The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #334 - 2025 Best Of Part 2

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

There is a causal link between having a purpose and a why or a reason to live and longevity. So it does have a positive effect on your physical health as well. There's only one way to get rid of excess iron in the human body, and that's through blood loss.


And that's why there is heavy bleeding in some situations, because the body's really smart and knows, this mom has too much iron. Let's get rid of it. She didn't mention changing cologne. She didn't mention changing body care.


It was just his natural smell, his natural odor was so different. She said she felt like she was making love to a stranger. That's how powerful smell is. Welcome to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more.


Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein.


So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this. Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Friends, we are here part two of the best of episodes for the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast 2025.


I hope you guys enjoyed last week's episode, part one. We had an array of stunning guests as we revisited some of my favorite moments from the show this year, and here we go again for the rest of them.


Words cannot describe my undying gratitude that I have for all of you. I could not do this show without you. It is always such a pleasure, such an honor, and so surreal to fake out these clips each year.


I'm so grateful for the opportunity to create this show, to learn from these incredible guests, and to share it with you guys. I hope you all had the most beautiful of 2025s. I'm wishing you a sparkling 2026.


I'm personally super excited about 2026. We have some incredible guests coming next year and I'll be finally launching my coffee line, Glow Coffee, which is exciting. Definitely get on my email list for all the announcements about that.


That's at glowcoffeeco.com. And also hopefully moving forward on my dating app development. So basically, I am just so, so excited. Please stick around with me for that journey. I can't wait to share all of it with you.


And now without further ado, please enjoy these wonderful memories from the podcast in 2025. What better way to start off part two than with a clip from my conversation with the legendary Kate Shanahan?


She is most likely the reason you might be concerned about seed oils. I was a fan of Kate for years and years, ever since I read her incredible book, Deep Nutrition. And then I had her on the show as well for her prior book, The Fat Burn Fix.


And in this special clip from episode 300, we talk about her newest book, Dark Calories. In this clip, we talk about how and why she picked the hateful eight, basically the vegetable oils you need to avoid, and why olive oil and peanut oil are okay.


Let's answer that by talking about exactly what are the problematic oils, because we have to understand that before we can go any further with our understanding of what these things are doing to us. I used to use the word vegetable oil.


I no longer use that. It's not precise enough. I realized we need to be exactly clear on which oils we're talking about. And I created this term called the Hateful Eight. The Hateful Eight because there are eight bad oils.


And I'm going to list them out for you. And then I'm going to tell you how I picked these eight because that is the key to understand. So from there, we can start to understand what they do to our bodies.


So the eight are corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grapeseed. So I didn't list sesame and I didn't list peanut. A lot of people think you have to avoid those. I would disagree.


If we're talking about, there's a caveat, if we're talking about teaching, unrefined peanut oil, and unrefined sesame oil, those are part of a healthy diet. Now, we can get into later, like, okay, but what about the total poofo content and all that sort of stuff?


That's something to talk about later. First, let's understand why I picked those out. And it has to do with the fact that other than possibly sunflower oil, none of the eight are historical food, like are historical oils, right?


None of the eight oil seeds, the corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice burning, and grape seed. None of those eight, some of them we might have eaten as a seed, right? We ate soy and we ate sunflower, but we didn't eat the oils to any degree until the industrial era.


Why is that? Well, that's because you can't easily extract an edible oil from these things. You need machinery, and generally, you need dangerously high heat. And often they use solvents to make it more efficient.


And of course, the solvents are hexane, which are toxic. But the hexane and the added things are not the problem. It's not the source of the toxin. So what happens is that in the factory, because of the heat and because of the other things that are removed from the oil that are not removed from virgin olive oil or virgin peanut oil, what you get is a naked triglycerides.


Naked triglycerides. You're not getting a real oil. So human beings have never consumed naked triglycerides. Triglycerides are just the fat. What other things does olive oil have and traditional fats have other than triglycerides?


Very important things that prevent oxidation, that's what. And we call them, they've got a bunch of names. Some of them are just called antioxidants. We call them also phytonutrients, phytosterols related to cholesterol molecules, lecithins, phospholipids, cholines, vitamins, all of those things, even minerals, all of those things, with the possible exception of minerals, help to stabilize and protect the triglyceride fat from being oxidized.


Okay. But all of that's gone in these hateful A. That is not the case for olive oil. It's not the case for unrefined peanut oil. It's not the case for unrefined sesame oil. All of those unrefined virgin oils that are edible have these protective factors that slow down oxidation to the extent that the oil will last a year before you get significant or more even, before you get significant amounts of problematic amounts of deterioration of those triglyceride fats.


And this has to do with the polyansaturates, right? So polyansaturates is probably a term that your audience is familiar with. Yeah. So those polyansaturates, they oxidize easily, right? They react with oxygen easily.


That's the source of the toxin in the hateful eight-seed oils. When the polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are fragile, they basically break when they react with oxygen and they break into, it's kind of like breaking a glass.


That's the analogy I make. Like a glass that you drink water from is useful, but it's fragile. The polyunsaturates in canola oil, corn oil, et cetera, are useful to our bodies when consumed in reasonable amounts, but they're fragile.


And when you, it's like smashing a glass, like oxygen does to them what a hammer does to a glass. It creates shards that are no longer useful and actually quite dangerous. You don't want to be walking on broken glass.


You don't want to be eating those broken molecules. You don't want them in your food. Right. So it doesn't occur in oils like olive because of several reasons that have to do with the breeding, thousands and thousands of years of careful breeding, so that we created oils.


I mean, we created olive fruit that yielded its oil without high heat. Plus, the olive oil itself has fewer of those fragile polyunsaturated fatty acids. It's less prone to oxidizing into toxins. And then it has all those stabilizing factors.


So it's not in any way familiar or similar to canola oil. But the dieticians and nutritionists say, well, if you can't afford olive oil, just buy canola. That is wrong. That is nutritionally inaccurate.


And it's absurd that the dietitians and nutritionists are not educated properly. And it's absurd that they aren't curious to dig down a little bit deeper into why is Dr. Kate saying this about oxidation?


What is all this business about oxidation? They're not doing it. That makes them irresponsible. Okay, friends, I am so excited about this next guest. He possibly is one of my favorite humans. He's definitely in the top 10, maybe top five, for fascinating humans that makes me basically die from laughter.


I am talking about A.J. Jacobs. I originally had him on the show for his book The Puzzler, which is a hysterical account of, according to the subtitle, one man's quest to solve the most baffling puzzles ever, from crosswords to jigsaws to the meaning of life.


It was so funny and so inspiring and eye-opening. I knew I simply had to have him back for his newest book, The Year of Living Constitutionally, One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's original meaning.


Friends, I love this book for so many reasons. First of all, I realized how little I knew about the Constitution. This book will give you an entire run-through of the entire Constitution in a way that is both hysterical, so-so-fun, and adventure, and eye-opening.


That's because AJ spent an entire year trying to live according to the original Constitution, like letter for letter. To give you a glimpse of the shenanigans that this entails, in this clip from episode 296, we talk about how the Constitution grants rights to being a legal pirate and how A.J.


