come in, and there you are,

yeah, boom, and then you graduate and the whole world changed. So the dissolution of the USSR? Did y’all ever have to keep up with any of the states that had broken away? And they weren’t Russian? Right? So you know, prior to the break up, this is kinda interesting. So I was a, I was a watch officer in Scotland. And that meant that, you know, this this was a 24 seven operation of spying on the Soviet Navy, and some ancillary things. And in the process of the world has no idea this is going on the whole time. Now, right? So fast, right? So we had listening posts all around the world, and You were the specialist, that man those listening posts, trying to get, you know, what’s called indications and warning you wanted to, there was chances that if, if the, you know, if, if there was ever going to be world war three, there would be indications ahead of time of special kinds of Soviet activity. And that’s why you spied on them because there might be indications of big movements or unusual activities, and you’re looking for unusual patterns as an analyst. And if those things happened, then you might be able to warn the US from what you’re seeing ahead of what anybody else was doing. So we could prepare and response. So that was sort of the general mission back then. And one of those that actually what happened was, that’s when Yugoslavia broke up members, some of the satellite states were breaking up at the time. Yeah, Yugoslavia was one of them. And I just happened to be on watch that one moment where one of our criteria was, if there was certain kinds of activity you detected, you had less than 10 minutes to notify the White House and senior

had to make a decision. Yeah

and you know you’re you’re like 2223 year old Ensign or or Lieutenant jG in the Navy. You’re in charge like 90 people and it’s in your the it’s totally on you at two o’clock in the morning decided you’re going to call the White House

that sort of stuff right there for a second because we have not uncommon Lee will hire employees and something will happen. You know, it’s it’s happened with everybody where it’s that they don’t show up for work, they whatever, blah blah, blah. And the response usually is just a kid. They’re only 2523 about ready to declare war.

Yeah, texting you. That’s nuts. Yeah. So one of the things we do is we would spy on some of the Soviet merchant ships. And you could hear them communicating. And it just so happened at the time, like a Soviet merchant ship was going up a river, I think in Yugoslavia, and there were shots being fired on both sides. So the it’s this thing’s right in the middle with rockets and shots being you know, flying Over the ship to either side because the country was breaking up. So I mean by the book, you know, if you if you studied your craft, you realize this kind of met that criteria. So you send this special kind of report, and boom, you know, 10 minutes later, you’re waking up the world on this. Good. You are there. And I’m a part of that team that had to make that call. Yep. Oh, my. That’s wild. And it really is. That’s very intense. And it’s kind of interesting that we’ve got life you’re talking about his experience and watching the breakup of the USSR firsthand. A few weeks ago, we had a guy on here named Rick Moore. And he was working the first rock concert in Moscow. And it occurred right before the fall of the wall. Yeah, yeah, Gorky Park, and his interpretation of that as a civilian going over and taking those photos. So it’s crazy to hear that they had a bit right around the same time.

You’d be about three years after that. It sounds like it did. You’re watching the breakup of the country’s because I don’t remember how many there were in the USSR 19 or something like that. That

experience sounded almost identical except he was with a lot of women and cameras and rock stars and drinking. Yeah. And it sounds like you were holed up someplace alone at to it. Yeah,

just exactly the same.

Exactly.

