Episode 108 – Wade Lightheart on Cryptocurrency, Backpacking the World, Freeing yourself from the 9-5 grind & more

welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our ascent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seat of consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a journey we are the intimate strangers thank you for listening

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three years to the day after my total complete meltdown I was standing on stage at the mr. universe in Mumbai India representing my country and I was like wow this this really works when you get rigid and you become dogmatic in your belief in your methodologies you stand you tend to stop paying attention to the red lights going off in your life right now it’s the heady days you know it’s going up at this exponential rate and virtually anybody you know gets in

and they’re like I’ve made 200 percent or 300 percent or 500 percent or a thousand percent last year or whatever it happens to be and and what happens is is greed can cause a loss of perspective and so one of the things that I have learned to develop is to look at diet or look at training or look at anything and stop seeing the differences but let’s look at the commonalities and I discover essentially it’s the drug called the whole thing is as a drug culture at the

end of the day humans evolve and contribute by adding value to other people

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what’s up folks Xavier katana here you’re listening to the human experience and wow what an amazing episode with mr. Wade light heart a Wade is a three-time Canadian all natural national bodybuilding champion he’s a nutrition coach he has explored health he’s explored fitness he’s explored consciousness and even cryptocurrency so we talked about all of those things in this episode Wade is a friend of mine and I was so glad to do

this episode with him and there’s so much information on just meditation connecting with yourself being able to free yourself from the matrix and travel and live the life that you want so I really hope that you guys enjoy this episode it was a really fun one thank you guys so much for listening the human experiences in session my guest for today is mr. Wade light heart Wade my good sir welcome to hxp oh it’s a pleasure to be here Xavier

thank you for having me so Wade we’ve been friends for a couple years and we met at a biohacking conference a couple years ago we talked about a bunch of different things and you know I I know you as having different facets of your life and traveling wealthy backpacker but people might not know who you are so if you could just give everyone listening a sort of background of what you do who you are for the audience please well thanks you know Ivan I like

to think that I’m an ordinary kind of person that just stumbled into an extraordinary life but I feel grateful is the the prime thing but it’s like everyone else we all have that challenges but if I can try and make a long story short you know I grew up in Canada and northern Canada I was did all the normal physical kids do play hockey and stuff and then had a transformational experience at fifteen with my sister you know diagnosis of cancer and we can

talk about that a little bit and I went to study exercise physiology the University New Brunswick because I was looking at ways of improving my own performance and health that led to your career in the health and fitness industry and also a career of kind of traveling I got into travel and you know my first plane ride was literally 22 and I got hooked on it and after that I just kind of went crazy and that you know brought me to a lot of things you know

as everything from hanging out with meditation masters and India and you doing shamanic sessions with people and standing on stage in front of 4,000 people given a talk on health and I had the good fortune of being one of the only vegetarians to compete in both the mr. universe and the natural mr. Olympia and yeah that’s it’s kind of the the four one one and then you know I got into the online space I had a friend who was making money online and I couldn’t

believe that you could I thought he was crazy at that time I had given up my computer and all my electronics because I was living kind of like a personal trainer as a monastic at the same time and we started a business and moved to Panama in 2005 because it started taking off and from there I think I spent about seven years kind of traveling the world living the lifestyle I always I always joke around I said I wish I had a red

Tim Ferriss book before I started I need like he didn’t write that soon enough because what he outlined in that book sort of said yeah I wish I hadn’t known that at first because I had to learn everything the hard way and then now today I just work on a variety of projects I have a nutritional company which focuses on fixing digestion because it’s such a big issue I have an online business called the wealthy backpacker which is teaching people

about online business and how to live in the digital republic the new the new world that is emerged that has is changing everything it’s changing countries it’s changing boundaries it’s changing work and this evolution is going to you know continue to accelerate in my opinion oh yeah I can’t wait to get into that with you you’re also an author you’ve co-wrote a book called staying alive in a toxic world you also won was it mr. Canada that you won three

yeah yeah yes three times Wow I mean that’s that’s quite an achievement man I mean so you know what do you find yourself doing the most in your day what do you think is taking the most of your management skills what are you spending the most time on right now well you know anything that I feel that will contribute and raise the consciousness of humanity whether that’s helping people have more resources whether that’s improving people’s health

well it’s just sharing tips about you know some great spiritual stuff that I’ve run into that mean that’s that’s always the driver behind everything I do if you understand if it’s in those light relations I’m excited about it I want to do it if it’s not in those lanes I don’t have the energy or motivation or really the interest because I’m just I’m on the planet to try and evolve the best that I can and by doing that it’s about

participating with everybody else on the planet and I don’t have everything figured out or anything like that I want to be clear about that but I just love humanity I’m fascinated by it but I think if you look at a day to day basis I spend a lot of my time online whether it’s a webinar teaching stuff I think if I had one scale it’s the ability to teach principles in an in a layman’s turns that people can understand and provide things that can improve their

health or improve their business so it’s a little bit of a split between those two those two areas yeah I’m so glad that you said that I’m so glad that you mentioned the service to others and service to humanity I think that’s so important to all the things that you’re doing with what you’ve established tell us about the backpacking project that you have running wealthy backpacker how does this work how does a person travel around the world on a limited budget

what is this new world that you were just you were talking about just a second ago that’s a great question and I’ll try and summarize it as best as I can basically the wealthy backpacker was an idea that was born out of myself and one of my friends AJ Harvey and what was interesting is both of us love travel we both made money not from a conventional way of business he was a former hedge fund owner had made his killing in the markets and when everybody was getting

blown up in 2008 he was exiting the market and living around the world and carrying a couple suitcases and that was it and you know even though he was fabulously and for myself I was able to build an online business income that I didn’t have to be in any particular location working in Panama one month and I could be in Bali the next month and I could be in Vancouver the next month and I could who visit my friends in California or