Jacobs attempted to do that. One of my favorite parts of the book was you talk about the privateering. Yeah, I love that part. I love that adventure. And that, as you say, that's an example of how different life was.


Because in the Constitution, Article 1, it talks about your right as a citizen to become a pirate. They don't call it pirate. They call it privateer, but it's essentially a pirate. And what it means is that you can apply to Congress and say, I've got this fishing boat.


I would like to go out onto the seas and attack enemy boats and keep the booty. I want to keep, you know, whatever it is, whether it's liquor, a lot of times it was liquor or supplies or guns or uniforms.


And this was incredibly important at the founding because in the revolution, we did not have much of a navy. So we had to rely on private citizens like fishing boats and whaling boats to go out there.


There were 2,000 private citizens, thousands of them, and they captured over 2,000 British ships. And we would not have won the revolution without these privateers. So, of course, they were huge, and they had to be in the Constitution.


Now, this has not, no one has been granted a license to be a privateer since about 1812, 1813. But since it's still in the Constitution, I thought as part of my project, maybe I should try. So that was one of my more interesting, I actually got a meeting with a congressman from California and I said, I would like to request a letter of mark and reprisal because that's the technical name.


And he said, Rocana is his name from California. He said, great. How can we make that happen? And then he was like, wait, what is a letter of mark and reprisal? And I explained to him and he's like, oh, well, that might be a little more complicated.


But he actually liked the premise of my book. So he actually tried to help me and went to other congresspeople. And it hasn't taken off, let's say. But his aide still emails me as Captain Jacobs. So I feel I accomplished something.


It's so funny. It sounds similar. I feel like the closest thing in modern times would be when they, like when there's an invasive species or something and they give a temporary time where you can go and we have a place in Sandibo Island in Florida and I remember there was an alligator attack when I was little and there was like this brief amount of time after that where they're like, you can just go and kill all the alligators like people could.


Wow. Did your family do that? No. No. No. But I just remember there was, yeah, like, and there's like a time limit, but it's like, you know, normal citizens could go and do that. That's a great point.


Yeah, you're right. It's sort of outsourcing law enforcement or animal enforcement to private citizens. So like un-amending an amendment. So why is that still in there when it clearly seems a little bit archaic?


But like the only one that was undone was the prohibition amendment, right? Right. Exactly. They said, oops, sorry about that. I think it hasn't become a problem. I mean, if Congress started allowing thousands of people to be pirates tomorrow, then there might be a movement to try to get it stricken.


But since no one but me has applied, I think that they just don't have it as a priority. Okay, friends, I hope you got just as many laughs out of that as I did. And up next, we now have a true legend returning to the show.


That is Dr. Stephen Gundry. Does the man even need an introduction? He is the founder of the concept of the plant paradox. He has so many books and I've had him on the show multiple times. In this clip from episode 297, I had him on the show for his newest book, The Gut-Brain Paradox, which, as you might guess, talks about the mind-blowing connection between our gut and our brain.


I really like what we talk about in this next clip, which is the role of nicotine and wine in longevity. I got into, I guess, a lot of controversy when I suggested in Gut Check that one of the reasons that four out of the five blue zones were at incredible longevity was the fact that they were all heavy smokers.


I'm a heart surgeon and I've never had a cigarette in my life. I think I've tried two cigars and didn't like it. But so I would never, ever suggest to anyone that they smoke. On the other hand, I make the case, based on evidence, that nicotine has incredible ability to produce mitochondrial uncoupling, which I happen to think is one of the key factors in longevity and mitochondrial health.


And isn't it odd that four of the vibluzones are heavy smokers? In fact, like Sardinia is a wonderful example. The only part of Sardinia that has exceptional longevity are the people who live in the mountains.


The folks who live down by the water don't have exceptional longevity. And the reason they have exceptional longevity is that the men, 95% of the men smoke, and only about 25% of the women smoke. And it's the men who, men in general, live about seven years shorter lives than women.


You guys are the greater sex. But there, the men actually live longer than the women. I was first turned onto this years ago with the study of the Catavans, which are an island race in Pepe, New Guinea.


And the Catavens have exceptional longevity, but they are heavy smokers. They smoke like fiends. And what was interesting about them that caught researchers' eyes was that there has never been a case in Catawba of heart disease, stroke, or cancer, despite the fact that these guys were heavy smokers.


And so you go, well, it must be, you know, they eat all these antioxidant rich foods. And smoking really causes oxidative stress. And that's why I'm really, really against smoking. But one of the interesting things about these people who are heavy smokers and have longevity is they eat incredibly rich antioxidant diet.


And I propose to people that these people have mitigated to a large degree the negative effects of tobacco smoking because of their antioxidant-rich diets. Now, so nicotine is a really unique mitochondrial coupler.


You're right, nicotine patches may very well have a place in, and certainly a number of biohackers, Dave Asprey comes to mind, are big proponents of the use of nicotine. Dave likes to joke, not really, that almost all of the great contributions to literature, science, whatever, was because of three drugs, caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine.


So, but anyhow, so no, please don't smoke, but nicotine needs our interest. Now, the question is, there is a nicotine-seeking microbiome. Now, the question is, I'm not convinced that nicotine per se is addictive, but it may be that nicotine does have an effect on the microbiome in a way that will make you go seek out more nicotine.


I think it's too early to tell. I think those experiments need to be done by people. But let's not throw nicotine under the bus. Let's throw tobacco smoking and vaping under the bus. Nicotine is very interesting.


Yeah, I'm fascinated by it. I actually, I was recording with Dave in his studio, and we had a little debate about nicotine versus alcohol because I love my nicotine. I also love my dry form wines. He's not a huge alcohol fan.


Well, you know, there's a very interesting paper since alcohol has become up as the evil of all evils. There's a very interesting paper that's been done in humans where they gave humans red wine, grape juice, or gin in equivalent calorie amounts.


And looking specifically at the microbiome and at inflammation. And interestingly, the folks who got the red wine had a much more diverse microbiome and less inflammation. Grape juice really had no effect.


And gin actually hurt the microbiome and produced more inflammation. So I think we have to take this in context. Four out of the five blue zones use alcohol as a part of their diet. But it's fermented alcohol.


It's sake in the case of Okinawa, but it's red wine and all of the other blue zones. And Loma Linda is the exception. But having been a professor at Loma Linda for much of my career, I can assure you that a great number of the Adventists in the privacy of their own home consume wine.


All right, friends, get excited for this next guest, which is a type of guest I have never had on the show before. I'm talking one of the world's top supermodels. Grace Valentine is a truly stunning human being inside and out, and I had them on the show to talk about their life as a top supermodel, and in particular, their mental health and wellness, including a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder,


and their experience with therapeutic ketamine, which truly gave them their life back. When I say top supermodel, I mean top supermodel. Grace actually went viral when they took off their shoes on the Fendi runway because they were, quote, uncomfortable.


And the week I interviewed Grace, they had a shoot in Vogue magazine. In this clip, I talk with Grace about where their confidence comes from. And Grace shared so much incredible insight about how they maintain their confidence, and in particular, how they interact with social media.


Definitely check out the full episode because we talk about so many other things, including Grace's travel hacks and how they experienced a whole new world of mental health after using ketamine. And by the way, Grace is not related to our later guest, Steve Valentine.