So after after the, the call goes to yoga Slavia then How much longer are you doing the cryptology work for the for the naval. So I had the one tour after that in Hawaii. And then I decided to get out because from what I just witnessed, it’s the kind of career that as a young person, you get to do all the cool things on the front end. And then on the back end, if you ever get to be a captain or an Admiral. I think there’s there’s probably a lot of cool things that go along with that. But there’s an entire mid career, a good 10 years that you’re not really engaged with the operational side, like I was enjoying, in, you’re probably bored pouring coffee and buying time, you know, to see if you can become a senior officer later and that was just too long run for me to, to go ahead and recommit to that. So as soon as my commitment was up, I realized that, you know, I’d made a hard turn from who I was, as a kid to what it took to, you know, do well in a in a military environment with that type of responsibility. But all of my vocabulary at that point was strictly military. So I realized, you know, I was missing a whole other chunk of more normal life. How old are you at this point? Probably 28. And so, I went to business school as a way to both get more education than and also sort of D speak myself on on being to military about how the world work and and just get a bit of a use grad school to get a bit of bit of the college experience. I thought I’d Missed on. Yeah, I can understand that. So that was that was going to be one of my questions is how did you prepare yourself for the exit? Do you think that it was a full year before you decided that you’re going to call it quits in the military that you had said, I need to lay my foundation to get into the corporate world? Yep, it was exactly a year. So I basically put my notice in a year in advance to give enough notice to rotate out of that tour does just kind of curious, does the does the Navy, then approach you and say life you should really reconsider? Do they have kind of a exit interview process where they want to see if they can have some level of retention so that you don’t walk away? No, not in particular, although, you know, they, it was more about trying to get you to go into the reserves after that then to sort of keep your skills relatively fresh, keep your clearance active, you know, that type of thing. So this was also kind of come this was during the Clinton years at that point, and so they were also shrinking forces down they were even paying a lot of pilots and stuff big bonuses to leave. You know, that type of thing. So it’s very cyclical. So you wouldn’t get your MBA after that at Tulane. Correct, right. All right. Well, we’ve only got a minute left, where we wrap up this, this half hour will be back here in just a moment with life. But can you can join the Navy? Oh, man.

I just love the idea of a 23 year old making a decision like that, and him being on the front end to be able to tell people I’ve watched you the slavi go through this and I had to inform the US. And then suddenly cnn sitting there doing this, it’s a people forget what our what our veterans go through what our soldiers do and the responsibility put on them at a very young age. But

not only that, but the thing that I find most incredible about life and others like him that it started off with their military background training, is you are forced into roles of maturation quickly, and it’s no coincidence that people likely end up in positions like that they’re in now because you’ve, you’ve basically in the most formative of your years been forced to make critical decisions have competence and doing it and then moving forward. So no shock whatsoever.

Absolutely. So we’re going to get into that and talk about how alexson all brought a mind like yours in to legitimize the industry.

Absolutely. Okay, that’s the end of this half hour. We’ll see y’all in two minutes.

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Alright, we are now back with the last half hour to get your project episode number 13. And just breaking down a very awesome career path from our own life Harrison sitting to my right and life we just basically wrapped up a lot of what you had done in the Naval Academy and you prepared to leave the Navy via gaining your MBA Tulane University and then you moved into the corporate world. Obviously a lot more Different setting. How did you feel prepared as you embarked upon this, this new level of career?

Yeah, I guess what’s, what I wasn’t expecting was that sort of as a 30 year old, newly minted grad with an MBA that then, you know, you’re, I didn’t expect to start at the bottom. So in the corporate world, I wasn’t pouring coffee, but I wasn’t too far away from that either. So I was I was just thrown in the world of spreadsheets and 15 hour days, and just grinding, grinding grinding on that. It’s been a valuable tool that stayed with me since so I appreciate that part of it. But it was it was a hard switch. And I think it’s hard for a lot of that’s the responsibility and and the teams that they lead and what that meant as young people, and then you can start a pure civilian career and it’s just you as an individual. You’ve got some work assignments, and you’re like, you know what for you helped helps make you better in that new role. But that doesn’t mean that the new role understands any of that or even cares so much. So, you know, sometimes at 30, I was like a 20. I was doing way more than this.

And you’re your boss happens to be 22.