wherever happens to be and you know it was a radical idea in 2005 now it’s much more common so what happened is AJ and I decided that you know we were really lucky we felt we were very fortunate and we had both achieved this lifestyle from very different means where we’re like totally opposite people and I believe in partnering up with people who are of opposite nature and opposite capacities if you do have some conflict inside of

that but that’s that’s healthy conflict if you know how to resort resolve that because you get your own ideas and your own values challenge and I think a lot of people in the world of social media today actually they do themselves a disservice because they get blocked into groups and ideas that just validate their opinions as opposed to exposing themselves to other groups or interests so that’s the one negative I think about social media is it just ends we really

deal with the confirmation bias before a social media I argued with all my friends and passionately and I didn’t think less of them I preferred that kind of you know that kind of sharing of ideas and the passionate sharing of ideas and then we laugh about it and we we learnt to accept and love each other for our differences and of course or improve ourselves but AJ and I decided to put this book together and we were gonna combine two unique ideas one is

how do you make money online enough that you could exit your day job or your go to work job and part two is where he came in is providing investment education news bulletins that would teach you the principles of investing how to invest like the world’s wealthiest people who you leverage things like hedge funds in which he owned one sure and so by combining those two ideas and then also sharing with us well guess what you probably don’t need

as much money as you think you do if you can make enough money online get a little bit of positive cash flow you can move to a low-cost jurisdiction very much like I did and like he did and start accruing more wealth at a higher quality of lifestyle and investing the difference between your expenses and your cash flow to make it simple and by doing that after a few years you would probably compound enough assets and enough passive income that you could

of pretty much anywhere you wanted anyways but the key was to create that gap to create that that area of resources financial resources that a lot of people just don’t have they don’t and they don’t know how to get that you know they’re just making enough to get by and to opening up the world to this what I call the digital Republic that you can live anywhere you can work anywhere you can communicate with anybody you can make money online I mean although the

largest companies in the world right now our unlike knees I love this this idea of traveling around the world I mean this for me is actually a dream thing as a personal goal I’ve set for myself to have everything mobile which it pretty much is right now and to be living in country of your choice you know like Bali somewhere like that and then move to a different country absorb as much culture as I can and do that for you know several years and then sort of come

back to you know the states or wherever I may end up but you know why do you think people get trapped in the nine-to-five of things and have so much trouble sort of exiting the matrix great question I would say two main things and that is fear and identification with possessions so how do we identify that fear how do we turn that fear into knowledge and then use that knowledge for our benefit it’s a great another great question I love your questions by

the way um well I think you have to really understand how psychology works you need to say I think a lot of people focus on consuming information but actually don’t consume information to learn how their brain is and our brains are relatively unreliable the more that you study it so what you expose to you tend to believe and what happens is most of the mainstream media channels are focusing on fear if you look at today’s world it’s hard to believe that less

people are dying by war than ever before less people are there’s less crime being committed on the world people are living longer than they have like there’s a lot of great things but if you look at the news or you look these things you would never ever dream that that’s happening right it looks horrific and it’s terrible but the statistics are absolutely the opposite to what a lot of people think but our brains are wired to self protect their

selves to be fearful all you don’t know you don’t want to take that trip you don’t want to go to that place what happens I heard that you know that’s really damaging over there I heard is there’s a war gone over there I heard there’s crime over there when the reality is is that’s a very small segment for a very particular time in a place but that could happen in any city and so people develop fears and they get comfortable with their local environment

because it’s predictable in their brain says this is safe this is secure can’t imagine living anywhere else you know what and then it starts what happens is we start making rationalizations but at the core is there’s a fear and we rationalize away our lives to protect their selves and how that ties into our identities is oftentimes you know where you live what kind of home you have what kind of car you drive what kind of friends that you have what kind of

events that you go in and that can come at any financial range so it doesn’t matter if you’re making you know twenty thousand a year or two hundred thousand dollars or two million dollars a year there is an identification what I would call product line with each strata of income that just keeps you hooked into that and what happens is we start to develop an identity around those things and once we build an identity into it you know I think it was the Russians way

back in the 60s we’re doing psychological research and they discovered that the fear of death was not the number one fear it was the loss of identity huh okay yeah I find that intriguing it’s really really interesting how much we can allow fear to dictate our lives fear to prevent us from you know really living the life that we want I think there is a sort of romantic notion that is attached towards traveling around the world it is a very

romantic idea to travel and live abroad I really think that more people want to do this but they’re simply afraid to either they’re afraid or they just haven’t done it yet and it’s a procrastination thing that keeps getting put off and and like you said it ends up being something that never really happens why do you call this the revolution the digital revolution why is that a term that you use so often well here’s the thing if

you look at how humans have organized themselves over these you know over the centuries you know we started out at kind of tribal cultures foraging for food and doing whatever we we could and then when the Industrial or the agricultural evolution came in we started organizing in cities and stuff because we could actually grow food and we didn’t have to travel very much and that was you know that caused major changes in society and then came the

Industrial Revolution which changed that we weren’t working on farms we started to working in factories and machines and then and then cities got bigger and then also as you know we assured in this last century with the rising the the devaluation of the dollar and the increase of production of things the demand for money increase in so people started to move into the suburbs to have bigger homes and commuting and you know to cars and Pulaski kids and so all of

this started to change culture at a very rapid rate then what happened is the internet came upon us and the internet changed everything because now today you’re in a living in a condo for example you don’t know your name Bursar’s but you’re communicating with people all around the world and you used to go down to the to the five-and-dime store to do your shopping well now amazon has outputted outperformed all of the retail shopping

in america they’ve made more sales than all of the retail shop america in retail shopping in america you have to realize it’s got like a 300 year head start amazon has been around what 20 years has it been that long and it’s now completely changed that look at you know companies like Facebook look at Google you know everybody Google’s in a day everybody you know will use Twitter or Facebook or take an uber ubers in one of the big community