Without further ado, please enjoy this clip from episode 299. It's definitely real. I know it took me a minute to get here, but it also, like, I think largely is because I separate the job from my ego.


Yeah, I think that's really important of me. I never let it impact who I am. And I think, you know, that's why my confidence stays the same. Because the work that I do, even though it's rather impressive, it still is not everything to who I am.


And then even like on the negative side, like getting a negative comment or whatever, like it still doesn't, you know, go through that barrier that I've built around myself to have that confidence. I love this so much.


Speaking of negative comments, do you get on social media and look at things like that? Or how do you engage in a healthy way with that? Yeah, I'm really not big on the whole social media thing, actually.


I will have moments where I'll completely deactivate my Instagram. Like, you can't even find my account. I think that's the healthiest thing for me and my mental health, to just not pay attention to social media, you know, looking up my name, looking up comments, things like that.


But even at that, like, when those happen, I tend to brush them off really easily because, you know, I've experienced that throughout my entire life. Yeah, it's just gotten to a point where it's like, it's so tiring that I just don't even let it get to me anymore.


And the people saying these things don't know me on a personal level either. And they're coming from my appearance, which I think is like also like the least interesting thing about myself and about people.


So how, like, I don't know, how, how impactful can their comments be if that's how I see it? I love hearing that, especially the dichotomy of, you know, you saying your appearance is the, you know, the least impactful or important thing here when people idolize runway models and would give anything for that one appearance aspect.


And so it's really empowering to hear, you know, that that's not the be all end all. So you've hinted at it a few times earlier. You're saying something about your thoughts on body image and, you know, and just now things that you've gone through.


So your personal story growing up and getting into, you know, what you experienced with friends and mental health and wellness, what happened in your childhood involving those issues? So, yeah, with my appearance, I mean, just, you know, the typical kind of bullying.


It was never physical, but more like words. And, you know, words stick. Things like, oh, you look like a monkey, oh, you're so thin. Like, just, just stuff that you really kind of take into consideration when you're hearing growing up.


But I knew those things weren't important. I knew people saying those things, it was more a reflection of them and how they feel about themselves. And like, although like, yeah, it still hurt to hear, it just wasn't like everything.


I never became obsessed over it or like tried to change those things. I was still very much myself. I've never not been myself. I've never struggled to not be myself. And I think that's a great thing.


I think that's paid off in the long run to not try to like fit into whatever people want me to be. But yeah, growing up with that appearance aspect. Yeah, I don't know. It was not really something I really focused on that much.


All right, friends. Up next, we have an incredible human, Jeff Krasno. He is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, an online platform for personal and societal well-being. He also hosts the Commune podcast, where he has the world's top guests on the show and puts on a lot of in-person events for health and wellness.


I had him on the show for his incredible book, Good Stress, The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things. In this clip from episode 307, we talk about the unappreciated, potentially best benefit of fasting, it might not be what you think, and also the benefits of stressful conversations.


It provides that space that Viktor Frankl described between stimulus and response. In that space is your choice, and in that choice is your potential freedom or liberation. And yeah, we often extol the many, many physiological virtues of fasting, from autophagy to ketosis, to mitobiogenesis, to the development of metabolic flexibility, to weight management, to activation of the Sirtuin pathway.


I don't know, keep going. And I'd like to geek out on all that stuff. But, you know, as I wrote in the book, I think one of the most potent impacts is this requirement to actually witness the source of your hunger.


Because if you consolidate all your consumption of food into an eight-hour window, that doesn't mean you don't get hungry outside of that window. You do. But because you've adopted this practice, because you become a disciple to it, that you actually have to examine the nature of that hunger and untangle whether or not it is a biological need or an emotional desire.


And in our day and age, I would say 99.99% it's an emotional desire. I mean, certainly for me, you know, I'm fit, but there's plenty of warehoused energy on my body. You know, meandering to the larder is not compulsory for me to biologically exist.


I'm generally eating at 9 p.m. because I'm bored or feel dissatisfied or someone insulted me, something's not going well at work, you know, whatever, fill in the blank. I'm eating my feelings. And really getting clear and kind of witnessing the provenance of that stimulus gave me a certain capacity, a space that I could apply in other areas of my life where it's like, do I really, really need to check Instagram for the 50th time today?


Do I really need that? Do I really need to address my feelings of perceived efficiency through retail therapy on Amazon or through, you know, grabbing that second or third glass of wine or, you know, reacting in a knee-jerk and maladaptive way to my children, for example.


So these, again, similar to cold water therapy, kind of intermittent fasting can provide you with a certain amount of emotional resilience, a certain amount of space to make better, more adaptive and appropriate decisions.


Yeah. And it extends to everything. Like you said, the shopping addiction, the Instagram, the my favorite, probably, no, I don't want to see my favorite. One of my favorite chapters was your stressful conversations chapter and, you know, the stimulus response with engaging with people and how to have listeners who have to get the book because after our conversation.


So the book has a ton of, has a lot of this, what we've been talking about, and it has a lot of, you know, a lot of science and protocols and how to integrate all of these different things into your life and, you know, how to do the cold therapy and the sauna and a whole chapter on xenohermetics and stress plants and the stressful conversation one, which is how to actually have hard conversations,


which you make the argument, which I thought was brilliant and I had never heard before, that's actually a form of hormetic stress, having stressful conversations. Yeah, I began to apply this concept of leaning into one's discomfort to other areas of life that weren't just, you know, physiological adversity, mimetics, and trying to actually embrace the things that are hard that we generally avoid.


And one of those is having hard, thorny conversations, especially with the people that we love, right? Parents and friends and partners and children, but also with people that we don't know. You know, our society now is so characterized by kind of anonymous digital warriorship where, you know, people just throw vitriolic barbs across social media at each other kind of all day in the most kind of odious and certainly unprofitable way.


What if we tried a different approach? I mean, I think a lot of these things come back to my question of like, how did I evolve? I evolved in tribe of 80, 90, 100 people. Didn't mean that we didn't have conflict.


We certainly did. But we actually had to come face to face and resolve our differences and find compromise and common ground and recognize our common humanity. And so I started to do that. And I engaged in, as a form of research and development, I suppose, in 26 hour-long conversations with people that didn't agree with me about something or another.


And kind of through that process, built a protocol for having these stressful conversations that has become incredibly useful. You know, we have to, you know, we go to the gym to build our biceps and through a little bit of stress and a little bit of rest, they grow back bigger.


That same concept can be applied to one's kind of psychosocial life. So, you know, I started to embrace these stressful conversations. And yeah, if you kind of get into the book, you see that there's an actual protocol for having them.


Friends, reading the book of Our Next Guest had a profound effect on my personal life. It truly changed the way I see the world when it comes to power dynamics between people. She is an incredible woman who has applied the insights she has learned from being a dominatrix to how that applies to everyday relationships.


Her book is called Unbound and I cannot recommend it enough. In this clip from episode 312, we talk about how as humans we interact in a dominant or submissive state and how it is all determined by your state of attention, basically whether it's placed inward or outward.