Right? Yeah. So then, you know, there were a few initial stops along the way. definitely got my feet wet. But as it turned out, this is funny. So when I joined the Navy at 17, I get a letter from my folks like a month later, and they’re like, we quit our jobs are starting our own business was like, Okay, I mean, they never gave me any clue about that. As soon as I was out of the house, I was an only child I was out. They just reset. So like I said, My dad was a pretty brilliant mechanical engineer. He’d actually invented a device, a new technology for railroads to help them predict definitely have a better idea when when a train might derail. Oh, and so he could actually analyze wheels on a train as it went down the track and tell you know what, that wheels about to go bad? And when it does, it’s going to cause the entire train to derail. Oh, geez. So he co invented that technology, and then started his own business and my mom who also happened to be an MBA at the time, the two of them opened up shop and turn that technology into their business for the next 20 years. Oh my gosh, that’s actually really impressive.

Whenever I hear any business I think about marketing How do you get that out there? What do you do and I just I don’t know, your dad, but like a one of those like weird commercials was like, Are you worried about your train de railing? We have the technology to prevent Yeah,

it’s just a big enough business with that when you’re the only ones in the world with that with a patented technology to deal with it. There’s enough there to keep the lights on. Wow, that’s awesome. That’s too bad. They weren’t able to use YouTube clips to make that happen. Just shoot their own commercials. So what was interesting is that that was the classic case of It took 10 years to be an overnight success,

always done.

By the time it was a success, they had grown just enough that it gave me an opportunity to go home and help them on the family business for like seven years and actually have some skills to actually make a difference. Wow, that’s awesome.

So then you did a couple other jobs. You were in sales? What was your favorite? So I’m seeing here you’re with a controller, your manager at jeppeson, which is a Boeing Company. Correct. And you were with them for three years? And then how did you end up at Alexa? So the whole reason we put this foundation of us because you have this complex background, you bring a lot of value to a company like elix and all that recently went public about a year ago or so. Right? Yep. And so they sought you out, you bring a ton of value to this company.

Yeah, I think I have a pattern of kind of.

I hit I hit it hard going in. I like all the learning that you have to do. And then maybe I get a little Bored once I think I figured something out, and I move on to the next thing. The difference here though, is that this is this is an aspect of business I’ve never seen before. There is, in all the other work I’ve ever done. You’ve had to beat the phones to help keep the business alive and try to grow it here. I don’t call anybody they call us. So there is so much demand for what’s going on here. Can we partner with you? that I that I sit here and have the only luxury I’ve ever had in my life of sifting through opportunities, deciding we like we like this opportunity, but we’re going to let that one sit aside I don’t have to chase everything and then take my chances are gonna be a lot more selective. So

the pretty girl and Tinder right

laughs

Yeah, lots of Left. Right. So

I think

I think with that is there’s there’s a responsibility to get it right. And it’s also to not repeat mistakes of the past, which is it looks to me in, in my view of the world that we’ve had some moments like tech in the late 90s. And but everybody knows how that kind of turned out and flamed out. And it was run by a lot of people who if you just kind of took a little bit of look under the hood, there wasn’t a whole lot of there there. And then finally, reality caught up with them in the market. This has that kind of fever in it on the front end. But we’re trying to professionalize the market so that there are actually legitimate, legitimate winners in this space, because they brought in the kinds of right people to work what I call a To me it’s like the phase two. Phase One was the startup back in 2014, when the farm bill passed and gave a little bit of breathing room to what you could do with hemp. Phase two was the second farm bill last December of 2018. That said, Okay, this is this can be more current commercialized. And now that it’s commercialized. It is drawing the attention of a lot of other sort of multi career path professionals who have gleaned a lot of experiences and a lot of other aspects of formal business to come into this world with marketing, operations, finance, business development, sales, all of that. They they kind of they have enough wisdom they believe along the way to say, these are tools and practices that work and these aren’t and they’re sort of helping the entrepreneurs that worked in phase one, to now have process processes in place certifications in place, formal plans in place, take money from the markets in and and with a fiduciary responsibility and a mindset to manage there’s those people’s money.