you know transportation companies and they don’t even own vehicles Alibaba doesn’t even they don’t even own any stock it they like they don’t own any inventory all right and they sell things online so we’ve moved into this age where people are interacting with other people through their screens through their phones through this digital world and what happens is it’s now going to affect boundaries so if you look at the tribal stay so we went to those tribal

countries and then we moved into city-states and then we went into like kind of we tried the mega nations with the EU and all that sort of stuff which you know United Nations which has had mixed results but now you know where countries used to make sense because of geographical borders or because of language and customs and cultures and that sort of thing those barriers are being tore down as those institutions those governmental systems are trying to

keep things in line you know but what’s happening is those lines are starting to blow hurry and so it’s like well why why do I call myself a Canadian why do I call myself when or an American or you know somebody from Cameroon aren’t I a human first like aren’t I really a human and when you start to strip away these identities you know people ask you where are you from well we automatically start building a story about who that person

is and that’s not necessarily true but we have maybe met you know a dozen Americans or a dozen people from Canada or whatever so we’ve said oh yeah Canadians they’re really nice and play well III know some unemployed Canadians you know catched me on a bad day it’s me so the bottom line is is I think this digital revolution is you don’t have to go to a job anymore you can make money online you can invest online you can buy all your stuff online and you can be

anywhere in the world doing it so I think it will completely eliminate boundaries countries and it’ll start inviting some questions of like well why are we fighting with each other what other options are there and the more that we expose each other to other cultures I mean think of probably what’s happened in the last oh I would say 10 years in the world of shamanic practices these have been going on for hundreds or thousands of years in South America

Chah and all of a sudden thanks to the internet the use of botanicalls as being widespread in her facilitating different states of consciousness in different states of awareness for a lot of people and that wasn’t possible before because people couldn’t get to South America or they couldn’t even hear about it they didn’t even know that was there or they couldn’t go to Leon ashram in India it was too far away I mean I think it was

around 1900 one of the presidents went to India it took him six months to get there in six months to get back right I can get on a plane and be there tonight yeah yeah it’s it’s absolutely fascinating and you know this isn’t something that you’re just talking about it’s not something that we’re just having a conversation about this is something that you live and do sometimes we’ll we’ll have a brief you know just a quick message and I’m like hey what’s up

you know how are you and you’ll tell me something like you know I’m headed to Dubai for the night and you know I’ll be back tomorrow or something like that it’s you know it’s very hilarious to me because it’s not usual you know it’s it’s not something that I see with other people and I think you know this digital revolution I think you really have something there because they’re more and more people are starting their own businesses moving away from the

corporatized you know culture of this nine-to-five job you know this cubicle madness where you’re you’re literally going insane and you know people want out of what we’ve been sold and a big part of something that you’re very motivated by and in my opinion is is cryptocurrency and you know bitcoin has been in the news for forever now it seems like lately you know Bitcoin has has seen some huge huge gains I think people sometimes they mix those two

things they they mix Bitcoin and cryptocurrency together and they’re – they’re these are two separate things right yeah I think if you’re talking about Bitcoin the currency or the blockchain per se I think there is extraordinary applications for both and there’s extraordinary challenges for both and right now we’re in what I call the 1999 dot-com phase if I don’t firth of you who weren’t around and what I see a big rage in the crypto space is particular

people who may not bid him round in that 1999 they were born after it or born just before it and if you remember there was all the rage about the dot-com industry and all these different companies came into play and and it was huge right there there was millions of dollars I lived in Vancouver at the time and I remember these startup you know warehouses offices of people and literally millions of dollars being poured into them with no tangible assets

no tangible business model but they had a great idea in a good pitch man and that sort of thing and these things started to emerge and I think with cryptocurrency I think there’s a couple things that’s really interesting about it number one is the idea of a decentralized Universal and private way of exchanging value and and I think where that comes from is a lot of people are frustrated with the banking system as it is and it’s concordant fiat

currency which tries it in which certainly has its place and its means and certainly up to this point I mean it’s it’s funded transactions it’s a lot better than trying to change you know trade beaver pelts for shotguns sure you know it’s a lot more convenient money you know is a more convenient way to exchange thing and people what’s the value of Bitcoin well what’s the value of your fiat currency well the fiat currency is based on the idea that you

know the bank is gonna issue and the taxpayers are gonna turn their labor units and turn that over plus interest to a centralized bank in the case of Bitcoin it is encrypt those it’s like okay we’re gonna do work on what’s called the blockchain actual you know computations by computers and that’s going to be the value that has been done and block chains are gonna pop out and that’s gonna allow you and me to do an exchange outside of the knurl own

currency system you know and that’s really a layman’s term I don’t I don’t want to profess that I’m an expert in crypto currencies or anything like that but I am fascinated by them can I like the idea and I think it I think what you’re gonna see is you’re gonna see some cryptocurrency be put in place on a global scale that will be leveraged and maybe several of them whether that’s going to be Bitcoin in the end or not Ida I’m not so sure I mean if you look

at you know Yahoo at one time was the largest search engine right myspace was the number one social media very seldom does the first one end up being the final adaptation and so I have a little bit of caution and when we talk about Kryptos and our investment news bulletins and aj of course is an expert on these type of things and right now it’s the heady days you know it’s going up at this exponential rate and virtually anybody you know gets in and

they’re like I’ve made 200 percent or 300 percent or 500 percent or a thousand percent last year or whatever it happens to be and and what happens is is greed can cause a loss of perspective and right now I think we’re in a very speculative component do I think there’s value in it yes do I think you should put all your eggs in that basket no definitely not do you want to put some money aside and play that game sure but right now it’s you know the applications