This will truly change your life when it comes to interpreting how you're interacting with people. Definitely check out the full episode because you will learn so much, including other things like what makes the good girl stereotype and the problems with that and how you can use questions to get what you want in life.


This is going to make things a little bit complicated for all of you listening who haven't heard a definition of what I mean by dominant submissive. First, submissive is not less powerful. It's only less powerful when you don't know you're doing it and you're not doing it right.


Same thing with dominant. If you're not fully aligned with leading, you're going to be really bad at it. It's not a powerful state. So I wanted to clarify that. The second thing is women are actually trained to be bad submissives.


So the default state of attention going inward when something goes awry. When something goes awry in an interaction, in a situation, we generally need our attention out. There is a panic vigilant overdrive that some people have, regardless of gender, that bypasses that.


But to keep things a little bit more simple at this point of the conversation, I want you to think of it this way. There is this way that we are all taught to engage with the outside world. And the way that we are taught to engage with this outside world affects our ability to shape our reality.


Being able to go inward and do the work is super important. Being able to go outward, talk to people, enroll people, get people on your side, have them collaborate with you is also super important. Both are forms of power.


You got to know which one you're doing when. If you're in a bad inward state, what I mean by bad submissive, bad inward, is if you need to communicate something to somebody, you need them to understand.


But instead of communicating, at that moment, you're choosing to express yourself, which means wantonly, recklessly talking about all your feelings and not paying attention to how it's landing. Then you're doing a bad job of communicating.


You got to know which one you're doing. Sometimes you need to have a safe space to go inward, right? Submissive, inward, and express yourself just to know how you're feeling. Then you ask for somebody to hold space or you go to a safe space where you journal, right?


You figure it out. You feel it. You talk it out. You talk it to understand it. If that, if this is a high-stakes situation, you don't want to express, expressing versus communicating. You want to communicate.


You want to put your attention out on the other person. See if they're moving with you, if you are leading them in the right direction, using questions or statements or whatever. So there's a lot of ways to talk about this, but here is another really simple way to think about it.


Predator and prey. Very, very, very, a very large portion of the way we train men still, but definitely my lifetime, to use their attention is more predatory and for women, more prey-like. So women are going to watch out for themselves, their safety, how they fit into a space, whether they're camouflaged, exposed, whether they're not.


It's even related to how our nervous system works. There's no flaw in it. There's no problem with it. It can be very, very powerful. It's very, very necessary. Going inward is very necessary. Being self-aware is very necessary.


Knowing what you're feeling, getting information from the inside, not only necessary, but a superpower. Outside, predatory, seeing whole landscape, seeing how the pieces fit together, seeing where you can have impact, where you can wedge and leverage your attention and energy most significantly to affect the entire landscape.


So this is a huge generalization because everybody uses both states of attention, dominant, submissive, predatory, prey, inward, outward. Everybody uses both of them. But because of how we raise boys and because of how we raise girls differently, we're going to have very different places where we get stuck.


And there are many situations where women get stuck in what we call a prey, victim, or submissive state that's not aligned. And one of those examples, which is, you know, this book was written at a time where we were all leading up to and going through the Me Too movement.


So sexual harassment was a really, really big deal. And that sexual harassment is a really good example of the default state of attention in women being this kind of collapsed, not powerful, submissive.


Somebody asks you an inappropriate question, says something, come up to my hotel room. Did you dress like that to get my attention? Right. And a woman, instead of going, you are asking me a really dumbass question right now or putting her attention out, she puts, wait, am I?


She goes inward. Am I? Did I do something? Did I send the signal? Am I giving the impression? Have I done something? And all of a sudden, she's frozen and pinned. Yes, there's like a thing called fight, fight, fight, flight, freeze, fawn.


But in the simple energy mechanics of what's happening at that moment, all attention's on her, her attention's on her, and she can't get her attention out, she can't get a word out, she can't speak. It's an example of the default state of attention being inward.


And if you want to test and see in your life how many women versus how many men have a default that's inward or outward, just go out there and see what happens when you ask 20 women an inappropriate question and 20 men an inappropriate question.


Okay, friends, just like I had Carmen Emmy in the best of part one episode, who is one of my dearest friends for over a decade, this clip today is with Steve Valentine, also one of my dearest friends who I have known for over a decade.


Steve is a legendary magician and actor. You may know him from Crossing Jordan, a myriad of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon movies, the film The Walk by Robert Semekis, and so much more. For all you millennials out there, he was also a lead character in Disney Channel's I'm in the Band and Wizards of Waverly Place.


He is also a master magician, one of the most respected in the world of magic. In this super fun and fascinating clip from episode 294, we talk about his work as a magician and how both levels of drinking and levels of intelligence affect our susceptibility to magic tricks.


Like all magic, it might not be what you think. Are certain audiences more difficult than others as far as trying to figure things out? People who are drunk, well, if they're having a drink, it's one thing.


But the thing is, the problem with drinking is it lessens the attentiveness, which is a good thing, but also a bad thing. So they're going to have shorter attention spans, which means any trick that's got any kind of a plot or any length to it is not good.


And they'll tend to look away at the wrong moment and miss it or forget a card. So I actually find they can be pretty tricky drunk audiences. And then you can have like the Magic Castle, the people are drinking in the shows, before the shows.


I mean, I've done shows with rooms packed with hammered Russians yelling at, you know, it's just, you, you just kind of have to lean into, well, this is what this show is going to be and kind of go for it.


I remember I had a, there was a, sometimes the hosts at the Magic Castle, when they seat the room, at the, when I'm doing the close-up room, they'll seat two people at my table. And, and those are the people that kind of like are the main people that I'll use in the show.


And sometimes they sit really pretty girls at the table because they think it's good. It looks good. But the problem with that is they don't necessarily always check if they're, if they're sober. So there was one show I did where this, this girl was absolutely, I mean, falling off her chair and out of her dress.


I mean, it was both off her chair and out of her dress at the same time. I mean, it was, I mean, and that was distracting, not just for me, but for everyone else in the room. So, and at one point, I was doing a trick with a red ball and she grabs the red ball, just puts it in her mouth and goes like a mad person.


And, you know, and I remember just looking at her and saying like, oh, now I know where I've seen you before. And the place we had is a huge laugh. And then her boyfriend kind of got the message and kind of escorted her out to the bar.


It's tricky. You have to, you have to be very delicate when you, when you deal with people. I find that some of the easiest audiences are the smartest people. And most magicians will find that. Like I used to do magic shows at the RAND organization, which is a think tank in Santa Monica.


And I would love it. I would deliberately bring the dumbest tricks because really smart people think in a different way. They think in a complicated linear fashion that, and most magic is really dumb.


So, you know, or as simple, often it's exactly what you think it is, but you just aren't seeing it, you know? And so, oh my God, I would have so much fun. Scientists are the best because, you know, they think they know everything and they're smart and they've got PhDs and they're like, oh yeah, I can figure this out.


And it's a blast. Yeah. Okie dokie, friends. Up next, we have a legend in the world of peptides. I'm talking about Jay Campbell. Meeting Jay, reading his work, was everything I could have wanted to know and more about therapeutic peptides, which yes, I do now personally use.


