Podcast appearances and mentions of nick polizzi

This podcast features Gabriele Corso and Jeremy Wohlwend, co-founders of Boltz and authors of the Boltz Manifesto, discussing the rapid evolution of structural biology models from AlphaFold to their own open-source suite, Boltz-1 and Boltz-2. The central thesis is that while single-chain protein structure prediction is largely “solved” through evolutionary hints, the next frontier lies in modeling complex interactions (protein-ligand, protein-protein) and generative protein design, which Boltz aims to democratize via open-source foundations and scalable infrastructure.Full Video PodOn YouTube!Timestamps* 00:00 Introduction to Benchmarking and the “Solved” Protein Problem* 06:48 Evolutionary Hints and Co-evolution in Structure Prediction* 10:00 The Importance of Protein Function and Disease States* 15:31 Transitioning from AlphaFold 2 to AlphaFold 3 Capabilities* 19:48 Generative Modeling vs. Regression in Structural Biology* 25:00 The “Bitter Lesson” and Specialized AI Architectures* 29:14 Development Anecdotes: Training Boltz-1 on a Budget* 32:00 Validation Strategies and the Protein Data Bank (PDB)* 37:26 The Mission of Boltz: Democratizing Access and Open Source* 41:43 Building a Self-Sustaining Research Community* 44:40 Boltz-2 Advancements: Affinity Prediction and Design* 51:03 BoltzGen: Merging Structure and Sequence Prediction* 55:18 Large-Scale Wet Lab Validation Results* 01:02:44 Boltz Lab Product Launch: Agents and Infrastructure* 01:13:06 Future Directions: Developpability and the “Virtual Cell”* 01:17:35 Interacting with Skeptical Medicinal ChemistsKey SummaryEvolution of Structure Prediction & Evolutionary Hints* Co-evolutionary Landscapes: The speakers explain that breakthrough progress in single-chain protein prediction relied on decoding evolutionary correlations where mutations in one position necessitate mutations in another to conserve 3D structure.* Structure vs. Folding: They differentiate between structure prediction (getting the final answer) and folding (the kinetic process of reaching that state), noting that the field is still quite poor at modeling the latter.* Physics vs. Statistics: RJ posits that while models use evolutionary statistics to find the right “valley” in the energy landscape, they likely possess a “light understanding” of physics to refine the local minimum.The Shift to Generative Architectures* Generative Modeling: A key leap in AlphaFold 3 and Boltz-1 was moving from regression (predicting one static coordinate) to a generative diffusion approach that samples from a posterior distribution.* Handling Uncertainty: This shift allows models to represent multiple conformational states and avoid the “averaging” effect seen in regression models when the ground truth is ambiguous.* Specialized Architectures: Despite the “bitter lesson” of general-purpose transformers, the speakers argue that equivariant architectures remain vastly superior for biological data due to the inherent 3D geometric constraints of molecules.Boltz-2 and Generative Protein Design* Unified Encoding: Boltz-2 (and BoltzGen) treats structure and sequence prediction as a single task by encoding amino acid identities into the atomic composition of the predicted structure.* Design Specifics: Instead of a sequence, users feed the model blank tokens and a high-level “spec” (e.g., an antibody framework), and the model decodes both the 3D structure and the corresponding amino acids.* Affinity Prediction: While model confidence is a common metric, Boltz-2 focuses on affinity prediction—quantifying exactly how tightly a designed binder will stick to its target.Real-World Validation and Productization* Generalized Validation: To prove the model isn't just “regurgitating” known data, Boltz tested its designs on 9 targets with zero known interactions in the PDB, achieving nanomolar binders for two-thirds of them.* Boltz Lab Infrastructure: The newly launched Boltz Lab platform provides “agents” for protein and small molecule design, optimized to run 10x faster than open-source versions through proprietary GPU kernels.* Human-in-the-Loop: The platform is designed to convert skeptical medicinal chemists by allowing them to run parallel screens and use their intuition to filter model outputs.TranscriptRJ [00:05:35]: But the goal remains to, like, you know, really challenge the models, like, how well do these models generalize? And, you know, we've seen in some of the latest CASP competitions, like, while we've become really, really good at proteins, especially monomeric proteins, you know, other modalities still remain pretty difficult. So it's really essential, you know, in the field that there are, like, these efforts to gather, you know, benchmarks that are challenging. So it keeps us in line, you know, about what the models can do or not.Gabriel [00:06:26]: Yeah, it's interesting you say that, like, in some sense, CASP, you know, at CASP 14, a problem was solved and, like, pretty comprehensively, right? But at the same time, it was really only the beginning. So you can say, like, what was the specific problem you would argue was solved? And then, like, you know, what is remaining, which is probably quite open.RJ [00:06:48]: I think we'll steer away from the term solved, because we have many friends in the community who get pretty upset at that word. And I think, you know, fairly so. But the problem that was, you know, that a lot of progress was made on was the ability to predict the structure of single chain proteins. So proteins can, like, be composed of many chains. And single chain proteins are, you know, just a single sequence of amino acids. And one of the reasons that we've been able to make such progress is also because we take a lot of hints from evolution. So the way the models work is that, you know, they sort of decode a lot of hints. That comes from evolutionary landscapes. So if you have, like, you know, some protein in an animal, and you go find the similar protein across, like, you know, different organisms, you might find different mutations in them. And as it turns out, if you take a lot of the sequences together, and you analyze them, you see that some positions in the sequence tend to evolve at the same time as other positions in the sequence, sort of this, like, correlation between different positions. And it turns out that that is typically a hint that these two positions are close in three dimension. So part of the, you know, part of the breakthrough has been, like, our ability to also decode that very, very effectively. But what it implies also is that in absence of that co-evolutionary landscape, the models don't quite perform as well. And so, you know, I think when that information is available, maybe one could say, you know, the problem is, like, somewhat solved. From the perspective of structure prediction, when it isn't, it's much more challenging. And I think it's also worth also differentiating the, sometimes we confound a little bit, structure prediction and folding. Folding is the more complex process of actually understanding, like, how it goes from, like, this disordered state into, like, a structured, like, state. And that I don't think we've made that much progress on. But the idea of, like, yeah, going straight to the answer, we've become pretty good at.Brandon [00:08:49]: So there's this protein that is, like, just a long chain and it folds up. Yeah. And so we're good at getting from that long chain in whatever form it was originally to the thing. But we don't know how it necessarily gets to that state. And there might be intermediate states that it's in sometimes that we're not aware of.RJ [00:09:10]: That's right. And that relates also to, like, you know, our general ability to model, like, the different, you know, proteins are not static. They move, they take different shapes based on their energy states. And I think we are, also not that good at understanding the different states that the protein can be in and at what frequency, what probability. So I think the two problems are quite related in some ways. Still a lot to solve. But I think it was very surprising at the time, you know, that even with these evolutionary hints that we were able to, you know, to make such dramatic progress.Brandon [00:09:45]: So I want to ask, why does the intermediate states matter? But first, I kind of want to understand, why do we care? What proteins are shaped like?Gabriel [00:09:54]: Yeah, I mean, the proteins are kind of the machines of our body. You know, the way that all the processes that we have in our cells, you know, work is typically through proteins, sometimes other molecules, sort of intermediate interactions. And through that interactions, we have all sorts of cell functions. And so when we try to understand, you know, a lot of biology, how our body works, how disease work. So we often try to boil it down to, okay, what is going right in case of, you know, our normal biological function and what is going wrong in case of the disease state. And we boil it down to kind of, you know, proteins and kind of other molecules and their interaction. And so when we try predicting the structure of proteins, it's critical to, you know, have an understanding of kind of those interactions. It's a bit like seeing the difference between... Having kind of a list of parts that you would put it in a car and seeing kind of the car in its final form, you know, seeing the car really helps you understand what it does. On the other hand, kind of going to your question of, you know, why do we care about, you know, how the protein falls or, you know, how the car is made to some extent is that, you know, sometimes when something goes wrong, you know, there are, you know, cases of, you know, proteins misfolding. In some diseases and so on, if we don't understand this folding process, we don't really know how to intervene.RJ [00:11:30]: There's this nice line in the, I think it's in the Alpha Fold 2 manuscript, where they sort of discuss also like why we even hopeful that we can target the problem in the first place. And then there's this notion that like, well, four proteins that fold. The folding process is almost instantaneous, which is a strong, like, you know, signal that like, yeah, like we should, we might be... able to predict that this very like constrained thing that, that the protein does so quickly. And of course that's not the case for, you know, for, for all proteins. And there's a lot of like really interesting mechanisms in the cells, but yeah, I remember reading that and thought, yeah, that's somewhat of an insightful point.Gabriel [00:12:10]: I think one of the interesting things about the protein folding problem is that it used to be actually studied. And part of the reason why people thought it was impossible, it used to be studied as kind of like a classical example. Of like an MP problem. Uh, like there are so many different, you know, type of, you know, shapes that, you know, this amino acid could take. And so, this grows combinatorially with the size of the sequence. And so there used to be kind of a lot of actually kind of more theoretical computer science thinking about and studying protein folding as an MP problem. And so it was very surprising also from that perspective, kind of seeing. Machine learning so clear, there is some, you know, signal in those sequences, through evolution, but also through kind of other things that, you know, us as humans, we're probably not really able to, uh, to understand, but that is, models I've, I've learned.Brandon [00:13:07]: And so Andrew White, we were talking to him a few weeks ago and he said that he was following the development of this and that there were actually ASICs that were developed just to solve this problem. So, again, that there were. There were many, many, many millions of computational hours spent trying to solve this problem before AlphaFold. And just to be clear, one thing that you mentioned was that there's this kind of co-evolution of mutations and that you see this again and again in different species. So explain why does that give us a good hint that they're close by to each other? Yeah.RJ [00:13:41]: Um, like think of it this way that, you know, if I have, you know, some amino acid that mutates, it's going to impact everything around it. Right. In three dimensions. And so it's almost like the protein through several, probably random mutations and evolution, like, you know, ends up sort of figuring out that this other amino acid needs to change as well for the structure to be conserved. Uh, so this whole principle is that the structure is probably largely conserved, you know, because there's this function associated with it. And so it's really sort of like different positions compensating for, for each other. I see.Brandon [00:14:17]: Those hints in aggregate give us a lot. Yeah. So you can start to look at what kinds of information about what is close to each other, and then you can start to look at what kinds of folds are possible given the structure and then what is the end state.RJ [00:14:30]: And therefore you can make a lot of inferences about what the actual total shape is. Yeah, that's right. It's almost like, you know, you have this big, like three dimensional Valley, you know, where you're sort of trying to find like these like low energy states and there's so much to search through. That's almost overwhelming. But these hints, they sort of maybe put you in. An area of the space that's already like, kind of close to the solution, maybe not quite there yet. And, and there's always this question of like, how much physics are these models learning, you know, versus like, just pure like statistics. And like, I think one of the thing, at least I believe is that once you're in that sort of approximate area of the solution space, then the models have like some understanding, you know, of how to get you to like, you know, the lower energy, uh, low energy state. And so maybe you have some, some light understanding. Of physics, but maybe not quite enough, you know, to know how to like navigate the whole space. Right. Okay.Brandon [00:15:25]: So we need to give it these hints to kind of get into the right Valley and then it finds the, the minimum or something. Yeah.Gabriel [00:15:31]: One interesting explanation about our awful free works that I think it's quite insightful, of course, doesn't cover kind of the entirety of, of what awful does that is, um, they're going to borrow from, uh, Sergio Chinico for MIT. So he sees kind of awful. Then the interesting thing about awful is God. This very peculiar architecture that we have seen, you know, used, and this architecture operates on this, you know, pairwise context between amino acids. And so the idea is that probably the MSA gives you this first hint about what potential amino acids are close to each other. MSA is most multiple sequence alignment. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. This evolutionary information. Yeah. And, you know, from this evolutionary information about potential contacts, then is almost as if the model is. of running some kind of, you know, diastro algorithm where it's sort of decoding, okay, these have to be closed. Okay. Then if these are closed and this is connected to this, then this has to be somewhat closed. And so you decode this, that becomes basically a pairwise kind of distance matrix. And then from this rough pairwise distance matrix, you decode kind of theBrandon [00:16:42]: actual potential structure. Interesting. So there's kind of two different things going on in the kind of coarse grain and then the fine grain optimizations. Interesting. Yeah. Very cool.Gabriel [00:16:53]: Yeah. You mentioned AlphaFold3. So maybe we have a good time to move on to that. So yeah, AlphaFold2 came out and it was like, I think fairly groundbreaking for this field. Everyone got very excited. A few years later, AlphaFold3 came out and maybe for some more history, like what were the advancements in AlphaFold3? And then I think maybe we'll, after that, we'll talk a bit about the sort of how it connects to Bolt. But anyway. Yeah. So after AlphaFold2 came out, you know, Jeremy and I got into the field and with many others, you know, the clear problem that, you know, was, you know, obvious after that was, okay, now we can do individual chains. Can we do interactions, interaction, different proteins, proteins with small molecules, proteins with other molecules. And so. So why are interactions important? Interactions are important because to some extent that's kind of the way that, you know, these machines, you know, these proteins have a function, you know, the function comes by the way that they interact with other proteins and other molecules. Actually, in the first place, you know, the individual machines are often, as Jeremy was mentioning, not made of a single chain, but they're made of the multiple chains. And then these multiple chains interact with other molecules to give the function to those. And on the other hand, you know, when we try to intervene of these interactions, think about like a disease, think about like a, a biosensor or many other ways we are trying to design the molecules or proteins that interact in a particular way with what we would call a target protein or target. You know, this problem after AlphaVol2, you know, became clear, kind of one of the biggest problems in the field to, to solve many groups, including kind of ours and others, you know, started making some kind of contributions to this problem of trying to model these interactions. And AlphaVol3 was, you know, was a significant advancement on the problem of modeling interactions. And one of the interesting thing that they were able to do while, you know, some of the rest of the field that really tried to try to model different interactions separately, you know, how protein interacts with small molecules, how protein interacts with other proteins, how RNA or DNA have their structure, they put everything together and, you know, train very large models with a lot of advances, including kind of changing kind of systems. Some of the key architectural choices and managed to get a single model that was able to set this new state-of-the-art performance across all of these different kind of modalities, whether that was protein, small molecules is critical to developing kind of new drugs, protein, protein, understanding, you know, interactions of, you know, proteins with RNA and DNAs and so on.Brandon [00:19:39]: Just to satisfy the AI engineers in the audience, what were some of the key architectural and data, data changes that made that possible?Gabriel [00:19:48]: Yeah, so one critical one that was not necessarily just unique to AlphaFold3, but there were actually a few other teams, including ours in the field that proposed this, was moving from, you know, modeling structure prediction as a regression problem. So where there is a single answer and you're trying to shoot for that answer to a generative modeling problem where you have a posterior distribution of possible structures and you're trying to sample this distribution. And this achieves two things. One is it starts to allow us to try to model more dynamic systems. As we said, you know, some of these structures can actually take multiple structures. And so, you know, you can now model that, you know, through kind of modeling the entire distribution. But on the second hand, from more kind of core modeling questions, when you move from a regression problem to a generative modeling problem, you are really tackling the way that you think about uncertainty in the model in a different way. So if you think about, you know, I'm undecided between different answers, what's going to happen in a regression model is that, you know, I'm going to try to make an average of those different kind of answers that I had in mind. When you have a generative model, what you're going to do is, you know, sample all these different answers and then maybe use separate models to analyze those different answers and pick out the best. So that was kind of one of the critical improvement. The other improvement is that they significantly simplified, to some extent, the architecture, especially of the final model that takes kind of those pairwise representations and turns them into an actual structure. And that now looks a lot more like a more traditional transformer than, you know, like a very specialized equivariant architecture that it was in AlphaFold3.Brandon [00:21:41]: So this is a bitter lesson, a little bit.Gabriel [00:21:45]: There is some aspect of a bitter lesson, but the interesting thing is that it's very far from, you know, being like a simple transformer. This field is one of the, I argue, very few fields in applied machine learning where we still have kind of architecture that are very specialized. And, you know, there are many people that have tried to replace these architectures with, you know, simple transformers. And, you know, there is a lot of debate in the field, but I think kind of that most of the consensus is that, you know, the performance... that we get from the specialized architecture is vastly superior than what we get through a single transformer. Another interesting thing that I think on the staying on the modeling machine learning side, which I think it's somewhat counterintuitive seeing some of the other kind of fields and applications is that scaling hasn't really worked kind of the same in this field. Now, you know, models like AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold3 are, you know, still very large models.RJ [00:29:14]: in a place, I think, where we had, you know, some experience working in, you know, with the data and working with this type of models. And I think that put us already in like a good place to, you know, to produce it quickly. And, you know, and I would even say, like, I think we could have done it quicker. The problem was like, for a while, we didn't really have the compute. And so we couldn't really train the model. And actually, we only trained the big model once. That's how much compute we had. We could only train it once. And so like, while the model was training, we were like, finding bugs left and right. A lot of them that I wrote. And like, I remember like, I was like, sort of like, you know, doing like, surgery in the middle, like stopping the run, making the fix, like relaunching. And yeah, we never actually went back to the start. We just like kept training it with like the bug fixes along the way, which was impossible to reproduce now. Yeah, yeah, no, that model is like, has gone through such a curriculum that, you know, learned some weird stuff. But yeah, somehow by miracle, it worked out.Gabriel [00:30:13]: The other funny thing is that the way that we were training, most of that model was through a cluster from the Department of Energy. But that's sort of like a shared cluster that many groups use. And so we were basically training the model for two days, and then it would go back to the queue and stay a week in the queue. Oh, yeah. And so it was pretty painful. And so we actually kind of towards the end with Evan, the CEO of Genesis, and basically, you know, I was telling him a bit about the project and, you know, kind of telling him about this frustration with the compute. And so luckily, you know, he offered to kind of help. And so we, we got the help from Genesis to, you know, finish up the model. Otherwise, it probably would have taken a couple of extra weeks.Brandon [00:30:57]: Yeah, yeah.Brandon [00:31:02]: And then, and then there's some progression from there.Gabriel [00:31:06]: Yeah, so I would say kind of that, both one, but also kind of these other kind of set of models that came around the same time, were kind of approaching were a big leap from, you know, kind of the previous kind of open source models, and, you know, kind of really kind of approaching the level of AlphaVault 3. But I would still say that, you know, even to this day, there are, you know, some... specific instances where AlphaVault 3 works better. I think one common example is antibody antigen prediction, where, you know, AlphaVault 3 still seems to have an edge in many situations. Obviously, these are somewhat different models. They are, you know, you run them, you obtain different results. So it's, it's not always the case that one model is better than the other, but kind of in aggregate, we still, especially at the time.Brandon [00:32:00]: So AlphaVault 3 is, you know, still having a bit of an edge. We should talk about this more when we talk about Boltzgen, but like, how do you know one is, one model is better than the other? Like you, so you, I make a prediction, you make a prediction, like, how do you know?Gabriel [00:32:11]: Yeah, so easily, you know, the, the great thing about kind of structural prediction and, you know, once we're going to go into the design space of designing new small molecule, new proteins, this becomes a lot more complex. But a great thing about structural prediction is that a bit like, you know, CASP was doing, basically the way that you can evaluate them is that, you know, you train... You know, you train a model on a structure that was, you know, released across the field up until a certain time. And, you know, one of the things that we didn't talk about that was really critical in all this development is the PDB, which is the Protein Data Bank. It's this common resources, basically common database where every biologist publishes their structures. And so we can, you know, train on, you know, all the structures that were put in the PDB until a certain date. And then... And then we basically look for recent structures, okay, which structures look pretty different from anything that was published before, because we really want to try to understand generalization.Brandon [00:33:13]: And then on this new structure, we evaluate all these different models. And so you just know when AlphaFold3 was trained, you know, when you're, you intentionally trained to the same date or something like that. Exactly. Right. Yeah.Gabriel [00:33:24]: And so this is kind of the way that you can somewhat easily kind of compare these models, obviously, that assumes that, you know, the training. You've always been very passionate about validation. I remember like DiffDoc, and then there was like DiffDocL and DocGen. You've thought very carefully about this in the past. Like, actually, I think DocGen is like a really funny story that I think, I don't know if you want to talk about that. It's an interesting like... Yeah, I think one of the amazing things about putting things open source is that we get a ton of feedback from the field. And, you know, sometimes we get kind of great feedback of people. Really like... But honestly, most of the times, you know, to be honest, that's also maybe the most useful feedback is, you know, people sharing about where it doesn't work. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it's critical. And this is also something, you know, across other fields of machine learning. It's always critical to set, to do progress in machine learning, set clear benchmarks. And as, you know, you start doing progress of certain benchmarks, then, you know, you need to improve the benchmarks and make them harder and harder. And this is kind of the progression of, you know, how the field operates. And so, you know, the example of DocGen was, you know, we published this initial model called DiffDoc in my first year of PhD, which was sort of like, you know, one of the early models to try to predict kind of interactions between proteins, small molecules, that we bought a year after AlphaFold2 was published. And now, on the one hand, you know, on these benchmarks that we were using at the time, DiffDoc was doing really well, kind of, you know, outperforming kind of some of the traditional physics-based methods. But on the other hand, you know, when we started, you know, kind of giving these tools to kind of many biologists, and one example was that we collaborated with was the group of Nick Polizzi at Harvard. We noticed, started noticing that there was this clear, pattern where four proteins that were very different from the ones that we're trained on, the models was, was struggling. And so, you know, that seemed clear that, you know, this is probably kind of where we should, you know, put our focus on. And so we first developed, you know, with Nick and his group, a new benchmark, and then, you know, went after and said, okay, what can we change? And kind of about the current architecture to improve this pattern and generalization. And this is the same that, you know, we're still doing today, you know, kind of, where does the model not work, you know, and then, you know, once we have that benchmark, you know, let's try to, through everything we, any ideas that we have of the problem.RJ [00:36:15]: And there's a lot of like healthy skepticism in the field, which I think, you know, is, is, is great. And I think, you know, it's very clear that there's a ton of things, the models don't really work well on, but I think one thing that's probably, you know, undeniable is just like the pace of, pace of progress, you know, and how, how much better we're getting, you know, every year. And so I think if you, you know, if you assume, you know, any constant, you know, rate of progress moving forward, I think things are going to look pretty cool at some point in the future.Gabriel [00:36:42]: ChatGPT was only three years ago. Yeah, I mean, it's wild, right?RJ [00:36:45]: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those things. Like, you've been doing this. Being in the field, you don't see it coming, you know? And like, I think, yeah, hopefully we'll, you know, we'll, we'll continue to have as much progress we've had the past few years.Brandon [00:36:55]: So this is maybe an aside, but I'm really curious, you get this great feedback from the, from the community, right? By being open source. My question is partly like, okay, yeah, if you open source and everyone can copy what you did, but it's also maybe balancing priorities, right? Where you, like all my customers are saying. I want this, there's all these problems with the model. Yeah, yeah. But my customers don't care, right? So like, how do you, how do you think about that? Yeah.Gabriel [00:37:26]: So I would say a couple of things. One is, you know, part of our goal with Bolts and, you know, this is also kind of established as kind of the mission of the public benefit company that we started is to democratize the access to these tools. But one of the reasons why we realized that Bolts needed to be a company, it couldn't just be an academic project is that putting a model on GitHub is definitely not enough to get, you know, chemists and biologists, you know, across, you know, both academia, biotech and pharma to use your model to, in their therapeutic programs. And so a lot of what we think about, you know, at Bolts beyond kind of the, just the models is thinking about all the layers. The layers that come on top of the models to get, you know, from, you know, those models to something that can really enable scientists in the industry. And so that goes, you know, into building kind of the right kind of workflows that take in kind of, for example, the data and try to answer kind of directly that those problems that, you know, the chemists and the biologists are asking, and then also kind of building the infrastructure. And so this to say that, you know, even with models fully open. You know, we see a ton of potential for, you know, products in the space and the critical part about a product is that even, you know, for example, with an open source model, you know, running the model is not free, you know, as we were saying, these are pretty expensive model and especially, and maybe we'll get into this, you know, these days we're seeing kind of pretty dramatic inference time scaling of these models where, you know, the more you run them, the better the results are. But there, you know, you see. You start getting into a point that compute and compute costs becomes a critical factor. And so putting a lot of work into building the right kind of infrastructure, building the optimizations and so on really allows us to provide, you know, a much better service potentially to the open source models. That to say, you know, even though, you know, with a product, we can provide a much better service. I do still think, and we will continue to put a lot of our models open source because the critical kind of role. I think of open source. Models is, you know, helping kind of the community progress on the research and, you know, from which we, we all benefit. And so, you know, we'll continue to on the one hand, you know, put some of our kind of base models open source so that the field can, can be on top of it. And, you know, as we discussed earlier, we learn a ton from, you know, the way that the field uses and builds on top of our models, but then, you know, try to build a product that gives the best experience possible to scientists. So that, you know, like a chemist or a biologist doesn't need to, you know, spin off a GPU and, you know, set up, you know, our open source model in a particular way, but can just, you know, a bit like, you know, I, even though I am a computer scientist, machine learning scientist, I don't necessarily, you know, take a open source LLM and try to kind of spin it off. But, you know, I just maybe open a GPT app or a cloud code and just use it as an amazing product. We kind of want to give the same experience. So this front world.Brandon [00:40:40]: I heard a good analogy yesterday that a surgeon doesn't want the hospital to design a scalpel, right?Brandon [00:40:48]: So just buy the scalpel.RJ [00:40:50]: You wouldn't believe like the number of people, even like in my short time, you know, between AlphaFold3 coming out and the end of the PhD, like the number of people that would like reach out just for like us to like run AlphaFold3 for them, you know, or things like that. Just because like, you know, bolts in our case, you know, just because it's like. It's like not that easy, you know, to do that, you know, if you're not a computational person. And I think like part of the goal here is also that, you know, we continue to obviously build the interface with computational folks, but that, you know, the models are also accessible to like a larger, broader audience. And then that comes from like, you know, good interfaces and stuff like that.Gabriel [00:41:27]: I think one like really interesting thing about bolts is that with the release of it, you didn't just release a model, but you created a community. Yeah. Did that community, it grew very quickly. Did that surprise you? And like, what is the evolution of that community and how is that fed into bolts?RJ [00:41:43]: If you look at its growth, it's like very much like when we release a new model, it's like, there's a big, big jump, but yeah, it's, I mean, it's been great. You know, we have a Slack community that has like thousands of people on it. And it's actually like self-sustaining now, which is like the really nice part because, you know, it's, it's almost overwhelming, I think, you know, to be able to like answer everyone's questions and help. It's really difficult, you know. The, the few people that we were, but it ended up that like, you know, people would answer each other's questions and like, sort of like, you know, help one another. And so the Slack, you know, has been like kind of, yeah, self, self-sustaining and that's been, it's been really cool to see.RJ [00:42:21]: And, you know, that's, that's for like the Slack part, but then also obviously on GitHub as well. We've had like a nice, nice community. You know, I think we also aspire to be even more active on it, you know, than we've been in the past six months, which has been like a bit challenging, you know, for us. But. Yeah, the community has been, has been really great and, you know, there's a lot of papers also that have come out with like new evolutions on top of bolts and it's surprised us to some degree because like there's a lot of models out there. And I think like, you know, sort of people converging on that was, was really cool. And, you know, I think it speaks also, I think, to the importance of like, you know, when, when you put code out, like to try to put a lot of emphasis and like making it like as easy to use as possible and something we thought a lot about when we released the code base. You know, it's far from perfect, but, you know.Brandon [00:43:07]: Do you think that that was one of the factors that caused your community to grow is just the focus on easy to use, make it accessible? I think so.RJ [00:43:14]: Yeah. And we've, we've heard it from a few people over the, over the, over the years now. And, you know, and some people still think it should be a lot nicer and they're, and they're right. And they're right. But yeah, I think it was, you know, at the time, maybe a little bit easier than, than other things.Gabriel [00:43:29]: The other thing part, I think led to, to the community and to some extent, I think, you know, like the somewhat the trust in the community. Kind of what we, what we put out is the fact that, you know, it's not really been kind of, you know, one model, but, and maybe we'll talk about it, you know, after Boltz 1, you know, there were maybe another couple of models kind of released, you know, or open source kind of soon after. We kind of continued kind of that open source journey or at least Boltz 2, where we are not only improving kind of structure prediction, but also starting to do affinity predictions, understanding kind of the strength of the interactions between these different models, which is this critical component. critical property that you often want to optimize in discovery programs. And then, you know, more recently also kind of protein design model. And so we've sort of been building this suite of, of models that come together, interact with one another, where, you know, kind of, there is almost an expectation that, you know, we, we take very at heart of, you know, always having kind of, you know, across kind of the entire suite of different tasks, the best or across the best. model out there so that it's sort of like our open source tool can be kind of the go-to model for everybody in the, in the industry. I really want to talk about Boltz 2, but before that, one last question in this direction, was there anything about the community which surprised you? Were there any, like, someone was doing something and you're like, why would you do that? That's crazy. Or that's actually genius. And I never would have thought about that.RJ [00:45:01]: I mean, we've had many contributions. I think like some of the. Interesting ones, like, I mean, we had, you know, this one individual who like wrote like a complex GPU kernel, you know, for part of the architecture on a piece of, the funny thing is like