for Kryptos in a day to day basis um haven’t really translated into the real world I mean a little bit you know people are making some exchanges but the exchanges are relatively slow and you know there’s issues that haven’t been worked out and I think are gonna run into some challenges with governments I know that the IRS asked coinbase recently to share everybody who’s got you know twenty thousand coins or more because what happens is let’s say let’s say I bought

a Bitcoin at $1 way back in the day and now for whatever reason Starbucks puts in a transaction base for bitcoins or any commercial agency but that Bitcoin as we speak is worth like $15,000 over but I buy my my $4 coffee well under the tax laws of that particular country I’ve realized a three dollar capital gains here and so this is the part that people have to recognize that as it gets recognized as a currency these government agencies are one are going to

they’re gonna go against it and that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get involved with it and I think it’s something that everybody should you know get some semblance of knowledge and participate on some level but I I don’t people to lose their minds about it because at the end of the day humans evolve and contribute by adding value to other people and the more that we focus on value based enterprise as opposed to speculative base enterprise I think the

more security we actually build for ourselves because at the end of the day if we’re producing value people are going to purchase it whatever the form of currency happens to be or whatever the medium or wherever you happen to be I love the the broadness of your answer because it leaves enough for interpretation and I want to ask for anyone listening to us speak about cryptocurrency right now would you have any advice as far as you know investing

specifically with Bitcoin right now and and the price of Bitcoin it just seems a little bit silly right now what’s going on with Bitcoin would you agree yeah it seems it seems pretty crazy and like I said it seems a lot like 1999 the reality is is probably 90% of these crypto currencies aren’t gonna make it they will fall away things won’t work out or whatever but there will be some that emerges and what that is and so I don’t want to give financial advice I

can’t legally do that I think it’s that you run into trouble but one of the things I think there’s an old strategy in investment worlds I think that really plays out well first off never invest anything you’re not willing to lose sure number two don’t invest in anything that you don’t understand I think those are those are good rules number three one of the things that I do so I’ll share what I do as I’m not giving advice I’ll share

what I do is – I’m in an in a particular investment when it doubles I take out what I invested I ride that with whatever or the game was so that allows a person with a little bit of money to kind of play maybe not even in Bitcoin but maybe some of the alt currencies or whatever but as soon as it goes up double I pull out what my initial investment was and and if it rises up and if it goes down well you know I didn’t lose anything so and that was

something I’ve learned you know I was an athlete and athletes we take risks we go against the odds and thanks to AJ he was able to provide me some insight to my own biases and my own biases as I want to play I want to go for the win so if I hadn’t had that information you know maybe a few years ago or even you asked me the same question years ago I’d be like yeah go all-in right you know but I’m all-in but I don’t suggest you go all-in on

anything even though that was a pathway for me and almost everything that I did but as I move into a new season in my life I’m looking at a little bit more defensive strategy yeah yeah I like that I you know I would just suggest looking at you know like like you said all currencies alts coins wait I really want to talk about you know none of this stuff matters if your health isn’t on point if you’re if nutrition for you isn’t there then you

know none of this stuff that you’re traveling you’re not gonna be able to travel and your investments you’re not gonna care how much money you have because yours your health isn’t gonna be there so I mean a big part of your world is nutrition staying healthy and fitness in the way that you were competing in these athletic competitions for bodybuilding why was that such a a powerful thing for your life there’s a lot of reasons and those reasons evolved

over time but I’ll say when I was 15 years old my sister was diagnosed with cancer and she was four years older than me and she was very athletic strong and you know played a lot of sports and was quite successful at it and then I watched over for years through through my high school years as as you know despite all the heroic efforts of modern medicine and all the treatments and all that sort of stuff I watched her literally waste away and

eventually die within under you know tragic and painful circumstances particularly for my family and anyone who’s gone through an experience of a family member having cancer can recognize that they they understand what that is it’s a it’s a very helpless feeling but having that happen to me at such an early age there was a gift within that and the gift was is I realized that my health wasn’t a guarantee and I think so many people

assume that they’re going to be healthy and always going to be healthy and it’s just one of those things we put off to the side and suddenly at some point in time oh I got a diagnosis so it’s like you know gee how did that happen well it happened over the last 30 years of whatever you’ve been doing over 40 years or 50 years or however long you been on so that had a powerful impact on me now it started off very innocent and silly

my sister had actually given me a bodybuilding magazine I still remember had Troy zu claw toe mr. kit had won just mr. California on the cover and had these two beautiful girls and I thought oh wow man I guess you need muscles for that and he looks strong and healthy that looks great and I started getting into Arnold Schwarzenegger as my first kind of mentor in my mind and I read his book education of a bodybuilder and he said you know you can achieve anything

with hardwork self-discipline and a positive attitude and that seemed like a great idea to me he looked like he was doing well so I started on that endeavor to build up myself because I thought that would make me healthier and I thought it would make me stronger the ironic thing was is I went off to University studied exercise physiology and you know I got a good background information but it was like all these pieces of the puzzle it wasn’t put

together and so I decided that I would go under mentorship so what I did is I found one of the best coaches in the world in the world of bodybuilding and I hired him to mentor me and that was a great move on my part and it took me a long time to get there to kind of suspend my ego and make that step and when I did it was transformational but it also came with some challenges for example in 1998 I went to the my first national championship so this is you

know after ten years of training I go to my first national championship and I discover essentially it’s a drug cult the whole thing is a drug culture so we have this look of bodybuilding which is this you know these beautifully muscled men and women standing on stage and you know almost nothing you know chiseled you know cosmetic ideals of what we were supposed to look like but then backstage it looks like a a MASH unit or something

and so I realized at the time this is not why I got into the sport you know I got into the sport to be healthy and strong and vital no listen I realized that at the higher levels it’s become everything that I didn’t want it to be that’s not what I signed up for so I left the sport I opened up my own nutrition store but then I got involved in you know what I call sex drugs and spirituality basically my coach told me the years later what it was and he said