The episodes I've done with Jay are so popular, and he is a treasure trove of fascinating information when it comes to body composition optimization. In this clip from episode 319, we talk about the need for testosterone in women and how we get that all wrong.


Also, where should you put it? Including the clitoris. It's crazy how many women are destitute. And I'm going to go deeper on this because I want to talk about this, but they're destitute for testosterone and destitute for thyroid.


And they go hand in hand. There are so many women in this country who are in desperate, desperate need of therapeutic testosterone who are not getting it because their doctors are literally afraid of it causing cancer.


I mean, I could go on. I mean, this is like a big bugaboo for me and I go crazy, but I have seen so many women who are in their 50s and 60s who are not on testosterone, who need to be, that it blows my mind.


And most of their doctors have them on estrogiol and progesterone and not on testosterone. And they're so ignorant of the pleotropic nature of both estrogen and testosterone. Do you realize that if you give a postmenopausal woman a good amount of therapeutic testosterone, that she will cleave all of that through the aromatase enzyme into estrogen.


And she will have the estrogen levels like she had when she was in her 20s. But when you don't give them testosterone, you fuck them up and you actually make them worse. And so all these docs out there, they're giving women progesterone and estradiol without giving them testosterone are further castrating them.


And then don't even get me going on women that have had estorectomies. If they don't get testosterone, they're eunuchs. I mean, good luck having sex. They can't get lubricated. They cannot get any kind of flow.


I mean, they're like, I mean, forget it. I mean, you know, and this is why you see so many women, their relationships break down. The man is like, you know, they're still in a, they're still married, you know, for financial reasons or the kids or whatever bullshit.


And they don't even sleep in the same bedroom. It's horrible. But this is all medical malpractice. This is all due to the WHI event, you know, that unfortunately was, you know, based on, you know, equine, you know, primarin or whatever it was, whatever the drug was.


And, you know, there were some, and by the way, all the studies were flawed, but, you know, there were some people that got cancer from taking equine, you know, again, whatever the hormones were. And, you know, whether they were, it was flawed or they were comorbid people and they were mostly comorbid people, it doesn't matter.


It destroyed an entire generation of women getting hormones. And it was a tiny relative risk increase, even then. It's so minor. I mean, I'm telling you right now, do you realize that most people in America, including oncologists and doctors that work with male prostate, think that testosterone causes prostate disease or prostate cancer?


You know, it's the inverse of that, right? It's the inverse. The leading doctor in the world on prostates and testosterone is Dr. Abraham Morgenthaler. He's a good friend of mine. He's a Harvard educated doctor.


And he has done all the research. And he is now constantly, he doesn't battle it anymore because he's put out like, you know, all these white papers and, you know, documents and stuff like that. But like he now has clinically proven it's the opposite of what they think.


Those who have a testosterone deficiency are more likely to get prostate cancer than those that actually have optimized testosterone. It's insane. It's like the inverse of everything that everyone ever ever thought.


And I interviewed him and I knew this and I put this in my book 10 years ago and people still to this day don't know it. I mean, do you have any idea how many men come to me saying my doctor won't give me testosterone because I have stage one prostate cancer?


And I'm like, oh my God, please read this. Please show him this. But they're against it. Testosterone causes prostate cancer. Testosterone causes BPH. Testosterone causes this or that. And it's like, it's actually the opposite of the evidence.


And the part about women having access at the biohacking conference, I met with one of the, I'm actually going to have them on the show in a, a while from now, but it was like an oral testosterone supplement.


And I walked up and I was like, I'm so excited to like educate about women and testosterone. He was like, well, technically we can't. This isn't for women yet. I was like, can you believe that? Well, just let me just tell you this because I'm very outspoken about this now and I've had a bunch of stuff go viral on this.


Women, there's only two delivery systems that work. And this is for men and women. And this is injectable. And by the way, just so you know, the delivery systems of testosterone that are injectable and transdermal have improved dramatically in the last five years.


And what I mean by that is, is, again, go back to 1999 when I first started injecting testosterone. It was in like cottonseed oil. You know, it was very viscous. You had to use a very, like a 22 or 23 gauge needle to inject testosterone, which by the way, does create scar tissue.


You do not have to do that now. You can use a 30 or 31 gauge insulin needle to inject testosterone. It's in MCT oil. It's in grapeseed oil. It's in all there's even another carrier oil now that's a palmitic acid that is like, you know, instantly absorbed.


I forget what it's called, but it's a form of MCT oil. So a woman can inject with an insulin needle intramuscularly, you know, subcutaneously, anywhere, and it's like three seconds and it's done. There's no scar tissue, there's nothing, right?


So it's like, you know, so many people have hang-ups over needles and I get it and I understand it and I respect it, but there's no reason for that. And then the creams, just so you know this, I don't know if anyone's ever told you this on this podcast, but at the base of the man's scrotum is the most permeable skin location.


So if you put a 20 milligram, I'm sorry, a 200 milligram per milliliter atrivaceous or not aqueous, but a cream, a compounded testosterone cream right there, they will get a very similar, if not equal effect to injections.


So now, in the same vein, if you give a woman a cream, a compound of cream, and it's obviously a much lower dose, it can be anywhere from like 10 milligrams per milliliter to 15 to 20 milligrams per milliliter, and you put it on the clitoral head or the inside of the labial wall of the vagina, it's the same.


It's the same sensitivity, the same permeability. So you're literally able to place the creams in those locations for men and women and get very similar effects to injections. Now, again, everyone's biochemically unique.


You've heard that a million times. I'm sure a thousand people have told you that on your show. Everyone's N of one. So you have to kind of figure out between those two delivery systems, what's best. Now, there are oral delivery systems for women.


My wife used one for a while. I know thousands of women that have used different ones. They also will compound like lozenges that also have estradiol and progesterone in them. And if, you know, look, if you're using those and they work for you, you know, and when I say they work, you actually feel stronger, sexier, enhanced libido, more energy, great.


But if they don't and you don't feel that, and this is what I get and gather from most of the women that I talk to in my life, injectable or cream, you know, again, down there is by far the best delivery systems.


And more and more women are starting to find this out. Like we, as I said, you know, I've had some stuff go viral recently. As more and more women learn to inject testosterone, their lives become, I mean, it's insane.


I mean, it's so much better. Okay, friends. Up next is somebody I have been following for years and years and years. I've had him on the show multiple times. He is one of the smartest humans I think I've ever met, and he is one of the go-to authorities on all things longevity.


I'm talking about Seamland. In this clip from episode 319, we had him on the show for his incredible book, The Longevity Leap. And I really love this topic that we talked about, which is the role of children, marriage, kids, and even the age of your spouse in longevity.


There is a very consistent link between having good relationships and longevity. The reason for that probably has to do with many things. Even down to the simple thing that when you fall as an old person, then there will be someone to call the ambulance or something like that, someone remind you to take your medications or whatever, like these very practical things that will help a person to live for longer.


But there's also obviously mental health benefits and happiness benefits and purpose-related benefits that if you have someone else to live for, whether that be a partner or children, grandchildren, or even a dog or some religion or something like that, the research does suggest that there is a causal link between having a purpose and a why or a reason to live and longevity.