that piece of the architecture had been there since AlphaFold 2, and I don't know why it took Boltz for this, you know, for this person to, you know, to decide to do it, but that was like a really great contribution. We've had a bunch of others, like, you know, people figuring out like ways to, you know, hack the model to do something. They click peptides, like, you know, there's, I don't know if there's any other interesting ones come to mind.Gabriel [00:45:41]: One cool one, and this was, you know, something that initially was proposed as, you know, as a message in the Slack channel by Tim O'Donnell was basically, he was, you know, there are some cases, especially, for example, we discussed, you know, antibody-antigen interactions where the models don't necessarily kind of get the right answer. What he noticed is that, you know, the models were somewhat stuck into predicting kind of the antibodies. And so he basically ran the experiments in this model, you can condition, basically, you can give hints. And so he basically gave, you know, random hints to the model, basically, okay, you should bind to this residue, you should bind to the first residue, or you should bind to the 11th residue, or you should bind to the 21st residue, you know, basically every 10 residues scanning the entire antigen.Brandon [00:46:33]: Residues are the...Gabriel [00:46:34]: The amino acids. The amino acids, yeah. So the first amino acids. The 11 amino acids, and so on. So it's sort of like doing a scan, and then, you know, conditioning the model to predict all of them, and then looking at the confidence of the model in each of those cases and taking the top. And so it's sort of like a very somewhat crude way of doing kind of inference time search. But surprisingly, you know, for antibody-antigen prediction, it actually kind of helped quite a bit. And so there's some, you know, interesting ideas that, you know, obviously, as kind of developing the model, you say kind of, you know, wow. This is why would the model, you know, be so dumb. But, you know, it's very interesting. And that, you know, leads you to also kind of, you know, start thinking about, okay, how do I, can I do this, you know, not with this brute force, but, you know, in a smarter way.RJ [00:47:22]: And so we've also done a lot of work on that direction. And that speaks to, like, the, you know, the power of scoring. We're seeing that a lot. I'm sure we'll talk about it more when we talk about BullsGen. But, you know, our ability to, like, take a structure and determine that that structure is, like... Good. You know, like, somewhat accurate. Whether that's a single chain or, like, an interaction is a really powerful way of improving, you know, the models. Like, sort of like, you know, if you can sample a ton and you assume that, like, you know, if you sample enough, you're likely to have, like, you know, the good structure. Then it really just becomes a ranking problem. And, you know, now we're, you know, part of the inference time scaling that Gabby was talking about is very much that. It's like, you know, the more we sample, the more we, like, you know, the ranking model. The ranking model ends up finding something it really likes. And so I think our ability to get better at ranking, I think, is also what's going to enable sort of the next, you know, next big, big breakthroughs. Interesting.Brandon [00:48:17]: But I guess there's a, my understanding, there's a diffusion model and you generate some stuff and then you, I guess, it's just what you said, right? Then you rank it using a score and then you finally... And so, like, can you talk about those different parts? Yeah.Gabriel [00:48:34]: So, first of all, like, the... One of the critical kind of, you know, beliefs that we had, you know, also when we started working on Boltz 1 was sort of like the structure prediction models are somewhat, you know, our field version of some foundation models, you know, learning about kind of how proteins and other molecules interact. And then we can leverage that learning to do all sorts of other things. And so with Boltz 2, we leverage that learning to do affinity predictions. So understanding kind of, you know, if I give you this protein, this molecule. How tightly is that interaction? For Boltz 1, what we did was taking kind of that kind of foundation models and then fine tune it to predict kind of entire new proteins. And so the way basically that that works is sort of like instead of for the protein that you're designing, instead of fitting in an actual sequence, you fit in a set of blank tokens. And you train the models to, you know, predict both the structure of kind of that protein. The structure also, what the different amino acids of that proteins are. And so basically the way that Boltz 1 operates is that you feed a target protein that you may want to kind of bind to or, you know, another DNA, RNA. And then you feed the high level kind of design specification of, you know, what you want your new protein to be. For example, it could be like an antibody with a particular framework. It could be a peptide. It could be many other things. And that's with natural language or? And that's, you know, basically, you know, prompting. And we have kind of this sort of like spec that you specify. And, you know, you feed kind of this spec to the model. And then the model translates this into, you know, a set of, you know, tokens, a set of conditioning to the model, a set of, you know, blank tokens. And then, you know, basically the codes as part of the diffusion models, the codes. It's a new structure and a new sequence for your protein. And, you know, basically, then we take that. And as Jeremy was saying, we are trying to score it and, you know, how good of a binder it is to that original target.Brandon [00:50:51]: You're using basically Boltz to predict the folding and the affinity to that molecule. So and then that kind of gives you a score? Exactly.Gabriel [00:51:03]: So you use this model to predict the folding. And then you do two things. One is that you predict the structure and with something like Boltz2, and then you basically compare that structure with what the model predicted, what Boltz2 predicted. And this is sort of like in the field called consistency. It's basically you want to make sure that, you know, the structure that you're predicting is actually what you're trying to design. And that gives you a much better confidence that, you know, that's a good design. And so that's the first filtering. And the second filtering that we did as part of kind of the Boltz2 pipeline that was released is that we look at the confidence that the model has in the structure. Now, unfortunately, kind of going to your question of, you know, predicting affinity, unfortunately, confidence is not a very good predictor of affinity. And so one of the things that we've actually done a ton of progress, you know, since we released Boltz2.Brandon [00:52:03]: And kind of we have some new results that we are going to kind of announce soon is kind of, you know, the ability to get much better hit rates when instead of, you know, trying to rely on confidence of the model, we are actually directly trying to predict the affinity of that interaction. Okay. Just backing up a minute. So your diffusion model actually predicts not only the protein sequence, but also the folding of it. Exactly.Gabriel [00:52:32]: And actually, you can... One of the big different things that we did compared to other models in the space, and, you know, there were some papers that had already kind of done this before, but we really scaled it up was, you know, basically somewhat merging kind of the structure prediction and the sequence prediction into almost the same task. And so the way that Boltz2 works is that you are basically the only thing that you're doing is predicting the structure. So the only sort of... Supervision is we give you a supervision on the structure, but because the structure is atomic and, you know, the different amino acids have a different atomic composition, basically from the way that you place the atoms, we also understand not only kind of the structure that you wanted, but also the identity of the amino acid that, you know, the models believed was there. And so we've basically, instead of, you know, having these two supervision signals, you know, one discrete, one continuous. That somewhat, you know, don't interact well together. We sort of like build kind of like an encoding of, you know, sequences in structures that allows us to basically use exactly the same supervision signal that we were using to Boltz2 that, you know, you know, largely similar to what AlphaVol3 proposed, which is very scalable. And we can use that to design new proteins. Oh, interesting.RJ [00:53:58]: Maybe a quick shout out to Hannes Stark on our team who like did all this work. Yeah.Gabriel [00:54:04]: Yeah, that was a really cool idea. I mean, like looking at the paper and there's this is like encoding or you just add a bunch of, I guess, kind of atoms, which can be anything, and then they get sort of rearranged and then basically plopped on top of each other so that and then that encodes what the amino acid is. And there's sort of like a unique way of doing this. It was that was like such a really such a cool, fun idea.RJ [00:54:29]: I think that idea was had existed before. Yeah, there were a couple of papers.Gabriel [00:54:33]: Yeah, I had proposed this and and Hannes really took it to the large scale.Brandon [00:54:39]: In the paper, a lot of the paper for Boltz2Gen is dedicated to actually the validation of the model. In my opinion, all the people we basically talk about feel that this sort of like in the wet lab or whatever the appropriate, you know, sort of like in real world validation is the whole problem or not the whole problem, but a big giant part of the problem. So can you talk a little bit about the highlights? From there, that really because to me, the results are impressive, both from the perspective of the, you know, the model and also just the effort that went into the validation by a large team.Gabriel [00:55:18]: First of all, I think I should start saying is that both when we were at MIT and Thomas Yacolas and Regina Barzillai's lab, as well as at Boltz, you know, we are not a we're not a biolab and, you know, we are not a therapeutic company. And so to some extent, you know, we were first forced to, you know, look outside of, you know, our group, our team to do the experimental validation. One of the things that really, Hannes, in the team pioneer was the idea, OK, can we go not only to, you know, maybe a specific group and, you know, trying to find a specific system and, you know, maybe overfit a bit to that system and trying to validate. But how can we test this model? So. Across a very wide variety of different settings so that, you know, anyone in the field and, you know, printing design is, you know, such a kind of wide task with all sorts of different applications from therapeutic to, you know, biosensors and many others that, you know, so can we get a validation that is kind of goes across many different tasks? And so he basically put together, you know, I think it was something like, you know, 25 different. You know, academic and industry labs that committed to, you know, testing some of the designs from the model and some of this testing is still ongoing and, you know, giving results kind of back to us in exchange for, you know, hopefully getting some, you know, new great sequences for their task. And he was able to, you know, coordinate this, you know, very wide set of, you know, scientists and already in the paper, I think we. Shared results from, I think, eight to 10 different labs kind of showing results from, you know, designing peptides, designing to target, you know, ordered proteins, peptides targeting disordered proteins, which are results, you know, of designing proteins that bind to small molecules, which are results of, you know, designing nanobodies and across a wide variety of different targets. And so that's sort of like. That gave to the paper a lot of, you know, validation to the model, a lot of validation that was kind of wide.Brandon [00:57:39]: And so those would be therapeutics for those animals or are they relevant to humans as well? They're relevant to humans as well.Gabriel [00:57:45]: Obviously, you need to do some work into, quote unquote, humanizing them, making sure that, you know, they have the right characteristics to so they're not toxic to humans and so on.RJ [00:57:57]: There are some approved medicine in the market that are nanobodies. There's a general. General pattern, I think, in like in trying to design things that are smaller, you know, like it's easier to manufacture at the same time, like that comes with like potentially other challenges, like maybe a little bit less selectivity than like if you have something that has like more hands, you know, but the yeah, there's this big desire to, you know, try to design many proteins, nanobodies, small peptides, you know, that just are just great drug modalities.Brandon [00:58:27]: Okay. I think we were left off. We were talking about validation. Validation in the lab. And I was very excited about seeing like all the diverse validations that you've done. Can you go into some more detail about them? Yeah. Specific ones. Yeah.RJ [00:58:43]: The nanobody one. I think we did. What was it? 15 targets. Is that correct? 