you actually went through a grieving process so I went in and you know got involved you know I went through an evolutionary phase where I partied a lot and used a lot of different chemicals and stuff and then had a transformational experience in 2000 that pulled me out of that world and when I came out of it I got into meditation and started practicing and my teacher had told me that if something didn’t exist for you and it was right

you could do it if you practice these principle so I said okay I’ll put that to the test I became a vegetarian said I’m gonna win a national championship with no drugs as a vegetarian and I’m gonna meditate my way to that process and literally three years to the day after my total complete meltdown I was standing on stage at the mr. universe in Mumbai India representing my country and I was like wow this this really works this really really works he was right

this is true I can do this and you know a lot of unusual circumstances happened to that so I started to realize the power of meditation the power of self exploration the power of going inward and today in the digital world which everything is so outward and so coming at us that is stepping back and going within and realizing that no matter how powerful digital technology becomes it cannot compete with physiology the intuitive and emotional capacities of an

individual human and then if you can connect with a collective group of humans literally anything is possible but more importantly true inner peace and true joy is possible and I think at the end of the day that’s what everybody is really secretly craving you know when you see people practicing nutrition and working on their bodies you know whether it’s it’s weightlifting for competition or just to stay healthy is there a fundamental mistake that you see people

making that that you would advise against well I’ve made all of them so I could probably help people out along the way the first thing I think is rigidity of thought so if you look in martial arts a rigid position is a position of weakness and I believe it is the same in every endeavor the second we think that we know we’re in trouble so the ability to maintain an open mind the ability to experiment and to track that experiment

whether you are a data based person or you’re more an intuitive kinesthetic feel kind of person those two ways of interpreting how something affects your body is great so I would say that my first mistake and a lot of mistakes that people make is they begin to identify themselves with a certain diet a certain training style or a certain philosophy and what I have found is like life is things change and there is an evolutionary process so the right diet

for somebody at 15 years old might be different than 25 or 35 or 45 or so on or a competitive based diet which I you know I fell victim to one time all right and I say victim because I ended up becoming you know I ran that program out to a point that caused me to be ill now that illness led to a breakthrough which we can talk about but the bottom line is when you get rigid and you become dogmatic in your belief and your methodologies you stand you tend to stop

paying attention to the red lights going off in your life and that can be in any endeavor it could be in health it could be in relationships it could be in your business life but I think what happens is people get in there and I’m Kido or I’m a vegetarian or paleo or whatever the new fad is and oftentimes the change produces the initial results but if you look at life you look at everything everything has seasons everything has

arisen rhythms the the Four Seasons the changing the night today you know the dry climate – the wet climate the hot climate – the cold climate everything has contrast in the world that we live in and so by staying rigid we hold ourselves back from experiencing all possibilities and so one of the things that I have learned to develop is to look at diet or look at training or look at anything and stop seeing the differences but let’s look at the

commonalities and from the commonalities we can compile some basic tenant are some basic truths and from that point we can do our experiments so what I’m hearing is to really excel at this at anything is to not to have a rigid stance on whatever your understanding of something may be and to have enough of an open mind to accept you know the changes of things as in like the seasons and you compared it to the seasons as my close and understanding what what you

just said yeah I think so and I think there’s another piece that when we’re relating to diet particularly that people make a big mistake okay and that is theyes you know the old saying you are what you eat and that’s kind of become a meme that is perpetrated throughout the world and of course we identify with what we eat or so we’re socially or physically or culturally but what most people don’t realize it’s a single canal from your mouth to your

anus it’s like the food is in the tube it’s not in your cells it’s not in the actual body it’s not in your physicality until it goes across you know it goes through the digestive process and is broken down and in today’s world I think what happens is we are chasing our tails because we make the assumption that if I eat it it gets consumed and utilized and absorbed and that’s not the case and what we’re having developed now is we’re

seeing that but the fifth leading cause of death is digestive related illnesses in people who was that possible but yeah well the root cause of cancer and the root cause of heart disease and the root cause of diabetes they’re all traced to what we eat or what we consume but and some of those things can be things that cause us to be depressed some of those things can cause us to have various illnesses in the body whether it’s diabetes whether it’s heart disease

whether it’s cancer these are all related to our environment both externally and internally and so what we find is that getting ones digestive health in an optimal state is a key component to get the maximum benefit out of any dietary practice and also over the long term to maintain one’s health and one’s vitality is our ability to consume and utilize the nutrients from our diet and to eliminate the waste products and today we have a lot of things like you

know chemical agents and you know whether it’s pesticides and herbicides and plastic they’re finding plastic all in people’s physical tissues now you know that the high levels of estrogens and all the things that we genetically modify through all these sort of things that have been developed relatively recently and our human bodies have not adapted to them and although we have all the technological breakthroughs that life is brought to us we see an

increasing level of depression and what I call treatable these diseases so we have treatments for disease that’ll extends people’s life but doesn’t extend their quality of life and so for me I want to live long and live strong in order to do that I have to recognize I need to put great fuel in my body and I need that engine that digestive system is how we convert fuel into everything else in our body that needs to be at an optimal level and from that we developed

a company around that because I had that problem in 2003 when I went to that Mr Universe contest never goes oh wow that’s great and wonderful I followed a extremely rigid diet for a long period time eleven straight months I ate five things and literally at the end of that contest game 42 pounds of fat and water I felt terrible I went from mr. universe to mr. marshmallow and it was devastating and I couldn’t figure out I couldn’t I was like I’ve been doing this

for 16 years I’ve got the best coach in the world I’ve got the best discipline in the world I’m doing everything I’m right and Here I am at the end of my rope I’m having a disaster from that perspective but that’s what led me to finding the medical doctor that taught me about how to build the body from the inside out as opposed to the outside in I had started a meditative process at that time so that made even more sense to me on a