So it does have a positive effect on your physical health as well. And the same applies to relationships, apparently, that there's a physical benefit to good social relationships, not just the mental health side.


When it comes to men and women, then it actually seems like men benefit more from marriage and partnership. When it comes to longevity, for women, there's a weaker association between relationships and marriage and longevity, but for men, it's a lot stronger.


Maybe it's because women already live slightly longer than men, so like about five to ten years longer than men on average. So maybe they don't, they've already, you know, let's say, reaped a lot of the potential benefits from relationships when it comes to longevity.


The other things that these other genetic or sex differences have already given them a lot of the longevity benefits so they don't gain additional advantages. Whereas for men, there's reasons why men tend to live shorter than women, probably with poorer lifestyle, some hormonal differences, higher rates of heart disease, alcohol and riskier behaviors, etc.


So there might be some, let's say, drop-off effects from these relationships and marriage later in life that mitigate some of those increased risk men experience. Yeah, I thought that chapter was so interesting.


You even said at one point, so basically, and like with the age gap difference, basically for men, it benefited to marry younger, right? But for women, not so much. Yeah, there's a men gain the best benefit from younger spouses and women, there's no difference, if I remember correctly.


And, you know, perhaps the reason men gain benefits more from younger spouses for longevity would be maybe that they would live longer. So like if you have a significantly older wife, then that wife would potentially die sooner as well.


So maybe there is some of that effect. I would presume that would be the reason. Gotcha. The kids thing. I'm haunted by the kids thing because I personally don't think that I want to have kids. So I'm always really curious how it affects and relates to longevity.


So I'm curious what you found there. I loved, I've been quoting this study to people. You mentioned a study in the Amish. Was it their longevity or their happiness that was increasing? For men, up to 14 kids was linked to great pregnancy.


But for women, it was something like four to five or something, something like slightly less than for men. So there is a physical, biological burden that your body goes through when you're pregnant. And maybe if you have 10 kids or something, then there might be some effect on the speed of biological aging.


It is an honor to introduce our next guest, one of my dear friends, Kelsey Packwood, who I met through Blaze Agile. Check out the best of part one for an excerpt from my conversation with Blaze. Kelsey has borderline personality disorder, and she is doing incredible work in raising awareness and changing the stigma surrounding it.


So basically, borderline personality disorder, in order to qualify, you need five out of nine criteria. That means there are hundreds of manifestations and it can look a little bit different in different people.


You may have it or you may know people who have it, and it can be a really scary diagnosis. In this clip from episode 329, we talk about how people are scared of borderline personality disorder, the implications of that, and whether or not they should change the name.


Kelsey is an actress and has an incredible show she produced called Borderline. Not only is it hysterical, riveting, emotional, and moving, but it will give you true insight into the mind of Borderline personality disorder.


A lot of people are so scared of the diagnosis, they don't want to say that they have it. So, I mean, I felt a sense of relief. And, you know, there's BPD is a part of cluster B personality disorders.


So there's other personality disorders. Some other personality disorders, people don't want to go and get help. They're less likely to come in to seek therapy. With BPD, you're more likely to come in and seek therapy because you're in so much emotional pain that you just can't handle it anymore.


So I don't know. I think it's a mix at this point because of the stigma, but my goal is to break the stigma. If we break the stigma and people realize that it isn't that one thing that everybody thinks it is, this big, monstrous, scary, scary word, like borderline, you know, when they realize that it's actually like the people in the hospitals that they're treating, they're the ones who are, you know,


self-injuring and really, really suffering in ways where they need psychiatric treatment. But there's a lot of people who are kind of coasting in their own personal lives, dealing with BPD, but don't have the means to go in.


Maybe they're not injuring themselves. So they're just kind of like out there and they may or may not be diagnosed. If you're going to present it in a way that's very negative, they're not going to want to accept that diagnosis.


But if you can kind of show it for what it really is, which is it's an emotional dysregulation disorder. It's a trauma-based disorder. It's a disorder that is caused by extreme invalidation in your life.


Then all of those things start making sense. And then the people in your life, if they do their research, can kind of meet you where you're at. Because I think that that's what's missing right now is people with BPD aren't really getting treated in the ways that help them.


They're getting, they push people away. And, you know, I push people away. I have, like, I know people who have pushed people away. And instead of kind of getting to a better like baseline, you kind of have now isolated yourself.


But I think that if we can just work towards more education, then maybe people will hear it and then own it. And then, okay, let me do my research and go get some help. Yeah, so many things here. I'm actually really curious.


I'm really interested in like language and words and names. I wonder how much like the naming of it, like borderline, how much of that actually feeds into the stigma of it. I don't know, because I actually don't know the history of when, like, I don't know when it became so stigmatized.


I don't know if you know. I think that, and forgive me if I get anything wrong, but I've been doing my research. I think that before it was borderline, you know, back in the day, like when many different illnesses like didn't quite exist in the DSM yet, you know, whether that's physical illnesses or mental illnesses in the DSM, I feel like people called it hysteria or this or that.


You know, people were kind of labeled as, you're just a crazy person. And I hate to use that word, but I know that that word is used. And so I think that the more that they did research and, you know, John Gunderson introduced borderline personality disorder into the DSM in the 80s, then that it was, you know, finally identified as being on the border of reality and psychosis, which again, now that we've done more research,


I actually don't think that that's quite accurate anymore. I think that people with BPD don't quite go, it's not exactly the correct way to describe it as being on the border of reality and psychosis, but they've also wanted to change the name, I believe, to emotional dysregulation disorder.


That is a controversial thing. It's also in the UK, I believe, it is called EDD, and they're trying to get that to change, but like, I don't think that that's going to happen. And so correct me if I'm wrong, but the name, yes, the name has been something that kind of makes it seem scarier than it sometimes is.


Not saying that it isn't a scary thing that people have to go through, whether you have it or whether you're dealing with somebody who is in crisis. I know that they've kind of questioned whether or not they should change the name of Okie Doki friends.


Up next, we have one of the most popular guests that I have on this show. He's been on multiple times and I am always blown away by the reception. People are obsessed with Morley Robbins and for good reason.


He provides a complete paradigm shift when it comes to iron regulation in the body. Basically, is it not about iron after all? Is it actually about copper? Does anemia actually not even exist? We talk about all of that in this clip from episode 328 when he came on the show for the re-release and update and publishing by a traditional publisher of his incredible book, Cure Your Fatigue.


So let's talk some numbers. Let's say that the average woman today having a child is like 30 years old. Let's just use that as a reference point. Okay. So someone who's 30, so 30 times 365. So they've got about 11,000 milligrams of iron.


The amount of iron that the mom needs to give to the baby at birth is 375. So let me just 375 divided by 10,950. So that's not even 3%. So the tragedy is we're a century into this medical meme that everyone's anemic.


It's a very dark meme. If someone were here from the World Health Organization, they would tell us that 30% of the world's population is anemic. It's not just anemic. They have iron deficiency anemia.


Doesn't make any sense. 36% of the Earth's composition is iron. They're fortifying iron everywhere, all over the planet. In grains, they're hybridizing food to bring greater iron uptake. It isn't, I mean, it's just, it's so out of context and out of touch with reality.