14. 14 targets. Testing. So we typically the way this works is like we make a lot of designs. All right. On the order of like tens of thousands. And then we like rank them and we pick like the top. And in this case, and was 15 right for each target and then we like measure sort of like the success rates, both like how many targets we were able to get a binder for and then also like more generally, like out of all of the binders that we designed, how many actually proved to be good binders. Some of the other ones I think involved like, yeah, like we had a cool one where there was a small molecule or design a protein that binds to it. That has a lot of like interesting applications, you know, for example. Like Gabri mentioned, like biosensing and things like that, which is pretty cool. We had a disordered protein, I think you mentioned also. And yeah, I think some of those were some of the highlights. Yeah.Gabriel [00:59:44]: So I would say that the way that we structure kind of some of those validations was on the one end, we have validations across a whole set of different problems that, you know, the biologists that we were working with came to us with. So we were trying to. For example, in some of the experiments, design peptides that would target the RACC, which is a target that is involved in metabolism. And we had, you know, a number of other applications where we were trying to design, you know, peptides or other modalities against some other therapeutic relevant targets. We designed some proteins to bind small molecules. And then some of the other testing that we did was really trying to get like a more broader sense. So how does the model work, especially when tested, you know, on somewhat generalization? So one of the things that, you know, we found with the field was that a lot of the validation, especially outside of the validation that was on specific problems, was done on targets that have a lot of, you know, known interactions in the training data. And so it's always a bit hard to understand, you know, how much are these models really just regurgitating kind of what they've seen or trying to imitate. What they've seen in the training data versus, you know, really be able to design new proteins. And so one of the experiments that we did was to take nine targets from the PDB, filtering to things where there is no known interaction in the PDB. So basically the model has never seen kind of this particular protein bound or a similar protein bound to another protein. So there is no way that. The model from its training set can sort of like say, okay, I'm just going to kind of tweak something and just imitate this particular kind of interaction. And so we took those nine proteins. We worked with adaptive CRO and basically tested, you know, 15 mini proteins and 15 nanobodies against each one of them. And the very cool thing that we saw was that on two thirds of those targets, we were able to, from this 15 design, get nanomolar binders, nanomolar, roughly speaking, just a measure of, you know, how strongly kind of the interaction is, roughly speaking, kind of like a nanomolar binder is approximately the kind of binding strength or binding that you need for a therapeutic. Yeah. So maybe switching directions a bit. Bolt's lab was just announced this week or was it last week? Yeah. This is like your. First, I guess, product, if that's if you want to call it that. Can you talk about what Bolt's lab is and yeah, you know, what you hope that people take away from this? Yeah.RJ [01:02:44]: You know, as we mentioned, like I think at the very beginning is the goal with the product has been to, you know, address what the models don't on their own. And there's largely sort of two categories there. I'll split it in three. The first one. It's one thing to predict, you know, a single interaction, for example, like a single structure. It's another to like, you know, very effectively search a space, a design space to produce something of value. What we found, like sort of building on this product is that there's a lot of steps involved, you know, in that there's certainly need to like, you know, accompany the user through, you know, one of those steps, for example, is like, you know, the creation of the target itself. You know, how do we make sure that the model has like a good enough understanding of the target? So we can like design something and there's all sorts of tricks, you know, that you can do to improve like a particular, you know, structure prediction. And so that's sort of like, you know, the first stage. And then there's like this stage of like, you know, designing and searching the space efficiently. You know, for something like BullsGen, for example, like you, you know, you design many things and then you rank them, for example, for small molecule process, a little bit more complicated. We actually need to also make sure that the molecules are synthesizable. And so the way we do that is that, you know, we have a generative model that learns. To use like appropriate building blocks such that, you know, it can design within a space that we know is like synthesizable. And so there's like, you know, this whole pipeline really of different models involved in being able to design a molecule. And so that's been sort of like the first thing we call them agents. We have a protein agent and we have a small molecule design agents. And that's really like at the core of like what powers, you know, the BullsLab platform.Brandon [01:04:22]: So these agents, are they like a language model wrapper or they're just like your models and you're just calling them agents? A lot. Yeah. Because they, they, they sort of perform a function on behalf of.RJ [01:04:33]: They're more of like a, you know, a recipe, if you wish. And I think we use that term sort of because of, you know, sort of the complex pipelining and automation, you know, that goes into like all this plumbing. So that's the first part of the product. The second part is the infrastructure. You know, we need to be able to do this at very large scale for any one, you know, group that's doing a design campaign. Let's say you're designing, you know, I'd say a hundred thousand possible candidates. Right. To find the good one that is, you know, a very large amount of compute, you know, for small molecules, it's on the order of like a few seconds per designs for proteins can be a bit longer. And so, you know, ideally you want to do that in parallel, otherwise it's going to take you weeks. And so, you know, we've put a lot of effort into like, you know, our ability to have a GPU fleet that allows any one user, you know, to be able to do this kind of like large parallel search.Brandon [01:05:23]: So you're amortizing the cost over your users. Exactly. Exactly.RJ [01:05:27]: And, you know, to some degree, like it's whether you. Use 10,000 GPUs for like, you know, a minute is the same cost as using, you know, one GPUs for God knows how long. Right. So you might as well try to parallelize if you can. So, you know, a lot of work has gone, has gone into that, making it very robust, you know, so that we can have like a lot of people on the platform doing that at the same time. And the third one is, is the interface and the interface comes in, in two shapes. One is in form of an API and that's, you know, really suited for companies that want to integrate, you know, these pipelines, these agents.RJ [01:06:01]: So we're already partnering with, you know, a few distributors, you know, that are gonna integrate our API. And then the second part is the user interface. And, you know, we, we've put a lot of thoughts also into that. And this is when I, I mentioned earlier, you know, this idea of like broadening the audience. That's kind of what the, the user interface is about. And we've built a lot of interesting features in it, you know, for example, for collaboration, you know, when you have like potentially multiple medicinal chemists or. We're going through the results and trying to pick out, okay, like what are the molecules that we're going to go and test in the lab? It's powerful for them to be able to, you know, for example, each provide their own ranking and then do consensus building. And so there's a lot of features around launching these large jobs, but also around like collaborating on analyzing the results that we try to solve, you know, with that part of the platform. So Bolt's lab is sort of a combination of these three objectives into like one, you know, sort of cohesive platform. Who is this accessible to? Everyone. You do need to request access today. We're still like, you know, sort of ramping up the usage, but anyone can request access. If you are an academic in particular, we, you know, we provide a fair amount of free credit so you can play with the platform. If you are a startup or biotech, you may also, you know, reach out and we'll typically like actually hop on a call just to like understand what you're trying to do and also provide a lot of free credit to get started. And of course, also with larger companies, we can deploy this platform in a more like secure environment. And so that's like more like customizing. You know, deals that we make, you know, with the partners, you know, and that's sort of the ethos of Bolt. I think this idea of like servicing everyone and not necessarily like going after just, you know, the really large enterprises. And that starts from the open source, but it's also, you know, a key design principle of the product itself.Gabriel [01:07:48]: One thing I was thinking about with regards to infrastructure, like in the LLM space, you know, the cost of a token has gone down by I think a factor of a thousand or so over the last three years, right? Yeah. And is it possible that like essentially you can exploit economies of scale and infrastructure that you can make it cheaper to run these things yourself than for any person to roll their own system? A hundred percent. Yeah.RJ [01:08:08]: I mean, we're already there, you know, like running Bolts on our platform, especially on a large screen is like considerably cheaper than it would probably take anyone to put the open source model out there and run it. And on top of the infrastructure, like one of the things that we've been working on is accelerating the models. So, you know. Our small molecule screening pipeline is 10x faster on Bolts Lab than it is in the open source, you know, and that's also part of like, you know, building a product, you know, of something that scales really well. And we really wanted to get to a point where like, you know, we could keep prices very low in a way that it would be a no-brainer, you know, to use Bolts through our platform.Gabriel [01:08:52]: How do you think about validation of your like agentic systems? Because, you know, as you were saying earlier. Like we're AlphaFold style models are really good at, let's say, monomeric, you know, proteins where you have, you know, co-evolution data. But now suddenly the whole point of this is to design something which doesn't have, you know, co-evolution data, something which is really novel. So now you're basically leaving the domain that you thought was, you know, that you know you are good at. So like, how do you validate that?RJ [01:09:22]: Yeah, I like every complete, but there's obviously, you know, a ton of computational metrics. That we rely on, but those are only take you so far. You really got to go to the lab, you know, and test, you know, okay, with this method A and this method B, how much better are we? You know, how much better is my, my hit rate? How stronger are my binders? Also, it's not just about hit rate. It's also about how good the binders are. And there's really like no way, nowhere around that. I think we're, you know, we've really ramped up the amount of experimental validation that we do so that we like really track progress, you know, as scientifically sound, you know. Yeah. As, as possible out of this, I think.Gabriel [01:10:00]: Yeah, no, I think, you know, one thing that is unique about us and maybe companies like us is that because we're not working on like maybe a couple of therapeutic pipelines where, you know, our validation would be focused on those. We, when we do an experimental validation, we try to test it across tens of targets. And so that on the one end, we can get a much more statistically significant result and, and really allows us to make progress. From the methodological side without being, you know, steered by, you know, overfitting on any one particular system. And of course we choose, you know, w