psychological level but then it was something I could use on a biochemical level as well and and you know it’s been that way ever since so I really want to dig into your last statement there where you felt you had been doing this for you know 16 years or what were you doing wrong that resulted in this reaction what happened there a couple of things one was an excessive consumption of protein I think was the first thing number two an extended

calorie restriction under you know an incredible physical duress I mean training for mr. universe contest is annexed it’s challenging and run a life and stuff and also I would compound another thing onto that and going back to my initial statement the first fear because of an identification I was that guy I was that guy that need to be at single-digit body fat percentages I identified with you know being that champion being that athlete being best

student of my coach and not listening to my own intuitive wisdom you know I felt terrible the last six months I knew that there was problems but I refused to acknowledge them because I was so focused that I was going to the mr. universe no matter what and it didn’t matter what the cost was and you know when the bill came I discovered what the cost was and the cost was my health and the cost was my happiness the cause was all that but fortunately I was able to

find another person to help me and that’s what opened me up to flexibility you know you will become flexible or life will smash you ask anybody that has kids right kids change everything yeah absolutely this is why I wanted to you know really bring you on the show is such a diverse range of experiences that you’ve had and there’s something that I was reading about that I had to do a double-take on when I was doing the research for the show I think it was an

article that you wrote called what every athlete needs to know about restructured ionizedwater is this an action this is a real thing what is restructured ionizedwater why isn’t so important to our health and our bodies well again this was a another fortuitous discovery that I made in 2007 ionized water or electrically reduced water as it’s some kind sometimes called in like scientific or technical is basically a process where through

electrolysis you put an electrical current through water and with a device you can separate those waters into two streams and this one stream will be acidic and one stream will be alkaline based on the mineral dispersion so you had an occurring in a negative ion base minerals will go one way and the positively charged ones will go another way and it was discovered in Japanese hospitals back in the 60s that you could use this ionized water and you could

treat a variety of different things and there was a lot of different theories about why this was had positive benefits but I will list the couple that I understand which has now have recently been proven to be true and number one is if you can I’ll start on the one side that a lot of people don’t start on on the acidic side when you create an ionized water you’ll create two sides one will be negatively charged which has an antioxidant benefit and another one

is a positively charged which will be an acidic effect now you can make a strong acid using this water that you can kill salmonella E coli mersa any kind of bacteria in Japanese hospitals we’re using that in order to disinfect the instruments without using antibiotic or antibacterial mechanisms and so that has a massive benefit to society from a you know you look at hospitals today they’re the number one source of you know untreatable

antibiotic resistant bacteria one of my friends dr. Horace filter who was part of the team that put the he’s a Harvard graduate and he taught at the Harvard Medical Center for 35 years and surgery put the first stent in the body he says that you know a large part of people who die from surgery die from infection not from the surgery and so he was testing it because he thought it was it was beneficial for untreatable wounds you

know people with open wounds and sores and all these things that wouldn’t respond to normal treatment so use it for that and that’s what it was originally used for in Japanese hospitals but they also started to realize that if you drank the negatively charged ions what happens there was a change to the structure a change to the charge of the water a change to its effectiveness and what it meant is it reduced water to a level that was more

absorbable by the body it was easier to cross into the cell membrane so you had better hydration and it also seemed to have a positive effect on free radicals and that is free radicals are the things that basically cause inflammation in the body on every level we’re all inflammation is the number one killer of everything it you know we get inflamed anything that’s an itis inflammation is the silent killer that we can’t feel or touch but it’s

part of what causes the aging and degeneration process and so they started using this in Japan quite widespread Lee and then later on what happened is a number of companies sprung up and they were selling these household ionisers that you could actually turn your tap water into this I thought it was a bunch of bunk guys like come on man this sounds really far-out fortunately you know I mean really and what happened is I realized that I had a

rigid position and I went okay you know what I have a rigid of the position the scientific method is to put in a hypothesis and test that hypothesis to see if it’s gonna be what I find ironic is a lot of people in the medical or scientific professions quickly discount this kind of technology without running an experiment they actually break away from scientific method they condemned it before experimenting so it’s just one of the the interesting points of the world

today so I didn’t experience it you know I’m gonna try this stuff at the time I was about 200 pounds I said approximately 75% water I’m going to replace if this really is that much more absorbable and utilizable I’m gonna put a little theory that I’m gonna drink as much of this water as possible or a short period of time and see what its effects on my body Isis be like changing the oil in my in your car in layman’s terms I figured I would just flush all

the water that’s currently in the body and put in this new stuff so I drank an excessive amount of this water and I trained and in a ferocious late cuz I said if this is an antioxidant level this is really has an ability to absorb better it should reduce lactic acid significantly and it did I couldn’t believe it I was like wow I can’t believe I’m training this hard and the level of soreness I experienced is significantly reduced to anything that

I’ve ever experienced before and so I said well maybe it’s an antidote maybe this isn’t true so what I did is I literally Regan turd into the national championships which was only three and a half weeks later I’ve been retired since my contest in 2003 this was 2007 and I was like I’m gonna compress four months of preparation into three and a half weeks and there’s no way I could possibly survive this under normal circumstances

but I’m gonna apply everything that I’ve learned over these last four years in rebuilding my health and I’m gonna put it out of an extremely high level in an optimized level and I’m gonna train like a crazy person and I’m gonna see if I can produce a result that I know is not possible and that is to get in shape for this contest and potentially win it and turned out I did win both my classes and went back to the World Championships

three months later and placed better than I did the first time and I said okay that’s great now what was interesting going back to the book his people got wind of this story and as you know when people get wind of the story they oftentimes get it incorrectly and so I came back I went to the contest was in Greece at that time and after Greece I went on a you know kind of a tour around Europe and ended up all over the world and then I got back in January and