And so the great fear in pregnancy is that someone's going to deliver and they're going to, quote, bleed out. That's one of the great fears, especially that the practitioners have. And that's why they want the hemoglobin up really high so that if they do bleed out, they know they're going to be just fine.


Well, here's the part that no one is accounting for. There's only one way to get rid of excess iron in the human body, and that's through blood loss. And that's why there is heavy bleeding in some situations, because the body is really smart and knows this mom has too much iron.


Let's get rid of it. The other thing that people may not be aware of is that there's a very important hormone in pregnancy called oxytocin. I'm certain you've heard of it. The love hormone, right? The bonding hormone, the lactation hormone, right?


Well, you know what its conserved job is? It is, in fact, the mechanism that clamps off the blood vessels so there isn't excess of bleeding. Women are... Now, the reason why that's important, Melanie, is that oxytocin is nine amino acids long.


It's a really tiny little peptide. Nine amino acids, but it's one of the most important in our body. And if you reverse two of those nine amino acids, it becomes vasopressin. These are two of the most studied neuropeptides in the human body.


The guy who identified, sequenced, and replicated oxytocin got a Nobel Prize. It's a big deal. And what is required to make it work? Oh, yeah, you've got to have that PAM enzyme, which is copper-dependent.


And if the PAM enzyme is not working, then you can't activate oxytocin, then it can't clamp off the problem. And so women today are copper deserts. They're iron-loaded because they're taking prenatals.


Some of them have 75 milligrams of iron each and every day. That's an outrageous amount of iron to be giving a pregnant woman. And people think nothing of taking... I had a client that was taking 375 milligrams of iron every day.


So that's a year's worth of iron every day. And yet she was still anemic. So you know there's something wrong. There's more to the story. And so what's happened is society has become conditioned that they can take as much iron as they want, but be afraid of that copper thing.


And that's how we know we're in a world of delusion and inversion. It's the opposite of the truth. Okay, friends, sticking with the theme of guests that I've had on this show multiple times, it is an honor to be here today with Dr.


Eric Zelensky. Not only is he a dear friend, he lives in Atlanta, and I love hanging out with him and his wife, Sabrina, and I've been following him for years and years and years. He is essentially the leading authority on all things essential oils.


I had him on the show for his incredible essential oils recipes card deck. It's a 52 card deck for essential oil recipes of basically anything you could ever want. We're talking food recipes, cleaning recipes, relaxation recipes, anything you could use essential oils for, there's a recipe in here for it.


Like if you need a gift for somebody who's interested in health and wellness, this is such a cute gift and so fun and helpful. In this clip from episode 305, we talk about the role of essential oils in your sex life.


That's right. Aphrodisiac essential oils. This is kind of like a rabbit hole tangent, if you're comfortable talking about this, but I was going through the deck and you do have like, like you have a sensual bath blend and a sensual master blend.


And you actually say in the sensual bath blend, enjoying sex is part of the abundant life that we preach about so much. And then you have more there. But I know your audience is very, you know, like a Christian audience.


And I was raised in the church as well. And I think like if I had been given this deck when I was young in the church, they probably would have taken these cards out. Is this church friendly? Come on.


Hey, I'm like, if God didn't make, if God didn't want us to procreate, then sex would not be so pleasurable, right? I mean, there's a reason we have seven kids. I mean, it's just, you know, it is, it is.


There's so many fun little things we could go with that. I found it refreshing throughout my life to unlearn some of those things I was taught growing up, but the role of oils and attraction to other people.


What's going on there? Like, why, like, from an evolutionary perspective, would that even work? Like, I understand why certain ones would, like, kill bacteria and, and disinfect and clean and soothe.


What's happening with attraction? Now, I'm going to give you a tip before I forget because I just, I thought of it and then you brought up sex and you got me thinking about my wife. And now I got to go back.


Okay. So is that funny? So here's a tip, by the way. If you're next to that person on the plane, be a mouth breather because you're bypassing the nasal omylfactory. And as much as my deep breathing, breathing expert folks say you have to breathe through your nose, no way.


Like if you want to protect your brain, you just breathe through your mouth. And no joke, it's the best. That's what I'm going to do when I'm at the store and I have to go through that aisle to go to where I want to go.


Or if I'm next to someone, I breathe through my mouth. That at least protects your brain. It's still going to hurt your lungs, but at least it's better. And that's the also thing, too, when I'm at the gas station or I don't know why, you know, you know what it is?


It's trying to overcome bad smell with good smell and that doesn't work. You're in an Uber car. You're in a store. Oh, it's the worst. I will get out of an Uber. Like if I get one and it's that bad. And if it's like a longer trip, I'm like, I'll just order another Uber.


I can't. It's, it's so hard. I actually had my head outside of a window one day. Like it was only a 10 minute drive, but I was like, hey, can I roll down my window? And I'm just breathing. It's like, I can't deal with this.


I'm breathing out of my mouth. But it's even scary, though, Melanie, like going back to your question, though, but why aren't they triggered by that? And that's the problem. That's what I want to say.


Like you should be intolerant to sugar. You should be intolerant to chemicals. We should not be okay. And so that's what's happened. And so we are attracted to certain things. And when it comes to, you mentioned Elang Lang and I mentioned rose and even lavender and other oils that I include in my sensual blends.


But it's just, this is, people have known for these, they call them aphrodisiacs. Well, it's not like they necessarily stimulate the brain to want sex necessarily, but what they do is they put your body into this rest and digest parasympathetic state.


And not that we want to make this into a sex class, but especially for men and ladies out there, you know, a lot of guys aren't going to want to hear this, but they might need a little E-Lang, Lang, and Lavender in their life to get to the position if they have erectile dysfunction.


And ED is such a pervasive thing in men that are high performers, executives, and high stress men because it's harder, I guess pun intended, but it's more difficult to get an erection when you're constantly and chronically stressed.


And so one way to think of this, I go back to my neuroanatomy class when I was a student, but you think about point and shoot, right? To get an erection, you need to be in the parasympathetic state. And then when you, you know, shoot, ejaculate, that is the sympathetic state.


But go back to the parasympathetic state. Like that is hard. That is very challenging, near impossible for a lot of people to automatically get into. People are drinking themselves to that state. They're trying meditating into that state.


They're trying to biohack into that state. They're trying to do whatever they can because we're constantly not in that state. And I know you've talked a lot about this over the years in your podcast episodes.


So that's why what we see with men, especially a lot of these sensual love blends that are out there in the essential oil world, they're tapping into natural aphrodisiacs and flowers that people just think, hey, this stimulates libido.


Not necessarily, right? It can through a different way, though. It just chills you out. It calms you down. It allows you to be in the position where you can actually be. And that's a different frame of mind.


That's a different place to be where your mind isn't racing for five seconds and you can actually focus on what's in front of you. And you have someone that you love in front of you. You have someone attractive right in front of you.


You have an opportunity in front of you, right? And opportunity, obviously, we're talking about sex here. If you're not in that frame of mind, you're not being. You're doing. And you're doing your homework, your housework, your workwork.


You're doing something in the back of your mind that is keeping you away. And this constant thing. And so that's one of the beautiful things because when you smell flowers, when you smell the extracted VOCs that are in the essential oil and that we use in diffusers and body lotions and body oils and things, it literally immediately, immediately puts people into that parasympathetic state.