That’s That’s why I think your background is so important using the term fiduciary responsibility and you said I did spreadsheets in this job, I went back, I did this startup with my mom and dad, I did the whole thing at 23. Having this, you come into this thing. And every time the reason why I want to have you on the show is because when we talk to you, you talk very different. Everybody else is like, let’s strike while the iron is hot, let’s just do this, you’re like, let’s slow everything down. Let’s build a structure a framework, let’s build a long term plan. That’s why I want to science it up. That’s why you want to use the processes, you know, standard operating procedure to get this from point A to wherever you want to go. And I think that the key to somebody being really successful, is being able to link these different memories that you’ve developed along the way and implement this and I do believe that there’s going to be one or two major players in the end, and election all is going to be one of

them. Yeah, something else though, about life’s movement. I think life that just really emboldens your position on on taking those approaches in this particular industry. If we just back up time two decades ago, and you thought of someone who may have left a large Financial Group, or something like that they moved into internet, or some type of internet company. You think, man, that is a crazy move? What a what a wild move from a standard industry or a banking industry over to frontier. But you wouldn’t think anything about that today. If someone came from AOL and moved over to I don’t know, Dean Witter or something like that you wouldn’t think anything of it. You just say, oh, that that makes sense. That’s an established industry, it only makes sense are probably going to do some kind of application. I think where you’re at is one of the new frontiers that will will look back in 10 or 15 years ago. That’s a very established industry.

Well, let me just throw this at you as business development. What is your six month one year goals in this industry that is just a wild west right now.

Well, it’s trying to get other decision makers to consider saying no, for the first time, because they’ve had to say like any entrepreneur, they’ve had to say yes to everything, just to keep the doors open, and I respect that. But now you can be a little more selective, and you need to be because it’s not necessarily just your money anymore at stake, you have to be mindful of that. You have to now instead of worrying about am I going to get to Next, you know, to the fall, you know, it’s more like, what, what could our destination look like in three years? What should it look like in five years, and making it’s there’s such there’s enough white space of opportunity and all of this, that let’s start making some bets now that aren’t necessarily going to pay off immediately. But we think as the industry shakes itself out, these are the kinds of things you’ll look back on and go man, I’m glad we set that up three years ago because look what it did for us today. I think in hopefully I’m not speaking out of turn here, but would one of those be perfect application and research, I mean, hundred percent we spend. We’re sitting we are intentionally focused on areas like medical professionals and education to that audience who can then act like internal champions like a BMD to their audiences about the benefits of CBD. And at the same time, just always trying to answer the question, what can we do to bring a new user in who has questions? How can we honor their questions and educate them in a way that they feel like they can make a smart decision for themselves? Those are, those are two challenges. I don’t think we go one or two days without really being conscious of

you know, on that same note, I received an email from a friend who sent me an article from supermarket news, trying to address some of the top concerns that retailers and customers have. And one of the questions that I’m looking at right here as I hear that a lot of hemp CBD products are testing poorly. What about brands And retailer concerns about supply integrity. And I think that’s one of the things that you have to differentiate yourself because there are a lot of people talking a lot of crap. And retailers want to be able to be able to explain the story to the consumer that comes into consumer wants to know that what they’re getting. So the brand itself when you say three and five year when you become the Kleenex of the industry, and that’s what we want to be without trying to we want to be the Kleenex of gut health, it’s the same thing of eventually that name sticks out because of the integrity.