Finding new ways to pray always lights up my soul. It's fun to try new ways of connecting to the Divine. Growing up in my Catholic faith, I was guided to consider “spiritual bouquets” as a gift to God and others. Spiritual bouquets are offered to express love, support and appreciation. I have come to learn other spiritual practices and use them in my spiritual bouquets. The Lakota Prayer to the Four Directions is one such practice. In many native cultures across the North American continent, there is a unifying spiritual element that has been used for many years to bring wisdom and healing to the people, it is called the medicine wheel. Nick Polizzi describes the medicine wheel is composed of four quadrants. Each direction North, East, South and West carries deep meaning. Each quadrant has its own color and spirit keeper. Envisioning both is part of the meditation. This healing prayer can be used for yourself or a loved one. As you imagine this person laying down, you can consider the four directions as a guide to the focus of your meditation. Their head is the north, East the left side, South their feet and West the right side. Vera Dery has written a beautiful prayer to go with this meditation.

Synthetic technologies allow scientists to venture into uncharted waters, asking unique research questions and finding previously unattainable solutions to some of life's biggest mysteries. From gene editing to protein engineering, synthesized DNA libraries enable researchers to grasp once unreachable high-throughput screening applications and dismantle barriers between experimental ideation and execution. In this podcast series, Synthetic Screens, Genes, and De Novo Proteins, The Scientist's Creative Services Team talks to experts about their experiences implementing Twist Bioscience's synthesized long double-stranded gene pools, called Multiplexed Gene Fragments, for high-throughput screening.   In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist spoke with Jeffrey Chang, a graduate student in Nick Polizzi's laboratory at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, about designing ligand-binding proteins from scratch and testing them in a high-throughput manner using synthetic DNA libraries.