I literally saw an article that was produced by a particular company and a quote about this and and I’m looking at this and then I I found out from some other people they thought I was some 70 year old guy that had went to the mr. Knorr because he came to retirement and there was all these stories and it was this crazy and so I called up one of the people that made the marketing brochure and I said to them I said hey look uh number one I think this is a wonderful

marketing brochure that you have it’s really well done it’s very oh ticket I love this design and the color we’ve got a couple of problems though and I said number one you use my picture without my approval number two you’re misquoting what actually transpired and you’re doing the world a disservice by telling them wrong information and so he was kind of he’s like waiting for a lawsuit I said look I don’t want you to sue I think the water

is great for people I think I’ve used it in my clinic I use myself I think it’s got a lot of benefit but how about we come together here and do something of service how about I write a book on how this affects athletic performance because I think it’s gonna be such a game-changer for athletics I think it is an unfair advantage if you’re drinking this water and you’re in an athletic environment on a daily basis or whether at the

highest levels of you know professional sports it’s a game changer so we wrote this little book what every athlete needs to know about restructure dinah has water and the next thing you know that started a speaking tour as these distributors of the product wanted me to come and speak at their local events and so off I went again and you know that was the culmination of about seven years on the road where I just kind of lived around the world and I would be taken in

by people and get on stage in front of a couple hundred people or a hundred people or you know a thousand people didn’t matter and I would share about what I had learned and I would answer questions from other athletes and and it met a lot of great people and had an amazing time and yeah it was totally unexpected but it was out of service you know just hey I think people can benefit from this I saw it personally in my own life and I saw it personally in

the with the clients I dealt with so that’s how it went and then what was recently happened is I just had a call with dr. filter three weeks ago and he also was very skeptical being a surgeon about this technology but it had he had found a significant benefit with his arthritis when he had a drinkin which is the bane of all surgeons he went on a quest for ten years and nobody could prove that it was actually having an antioxidant effect and he reasoned that

was because the charts that are the the mechanism they were using to measure its antioxidant effect was incorrect and he devised a test where he could do this he could actually measure its antioxidant effect and just recently published the data in a 100% defensible experiment scientifically valid put into peer-reviewed journals that has proven that this type of water increases mitochondrial energy and has an antioxidant effect in the body and is

absorbed by the body and also improves red blood cell formation all things which I experienced but it had no way of sharing other than anecdotal in my own intuitive nature so it was really nice to have that scientific validation wow this is really amazing really interesting to read about this to learn about this to hear about it from you Wow I mean wait we’ve covered so much information we’ve covered you know finance comics nutrition traveling the world you

know I really want to also cover because it this is a big part of your life and you mentioned it several times and I and I glossed over it because I wanted to cover these other things meditation and just enhancing consciousness identifying with our inner world connecting with that which is inside instead of looking on the outside for things how does a person do that more how do we how do we see within more oh that’s a that’s a

really loaded question um you know I can only share my own experience because you know I can’t always get inside of other people’s heads and I had a couple I think frankly I think I might have gotten some advantages that allowed me to discover the benefits number one when when I was fifteen we moved to this very rural areas five miles into the woods so I had to spend a lot of time alone without a lot of stimulus and so without

that stimulus you spend time in your thoughts you spend time going in also in a very peaceful environment even though I wasn’t interested in that at that’s being 15 I want to be with my friends and having fun and all that stuff Here I am in the munis pristine place so III develop that capacity and also when I was training when you’re building your body that became a process where you started to internalize so I do think that athletics gives a person an

advantage that by doing athletics you can start going within oneself as you get a deeper connection and I’m not talking about putting the headphones on and going to the gym I’m talking about actually feeling your body in itself whether that’s through yoga practice or whether that’s through bodybuilding whether that’s through endurance training you start to be aware of your breath you start to be aware of the physicality of yourself and then what

happens is you start to reflect on that now for me being experimenter as I as I have been and I didn’t know anything about meditation or internal environments when I was 22 you know I was experimenting with you know LSD and these type of things and for whatever reason I had an overdose at one point and had the experience of dying and had the life review and experience the universe or God however you want to a near-death experience and that completely changed

my life when I came out of that the world seemed you know I was in university at the time and it just seemed like I was in kindergarten and people were asleep and and I had this whole new awareness and that spawned me to you know get on a plane and go to Santa Monica and follow my dreams and become a body bill you know I met Joe golden when training and all that sort of stuff so there is a progressive part and then that can be a side effect you

know years later when I left bodybuilding and went through that down period again I I fell into the pursuit of you know trying all different sorts of chemicals and things like that what you have you know different experiences and states of consciousness but I got into the dark side of that and then you know had a mystical experience coming out of that where my teacher appeared to me and you know the rest you know told me I needed to start meditating and I

had been studying meditation from a scientific point and from a pure mechanical wave of playing music and doing sensory stuff but then I got into a serious practice at that stage in my life and from then the internal progression over time in its in it’s not linear sometimes you go through great periods of just unbelievable realizations and sometimes you feel like oh my god I’m not made any progress at all and that is part of the journey and

that is part of the reflection and that is part of understanding the seasons within our own consciousness itself and so I’m not here in advocating you know using sort of all sorts of recreational drugs or ethnobotanical –zz but I think for me they triggered some experiences that made these kind of Airy fairy out there ideas that I hadn’t been exposed to it at an earlier age become real and tangible and something I wanted to seek

without those those chemical agents yeah wow that’s so profound I love that yeah meditation is important crucial it’s an everyday practice for me it keeps me sane as much as I I look at at it as you know going to the gym for the mind for me it keeps me in tune things are very intuitive for me and for me to keep that compass sort of in line in check I have to have a sort of grounded state and if that is add an imbalance or if I if I’m not taking time

away and and doing that it’s not fun it’s important to have all these in check so that we can travel the world so that we can conquer you know all these business ideas and so that we can be so at service to others is there anything that that you can add to what I just said yeah I actually I can and I think I’m one of the experiments and why I got triggered into kind of travelling the world I read about the the wandering sad who’s in India and these people would