Right. So like on the retail side, because of the last farm bill, the large retail chains, the national chains, don’t want to be too late to the party, maybe not necessarily the first one out of the gate, but probably not the third or fourth one either. I mean, they’re really looking for the sweet spot. So we are constantly in front of audiences like this constantly making the case with with with very specific messaging that they, they can then turn around to their own decision makers. And repeat that messaging as internal champions. I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s a sales process that works. But it’s also we need to keep it anchored in in truth and integrity at all stages. And we have found that whether we’ve won opportunities for lost opportunities, we clearly have gained the respect of audiences we’ve spoken to who say, you know what, yeah, we might have gone with the other guy. But we have a feeling we are, you know, we don’t know if this will work. But we have laid such a baseline down of reputation, that I think it’s only a matter of time before they before they come home to somebody who’s going to be there for the long term, and then the long term ties into the supply question. So testing, bad results, all of that stuff. It’s a it’s a game that alexson all never played. It’s always spent whatever money is needed to spend to get the independent third party testing it needs and publishing those results from day one. As soon as a product hits the market, that what’s in that bottle or what’s in that tube, is what the label says it is. And then here’s the independent third party tab that you can go to the website, click on approve. That’s what that is. So we can’t fix the rest of the world, all we can do is set a standard that says at the end of the day, this is who we are. And I guarantee you that the larger corporations in the world do not want to mess around with anything on their supplier side that doesn’t meet those standards. So it’s the certifications, it’s the processes. It’s getting corporate to some degree, which can be a bad word to people. But again, it’s really about applying lessons that matter across time. And if and when you’re in a phase two growth phase, these are the new responsibilities you have to take on which is why you have to you have to go outside at times to sort of professionalize the industry. Yeah, absolutely. everything you just said I thought was just amazing. That makes sense. Do you find the the the opportunities with other technically competitors, but probably other good actors in the business is using them as allies is something is y’all develop this frontier that they become, y’all basically lean on each other to, to make some of these advances. I think it’s we’re early enough right now that we’re all still competitors, because there’s a lot of ground to stick out. However, I think the markets over time will act like they do. And when they do, even the competitors are going to find that sort of a co op petition will be the, the mechanism by which if they’re, if they’re not going to emerge, they need to coexist. So like Pepsi and Coke share coexist, there may only end up being two or three big players. When this is all said and done. It looks and all it’s going about it a little differently. We’re a little more global in nature, and at the expense of quarterly by quarterly profit performance. But we’re playing the long game and I don’t know that anyone else is to the degree that we are. So did you find that going into a new frontier industry were previously doing corporate work right out of the Navy, you said that you were probably in a lower level job and then anything you’d had exposure within the Navy and kind of had to work your way up. And then of course, you parlay that into the different positions that you took that led you to elix and all and joining the hemp industry. Do you find that kind of being a frontier has been kind of a thrust back or a little bit more of a hybrid setting? I am drawing on skills that I i thought i’d long since forgotten that’s how it is. It is you need a bit of a wild west mentality, but you need to remember where you came from. You need to be disciplined when when other people necessarily aren’t. You need to learn Say no in a room, when when they’ve not heard that before, you can’t chase everything down. But if you do commit to chase, then you chase it the right way. You chase it with an engagement on the front end and the middle in the back end.

With

well prepared thoughts, well prepared documents well researched, well argued. And it’s, the workload is higher than I’ve ever seen it in, in job I’ve ever been before. But you can win if you just have the endurance to keep working harder now than you ever have

ever have.

Wow, it just seems like that whenever you were in the Navy and talking about your naval experience, and then going over listening to the Russians that you had really critical decisions that had to be made. And then suddenly, you’re thrust into this corporate world where lots of it has kind of been done multiple times over. And so you, everybody kind of does some level, not that you didn’t work but you work where your sandbox is, and now you’re back into this. A wild Industry well a lot of people are waiting on you to make a big decision. It’s it’s a constant tension between winging it on what your gut says. And making decisions based on sound information. And that that tension is always there. But I think whoever in this industry dials that incorrectly is going to come out on top. That is really interesting because the Cold War right now for the hemp industry is just the right permissions to be allowed. And for the right things to happen for banking.

Yeah. Do you ever get frustrated when you see just so many companies MLM is people just making claims people doing the things that you’re purposely not doing? You’re doing things on the up and up? I mean, do you even is that just white noise to you? Do you just not care?

It is white noise and and because there’s so much workload, I don’t have much bandwidth left to even pay attention to any of that. And that’s probably a good thing because would probably drive me nuts.