How often do you get out in nature and look closely at the plants around you? Our forebears knew so much more than most of us do today about the natural world, and they embraced the healing power of herbs and other plants through their cooking and treatment of illness and injury. Herbalism is an ancient, scientific practice that I find deeply fascinating, which is why I want to share a new Masterclass from herbalism expert Nick Polizzi (of The Sacred Science) and James Colquhoun (filmmaker and co-founder of Food Matters & The Food Matters Institute) with you. If you have been experiencing stress, signs of burnout, or struggle to sleep well, this is a must-watch, giving insight into using medicinal herbs to feel calm and restore balance. Thanks to guest expert Nick Polizzi, you'll learn: The science of herbalism and how to use it to manage stress, anxiety, depression, and sleep issues. The #1 mushroom to help combat stress, anxiety, and low moods. What bitter herbs and flavors can do for your digestion. The nervine herbs that can calm your nervous system and give you better sleep. Why you should ditch the chamomile tea bags and grow chamomile yourself for daily use. And much more! Nick Polizzi has spent his career producing and directing feature-length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. He has been traveling the world, documenting forgotten healing methods ever since he cured himself of a debilitating illness using a traditional therapy when he was 25 years old.

Learn what ayahuasca is, what it's used for, when not to use it, and the top 7 tips to help you work with this powerful plant effectively. ------ JOIN ME AT RYHTMIA

This is a chapter from Trauma: Healing Your Past to Find Freedom Now by Pedram Shojai and Nick Polizzi. You'll learn more about what trauma actually is, and how to take the first step to healing. You can listen to the whole audiobook FREE for 14 days in the Hay House Unlimited Audio App. Download now! Apple: hayhouse.com/apple or Android: hayhouse.com/google. CONTENT WARNING: this episode refers to incidents of physical abuse and rape. 

Nick Polizzi is a producer and director of feature-length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. He is the founder of the Sacred Science, director of the feature documentary by the same name, and author of the book based on the film. Nick is the co-author of Exhausted: How to Revitalize, Restore, and Renew your Energy, Trauma: Healing Your Past to Find Freedom Now, and Conscious Parenting: A Guide to Raising Resilient, Wholehearted & Empowered Kids. Nick and his wife Michelle have been working tirelessly to bring information on healing, shamanism, herbalism, energy medicine, environmentalism and consciousness into the public sphere. Today we discuss some of his upcoming projects, and delve into topics like conscious parenting, ancestral healing and some pretty great ayahuasca stories. You can find him here: thesacredscience.com On Instagram: @thesacredscience Find us on IG @theselfconsciousnesspodcast And me jenniferwai.com Music Outro; Manu Chao - Me Gustas Tu --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/selfconsciousnesspodcast/message

Nick Polizzi is a producer and director of feature-length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. He is the founder of the Sacred Science, director of the feature documentary by the same name, and author of the book based on the film. Nick is the co-author of Exhausted: How to Revitalize, Restore, and Renew your Energy, Trauma: Healing Your Past to Find Freedom Now, and Conscious Parenting: A Guide to Raising Resilient, Wholehearted & Empowered Kids. Nick and his wife Michelle have been working tirelessly to bring information on healing, shamanism, herbalism, energy medicine, environmentalism and consciousness into the public sphere. Today we discuss some of his upcoming projects, and delve into topics like conscious parenting, ancestral healing and some pretty great ayahuasca stories. You can find him here: thesacredscience.com On Instagram: @thesacredscience Find us on IG @theselfconsciousnesspodcast And me jenniferwai.com Music Outro; Manu Chao - Me Gustas Tu --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/selfconsciousnesspodcast/message

If you've been wondering about what the best therapies are to help heal from trauma then tune in to today's episode. Today we sit down with NYT best-selling author, Dr. Pedram Shojai and author, producer, director, Nick Polizzi. Nick and Pedram share with us insights from their book, Trauma, Healing Your Past To Find Freedom Now. Join us as we discuss the ways in which trauma can show up in your life, the relationship between the “gut” and trauma and how to know when it is your trauma that is driving your actions versus  your authentic self? Highlights How do we know when we have actually moved on from our trauma and when we still need to address it? What is the role of the Vagus nerve in trauma? How does one start to work with normalizing the Vagus nerve? How does trauma potentially affect body weight and our ability to optimize our weight? What are some of the unintentional traumas that we can accumulate from our parents? Has our media and entertainment industry played a role in creating more trauma? Where is the starting point for someone that wants to heal their trauma and restore their life?

Nick has spent his career directing and producing feature-length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. Most recently, Nick directed The Tapping Solution and co-edited Simply Raw - Raw for 30 Days. His current role as producer of The Sacred Science—a documentary about explorations in the Amazon to learn about traditional, healing practices—stems from a calling to honor, preserve, and protect the ancient knowledge and rituals of the indigenous peoples of the world.Learn more about the Sacred Science on Facebook and Instagram.Learn more about Lyte.    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nick has spent his career directing and producing feature-length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. Most recently, Nick directed The Tapping Solution and co-edited Simply Raw - Raw for 30 Days. His current role as producer of The Sacred Science—a documentary about explorations in the Amazon to learn about traditional, healing practices—stems from a calling to honor, preserve, and protect the ancient knowledge and rituals of the indigenous peoples of the world.Learn more about the Sacred Science on Facebook and Instagram.Learn more about Lyte.   

Trauma is a scary thing to confront. Its darkness touches all of our lives in one way or another—but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Join holistic wellness expert Pedram Shojai and alternative-healing filmmaker Nick Polizzi as they discuss powerful healing techniques. You can listen to Pedram and Nick's new audiobook, Trauma, FREE for 14 days in the Hay House Unlimited Audio App. Listen now! Apple: hayhouse.com/apple Google: hayhouse.com/google

This weekend I’m speaking with Nick Polizzi, an investigative journalist who’s spent his career traveling the world and directing and producing feature-length documentaries about natural alternatives to conventional medicine. We’re talking about the three ancient energy hacks that can help boost your health and energy.  