stay and never stay in a place for more than two weeks because I didn’t want to tech develop attachments and patterns of behavior or actions based on their environment I thought well I wonder why they would do that that seems pretty radical so I said okay well why don’t I try that why don’t I just go all over the world I you know I had gone through a major change in life and you know didn’t have any possessions or anything like that so I was like well this is the

perfect time to kind of you know the world kind of help me let go of those by just circumstance and so I got on that path and you know Ike remember when you first do it especially when you go to a new place or a new area what happens is it’s very disconcerting most people don’t realize is that you develop once you get you know in a certain area or living in a place in the world that’s familiar you just ignore a lot of the things that are going on your brain goes

into autopilot mode and feeds in the data but when you go to a new place it seems there’s a lot going on and you’re aware of so many different things and all these tripwires and your brain start become activated and oftentimes when people travel it could be very stressful it’s very challenging you know new cultures languages you know going to the store can be difficult cuz you can’t communicate you don’t understand if you know what the exchange is you don’t know

the social customs all of this stuff and then I remember there is a kind of a breakthrough moment I think it was about three or four years in where I realized that I could go to a new place and not be overwhelmed and what I felt it was doing is I was increasing awareness of what’s my peripheral vision and at that point I was learning under a spiritual teacher by the name of dr. David Hawkins and he was talking about how meditation moves

to contemplation and in the bonner and busy world that you can meditation is kind of sitting in one place but in a contemplation you would hold maybe a spiritual thought or a universal thought or a loving thought and you would take that and apply it throughout the day in a meditative process so you could be going to the store and you could be kind and loving under all circumstances while someone smashes into your car well are you gonna be kind and loving in that

circumstance or you get caught in traffic and this becomes a a benchmark a contrast point to see where am I at and again I think that starts to bring you back in to see am i stressed am I overreacting am i angry having these negative emotion States and we start to realize yeah I am in a negative emotion choice and I can totally relate to what you said you know if for some reason I don’t do my meditation or I forget about my contemplation or I get you know out

of that pattern pretty soon it doesn’t take too long and all of a sudden I see a degeneration to my old patterns of behavior my old stress levels all these types of things coming up so you know I don’t think you’re immune to it at any level on the journey or any place in the journey like I said it’s not a linear thing is there’s no place to go there’s not like all those sort of stuff it’s it’s the letting go of everything and which is kind of counterintuitive to how

we’ve kind of setup the Western world of you know of more the more monster yeah and we can start to wrap up here with this and I think we’ve come full circle with this and I really appreciate this conversation it just flew by you know I think for a lot of people there is you know this fear of missing out and I feel like we go through education we go through this sort of training and we get put into the so-called real world and we’re not given any tools we’re not

given anything that’s beneficial my my degree is you know a paperweight it’s literally a piece of paper that I don’t think I ever used I think all the learning that I did post college is where I developed my career where I develop my passions do you agree with this I mean do you agree with the way that the system is set up that people are sort of trapped in this sort of loop this sort of cycle of school job work chase money get married that sort of

cycle of life and death yeah I really believe that that’s why I’m so passionate about the idea of the digital republic and living in this at the new age where you can experience and express more outside of that and recapture that youth if you look back to history history always gives indications of the future if you look back to ancient Greece and kind of like the great thinkers 2,500 years ago who really understood the psychology in mind they

talked about the connection between mind and body the development of self discipline within oneself and they didn’t teach just science they taught philosophy science without philosophy is can be used for terrible things science with philosophy can be transformative for the world but at the end of the day one can only apply philosophy or science to one’s self and rather than express oneself to force everybody to become like you or to you what you do that the

better way with the great teachers of the world where they reform themselves to such a level that became so magnetic and so attractive that their life took on you know a different level I mean you look at all these people that there was hardly any books there is no internet there was no these eyes but these ideas and these values have transcended and developed cultures throughout thousands and thousands of years and for some reason in the modern world and all this

busyness people have lost the concept of self-experimentation the the concept of the value of one’s physicality and taking it and and creating it to be as healthy as possible so that you can experience the full range of our sensory experience and environmental experiences and and then to leverage the technology of today to take that plane trip to the other side of the world to take that boat trip it take up the artist course to go down

there and drink some juice in the jungle and see what happens to you to go out there and expose yourself to things and you know of all the people that I’ve seen do that I haven’t met one of them that didn’t feel that their life was enriched did all the things that go out the way they expect no did you know they end up having a fatter bank account not necessarily did they experience a greater level of joy and connectedness almost every single time and some of the

most fascinating people I’ve ever met we’re the people who were willing to let go of the status quo the people that were willing to break free of the social conditioning that they found themselves in the ability to not identify themselves with the past but to learn from it and to use that as a tool to influence their present and ultimately their future I love it Wade thank you so much for being here man where can people find your work where can people get a

copy of of your book and whatever whatever you want to plug do it do it now please oh well thank you appreciate that well um if they’re interested in the digital republic can how to make money online to kind of finance their traveling world they would go to the wealthy backpacker calm and you can download a free copy if you’re suffering from health challenges or you’d like the next level health they can simply go to the human experience

slash the awesome health course we’ll put that in the notes and I give away literally a 12-week health optimization course and inside that it’s little five to fifteen minute videos of everything that I’ve learned over the last thirty years that can enhance the qualities of one’s health and vitality and I give both of those things away for free and the reason I do that is I really want people to freely enjoy my ideas but not to say that they have to follow them and

I always tell people just read it if you like it take what you like and discard what you don’t apply what you think is relative to your life right now and and if it works out for you drop me I’d love to hear it I’d love to hear those stories from people yeah for sure wait thank you so much for your time guys we are going to get out of here you have been listening to the human experience my name is Xavier katana a huge thanks to my guest Wade light heart

guys thank you so much for listening you will hear from us next week