It’s always funny because when I whenever I put an My patients on CBD in they’re like, Oh, well I’m on this and it costs this I’m like how many milligrams and then you realize there’s all this gamesmanship and the pricing, there’s gamesmanship in the marketing that’s, you have no idea that they don’t even list the CBD, you know, milligrams, all that stuff. Do you have a certificate of analysis? No. And you have to go through and explain all that. And I’m like this is this is an interesting industry when it becomes standardized when when we hit Christmas song on where he said, I think that we need to change the label we need to make make it so it’s much more obvious what the milligrams are and where it is, which companies have co ways which these things because that’s I think the industry is changing, almost on a monthly basis.

That’s critical part. And I think it’s actually the first to two parts. The second part is it appears expensive, but compared to what, what other pills are you on? What other things you trying to target, how much is all that stuff costing you when you’re taking a regiment of eight or 10 or 12 different things physically recommend it or not to, you know, to basically not cure what ails you but just really manage what ails you? Well, here’s this other thing, that if you if you look at it on sort of a value proposition, you know, a cost per effect. I am hard pressed even even just from a putting an old financial analyst hat on, I am hard pressed to figure out a way that you aren’t actually saving money in the long run by getting by paying for the high end, quality full spectrum CBD, given what you then get to set aside that’s been your regimen in a whole bunch of other areas with side effects and compounding effects. And really, you know, my wife is a disabled vet, injured in army training and she’s had multiple surgeries. If you’re not waiting for the VA, you’re just given bags and bags of hard drugs. And all it’s doing is masking a problem creating for other ones to get your mind off something central that’s not being fixed. So, again, if people are going to talk about the cost of the of the high quality high proven CBD, then I just say compared to what?

Well, what’s interesting is when you get consumer labs at whole analysis, and the ilecs, and all actually milligram, milligram in quality is one of the most cost effective CBD milligram, two milligram they did a whole analysis on this great article on that. Getting back to your talk about how what is the actual cost? Well, that’s what I deal with. When I have patients I have the luxury of having somebody that we diagnosed with ulcerative part Titus, and a drug called canasa cost 1500 dollars a month. And we’re going to end up publishing a case series here shortly about how we have shown both endoscopic and pathologic remission, using essentially whatever would be at the time we were we did One month. So for 79 bucks, we put you into remission

with that, and they had real relief.

Yeah. And this is not a disease claim. This is just here is the endoscopic picture. Here’s the pathologic, yeah. If you cannot go get those drugs, then we have an alternative solution.

That brings up another point we were talking. Just yesterday, that article that McWilliams sent over there brought up the perceptions of what a retailer has to take into consideration in life, obviously, handling the business and for ilecs. And all I’m sure these are challenges that you come up against, but kinji me does it kind of left out to you whenever we were read through that.

Well, it’s a very interesting article because it was the article stated at seven retailer and brand owner questions answered about hemp CBD. And, you know, one of the simple ones is how is it made, and so it goes into a little bit about that. That’s not what we have you here for. We’re talking about some of these different delete positions that’s changing. I mean, from a. I mean, from a business development perspective, when you suddenly have a bill change or a state adopt something, you’re you have to pivot and move that way or move accordingly. And that’s not an easy thing from a business development standpoint, you’ve got so many different things. Well, it’s like the wind changing on your boat, right? I mean, you just have to adapt.

Yeah, we might not even really be in the first 10% of this whole journey yet. So I’m not a retail specialist. But you know, I do I do have a general sense that people walk into a target or a Walmart and there’s price points in their head because of their experience of being in targets and Walmart’s so you know, something that might be above $40 in those venues, is sticker shock, because they’re just not using to spend anything more than that when they walk in there. So there is a challenge that to get on retail shelves. You know, we’re either shrink The bottle down to a $40 price point, or we’re giving them the power of volume but maybe at sticker shock for the person that’s walking in. So that’s another challenge in the mind shift that has to occur that if you’re talking about being proactive about your own wellness, and then comparing that to what your alternatives are in, in the pain management space,