And the body is like, okay, the mind is like, all right, there's no harm here. I could just, I could relax for a second. Dopamine, serotonin starts to get produced. Certain hormones start to be, the breathing rate kind of settles a minute.


The pulse rate kind of settles. And you just kind of chill. Right. You just start chilling out for a moment. And then it's like, oh, you know, now I could, you know, now I can think about other things.


And now my body can respond. And there are other things we're starting to see more in the literature, in the brain, you know, the addiction cascade, parts of the brain that are stimulated for sexual arousal and that sort of thing.


And, you know, how smell and essential oils tap into that. And that's exciting things. Like we do know that there are certain things that can stimulate, but there's this smell, this, this, you've heard of this.


We all emit pheromones. We all have our own version of how we interpret, but how we give off an aroma. That's kind of wild. That lavender on you smells different than lavender on me. Because of how it's interacting with the pheromones.


Yep. And that's when it gets really wonderful. I forget the name of this movie and I got to look it up because this is the second time I've mentioned this in an interview. So forgive me for the people that created this movie, but I was flying home and I watched a documentary on the flight from a conference I went to a couple months ago.


And it was about a rugby player from, I believe, New Zealand, if not Australia. Famous rugby player who ended up taking a dive into a swimming pool and lost his function of his legs and became a paraplegic.


Absolutely, obviously it destroyed his career as a professional rugby player. But he ended up regaining his mobility to a point where he started creating what is now a ministry, helping people overcome handicaps and disabilities.


And they hike mountains and they do crazy fun stuff. And he's still, you know, he's still, he's not 100%. He'll never compete in professional sports again, but he's doing things like, you know, taking his first step was impossible.


And now he's like hiking mountains. Right. And something that his wife said in the interview struck me. We're getting to the heart. Like, this was your husband. I mean, just an, you know, gorgeous, still is gorgeous, good-looking man.


His physique was, you know, picture perfect, athlete, great. You guys were just a beautiful young couple. And here you have this tragedy. How did it affect you? How did it affect your love life? How did it affect your intimacy?


And she said something that, that, that kind of really made me think more about this experience about smell and about olfaction. It really hit me hard. It hit me at home and it kind of brought me to tears.


She said, you know, it wasn't that his physical body changed, right? His muscle structure just, he atrophied. Like he was on his proverbial deathbed. They resuscitated him. He was recouping. It took him months and months just to get to the point where he can even consider taking a step and like all this, like his physical transformation was there.


And she goes, but was what was really hard and what really affected our intimacy was how he smelled. He didn't smell the same, which makes a lot of sense because here he was a completely different person biochemically because of all the drugs that he was taking, all the medical interventions.


His whole pheromone output was completely different. His pheromes, his smell, and we're not, you know, she didn't mention changing cologne. She didn't mention changing body care. It was just his natural smell, his natural odor was so different.


She said she felt like she was making love to a stranger. That's how powerful smell is. And that's also why it's so important that when we're courting, dating, considering being with someone for the rest of our lives, that you're into their smell, that you could relate that when you smell them, when you get intimate, when you hug, when you kiss, that it turns you on.


And essential oils and the right blends for certain people really exemplify that. And it's like, it's so beautiful. It's so wonderful. And when she said it, it felt like I was making love to a stranger.


It's like her eyes were closed. It was dark. It didn't matter what he felt like. Didn't matter, you know, what he sounded like. Matter what he smelled like. Okay, friends, what better way to end this best of series than with the true legend and dear friend, Dr.


Caroline Leaf? She is a renowned neuroscientist with multiple books and a massive audience because she provides so much incredible content on how to take charge of your mental health. I had her on for her latest book, which I loved called Help in a Hurry.


It's basically about how, yes, you can do a lot of work for long-term change, but sometimes you just need help in a hurry. Like, what do you do right now to deal with different mental anxieties, stressors, and problematic things you may be experiencing?


And in this clip from episode 314, we talk about the actual problems with positive thinking. I thought this might be a good way to end the episode because on the one hand, I am all about positivity, inspiration, all the things, especially going into the new year.


And also, I want everybody to remember that you don't have to force yourself into happiness and positive thinking all the time. And that's okay. I think this will be pretty inspiring for a grounded, realistic way of looking at your mental health and wellness and your life's journey, especially in the new year.


Please enjoy this clip from episode 314. That's such a great insightful question. Quick, can I just divide that answer into two parts? So firstly, I'm very, really glad that you did hone in on this. As I said, very insightful, good question, because we do live in a kind of zeitgeist, if I can use that word, of, you know, just think a positive thought, just create some positive affirmations.


Just, you know, to, I know you're in the world of biohacking, but literally, let's just, you know, biohack our way out of this. And I, and I mean, Dave Asprey even asked me the other day, can't you just speed this up, this neuroplasticity, this healing thing?


And no, you can't. You have to go through the process because of the whole way that the mind-band-body connection works. So these help in a hurry moments don't fix the problem. They give you a solution in the moment to teach you not to be reactive.


And they then open the door to wisdom, which is in the non-conscious mind. And maybe in the next question, we can just quickly rerun through what those are, the different levels of mind. But it literally opens up your insight and your wisdom.


And then you can see when you're when that part of your mind is open up, then you can see, okay, well, why am I needing to feel positive all the time? Or why am I using positivity as a solution for negative?


Where's this negativity coming from? And those are just big words that actually are showing us our signals, behavior patterns that are signals, because you get four types of signals, emotions, behaviors, bodily sensations and perceptions, and they work together as a unit.


And so something like feeling negative and wanting to replace it with a positive is basically a signal, a behavioral signal that's got a reason behind it. So you're not negative, you are negative because of massive difference.


So you're feeling negative because of. So if you just take a positive statement and put it on top of the negative statement or try and replace it every time a negative comes up, you think, okay, well, I'll just think positive.


You're basically putting a band-aid on the wound. Silly analogy would be if you put your hand on the stove and you keep taking opioids to get rid of the pain, but you never remove your hand on the stove.


Eventually your hand will get burnt off and the pain won't go away. And such a silly analogy, but that's what we're doing with just using positive psychology concepts or just a CBT technique. Not that I'm into any of those things.


They all have their place. They all, when they're in a balanced place, they all have value. Everything, positive psychology, everything has got value. Everything can contribute to our knowledge. But how you use things is so critically important.


So I'm not saying don't think the positive thought, but that's not your solution. That's the end part of the game. The first thing that you're going to have to do is, because you can't just replace, the first thing you're going to have to do is you're going to have to actually validate and honor the negative thought.


All right, friends, we've done it. There you have the best of clips from 2025 from the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. I hope you guys enjoyed revisiting these memories or creating new ones just as much as I did.


Words cannot describe how much I appreciate you all. I hope you truly had a fulfilling year and that you have the best yet to come in 2026. It's an honor to spend my life's journey with all of you and hopefully I can meet some of you in the future.


Thank you so much for all that you beautiful souls do. I love you so much and happy new year. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What, When, Why, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X.


Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guest. And always feel free to contact me at contact at melanyavalon.com. And always remember, you got this.