that this is actually a a, a value way out both in health and cost to manage your own future. But we’re probably still a long way there from having that be a common mindshare. That’s pretty wild. Because if you if you’re able to put it in, you use this word last hour, which is context put into context what cost is, it’s far more than cash out of your pocket, quality of life, the one thing that you can value more than anything is going to be time and if your time is high quality, that’s good time spent but if your time Fortunately is spent in pain or where you cannot enjoy your life, your quality of life is low. That’s what we’re all trying to avoid. That’s what we want to escape for not only yourself, but for your loved ones. And if you can just use a little bit of cash to buy a lot more good qL quality of life, it’s worth it. And that level of exchange is what people don’t know when they see that sticker shock. And can you had that issue with patients at the clinic if first when we were first using the ilecs and all once you determine it worked best in your patients, we had the four ounce bottle and the sticker shock. I was like, I’d love to try it. But it’s it’s a little bit hard for me to grab it. So actually, they paid a little bit more per milligram to get a smaller step in. And now they

do yeah, that’s the that’s the KPMG model and that you know people do when they get that so now we have a little built in deal where if somebody goes to KB MD dot docket KMD health.com. You know, we build it in so that I understand That when I put people on this, I tell everybody I tell my patients I said, Look, I need you to commit to this. Don’t try it once and say it didn’t work. Same thing without trying to don’t take one tablet go it didn’t work, right? Because it is the same thing with pharmaceuticals. All the studies have always shown whenever we do a study on anything that it can take up to X amount of weeks to work, blah, blah, blah. So I tell everybody, I’ve been thinking of your endocannabinoid system, like a sponge, if it’s really dry, you may require longer and and more amounts to really saturate it. Once you’re saturated, you’re going to feel like a new person. And depending on what those issues are, the problem is is this white noise everybody says that fixes this it fixes that. We know and an hour ago, we talked about leaky gut, not saying that it fixes leaky gut, I’m telling you a mechanism in a research model, how it actually binds to certain receptors to do this. Hence, when somebody comes back and says, Hey, I feel better. I believe that the combination of Toronto and KMD ellickson all branded hemp oil is meant to work together. And that’s what’s really cool because I see that success. Specially my Crohn’s and colitis people,

I see it whenever they come through for the scopes, and they give us the report that I feel better or we certainly can’t mention names. But we had the one gentleman who suffered from from Crohn’s for a long time who had been anemic for years, and suddenly now he’s not. And the only things that have changed. It wasn’t diet. He’d already been adhering to that, essentially, just

Yeah, my only disappointment with it now is that my staff has gotten so good. And obviously we take time to do the show and stuff. And so I have my my physician assistant, Megan, who’s gotten good enough that now when I see people’s like, hey, let me tell you about CBD. And they’re like, yeah, I’m on it. So I lose the ability to do the whole, like, Megan’s getting pretty good at putting people on this. Okay. You know, because it’s a little bit of a dopamine increase when I get a chance to talk about it.

Yeah, definitely. Well, life, believe it or not, that’s already been two hours, and I can’t thank you enough for For riding your horse all the way down from Colorado yeah to join us here in in Texas. What did you have that you had a comment about the air conditioning in our little studio here? What was that? That it’s like ice station zebra

classical Navy rockets and movie. Yeah, well I don’t have that one in my viewing pleasure

usually we tend to quote movies but yeah I haven’t seen

you did list tombstone as is one of your favorite movies also classic Yeah that one that one came with your favorite tombstone lines of a doc holiday.

I’ll be your Huckleberry.

Yeah, that’s that’s that’s most people’s go to move. Mine is.

You tell him I’m coming. And Hell’s coming with me?

Well, I here at the end of the show. There’s also the one where he says while By

the way, thank you so much for coming down. I love the fact that Elixinol has grabbed you from the corporate world and you’ve got you got your work cut out for

Episode 13 is in the books late. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. We will see y’all next week.