Actor and director DB Sweeney about his entry which closes out this year's virtual Underexposed Film Festival. The holidays are almost here. How will the pandemic change your yearly rituals? Khalilah Gates from Northwestern Medicine will join us to discuss. In times of transition, service members and veterans run the risk of disengaging from psychological health care. Even a brief lapse in care can impact their psychological health and may impact their overall wellbeing. We talk to Dr. Nick Polizzi. Anxiety is everywhere. We'll talk to author Amalia Andrade about her new book Things You Think about When You Bite Your Nails. Can your brain be debugged like a computer? Neurobiologist turned coder Casey Watts explains with his new book Debugging your brain.

Actor and director DB Sweeney about his entry which closes out this year's virtual Underexposed Film Festival. The holidays are almost here. How will the pandemic change your yearly rituals? Khalilah Gates from Northwestern Medicine will join us to discuss. In times of transition, service members and veterans run the risk of disengaging from psychological health care. Even a brief lapse in care can impact their psychological health and may impact their overall wellbeing. We talk to Dr. Nick Polizzi. Anxiety is everywhere. We'll talk to author Amalia Andrade about her new book Things You Think about When You Bite Your Nails. Can your brain be debugged like a computer? Neurobiologist turned coder Casey Watts explains with his new book Debugging your brain.

Actor and director DB Sweeney about his entry which closes out this year's virtual Underexposed Film Festival. The holidays are almost here. How will the pandemic change your yearly rituals? Khalilah Gates from Northwestern Medicine will join us to discuss. In times of transition, service members and veterans run the risk of disengaging from psychological health care. Even a brief lapse in care can impact their psychological health and may impact their overall wellbeing. We talk to Dr. Nick Polizzi. Anxiety is everywhere. We’ll talk to author Amalia Andrade about her new book Things You Think about When You Bite Your Nails. Can your brain be debugged like a computer? Neurobiologist turned coder Casey Watts explains with his new book Debugging your brain.

In this episode, we explore psychological health and the related stigmas, particularly associated with traumatic brain injury in active-duty service members and veterans. We feature interviews with clinical psychologists Dr. Nick Polizzi with the Psychological Health Center of Excellence and Jimmy Paiz, United States Marine Corps veteran. Picking Your Brain episodes interview TBI subject matter experts about everything from the latest clinical recommendations, the effects sustaining a TBI has on services members and veterans, and the loved ones who support their recovery process. For more information, follow DVBIC on Facebook or visit our website. Facebook: Facebook/DVBICpage DVBIC website: dvbic.dcoe.mil The views, opinions and/or findings contained in this podcast are those of the host and subject matter experts. They should not be construed as an official Department of Defense position, policy, or decision unless designated by other official documentation. Our theme song is "Medical Corporate' by TimTaj, available at jamendo.com and was used according to Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 licensing.

Listen to LTC Olivia Nunn speak with Dr. Nick Polizzi about the inTransition program. The DoD's inTransition program is a free, confidential program that offers specialized coaching and assistance for active-duty service members, National Guard members, reservists, veterans, and retirees who need access to mental health care. 

Are you exhausted? Nick Polizzi began his battle with chronic fatigue 6 years ago, despite a clean, healthy life. Join him for this enlightening look at the surprising causes of fatigue, and how you can beat it with an adaptive lifestyle and diet. You can listen to Nick's new audiobook, Exhausted in the Hay House Unlimited Audio App FREE for 7 days at hayhouse.com/podcast  

Dr. Nick Polizzi, Campaign Lead, inTransition Program & Real Warriors Campaign for the Defense Health Agency, joins the show to talk about efforts the DOD are making to address stigma and reducing barriers to wellness to impact suicide in the military affiliated population.

The Real Warriors Campaign promotes a culture of support for psychological health by encouraging the military community to reach out for help whether coping with the daily stresses of military life, or concerns like depression, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder. Capt. Cassandra Ross, the Executive Officer for the 120th Air Lift Wing in the Montana Air National Guard and Dr. Nick Polizzi, the Governmental Action Officer for the Real Warriors Campaign came on the program to talk about all the benefits of Real Warriors Campaign. Capt. Ross, a 13-year veteran, has experienced positive results in both her professional and home life after seeking care and working through treatment. Dr. Polizzi has more than 10 years of clinical experience in the military community.

From the February 20th episode of The Rocky Mountain Review, host Maximos Hunter speaks over the phone with Captain Cassandra Ross, Executive Officer for the 120th AirLift Wing in the Montana National Guard, and Dr. Nick Polizzi, Governmental Action Officer, both of whom work for the Real Warriors Campaign. The RWC is an organization meant to […] The post RMR Exclusive: Real Warriors Campaign appeared first on KCSU FM.

About The Sacred ScienceEight people. Eight illnesses. One journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. They went looking for alternatives to the modern medicines that failed them. What they found would change their lives forever. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit healthmatters.substack.com

I share the 20 top spiritual books that helped me get through my spiritual awakening with more joy and peace. These books also have the capacity to help you heal and awaken faster. I picked these books because of their capacity to help you through some tough periods in your awakening journey. LINKS TO RECOMMENDED BOOKS 1. A new Earth, by Eckhart Tolle: https://amzn.to/2XYd4N2 2. The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield: https://amzn.to/2Sx6nMa 3. The Last Laugh, by Arjuna Ardagh: https://amzn.to/2Y9wWrY 4. The Anatomy of Spirit, by Caroline Myss: https://amzn.to/2Obrc1c 5. The Surrender Experiment, by Michael Singer: https://amzn.to/2XZ2eqk 6. Change Me Prayers, by Tosha Silver: https://amzn.to/2LAP109 7. The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer: https://amzn.to/2JU5VDP 8. The Way To Love, by Anthony De Mello: https://amzn.to/2Yi8j0u 9. Shaman, Healer, Sage, by Alberto Villoldo: https://amzn.to/2YdJ9Qz 10. The Sacred Science, by Nick Polizzi: https://amzn.to/2Lzk50s 11. Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, by Wayne Dyer: https://amzn.to/2JU6Fc5 12. The Magic Shop, by James Doty: https://amzn.to/2XY1u4R 13. Conversation With God, by Neale Donald Walsch: https://amzn.to/2JU6Rbj 14. Many Lives, Many Masters, by Brian Weiss: https://amzn.to/2JVkLK7 15. Kundalini and The Chakras, by Genevieve Paulson: https://amzn.to/2JVNGhf 16. Field of Love, by Martin Birrittella: https://amzn.to/2XVguQN 17. Buddha, by Deepak Chopra: https://amzn.to/2Y7XoSI 18. The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby: https://amzn.to/2OesNmM 19. Night, by Elie Weisel: https://amzn.to/2OcnB2Z 20. Sacred Success, by Barbara Stanny: https://amzn.to/2XSmF8a VIEW THE FULL BLOG POST → Head over to the full blog post for comments, questions, and to download the audio version of this video. https://christina-lopes.com/videos/mindful-living/spiritual-books/ FOR COACHING & RETREATS → If you need 1-on-1 coaching, spiritual guidance, or healing, there are 3 ways to work with me: 1. Single sessions: https://christina-lopes.com/single-sessions/ 2. Premium coaching program (only open once a year): https://christina-lopes.com/heart-alchemy/ 3. Yearly retreats in Portugal (only open once a year): https://christina-lopes.com/heart-accelerator HAVE A QUESTION FOR A VIDEO? → If you have a question for my weekly videos, please leave in the comments below, along with the hashtag #askchristina DON'T MISS A THING! → Visit https://christina-lopes.com and sign up to get my weekly content delivered straight to your inbox. Just 1 email a week with actionable advice to help you solve your biggest challenges and live a joyful life. TAKE THE HEART QUIZ → Did you know that many of life's biggest challenges are caused by a blocked heart? Take my 5-min Heart Quiz to find out if your heart is blocked and learn what you can do today to start living a life filled with joy, happy relationships, financial freedom, and deep purpose. https://christina-lopes.com/take-heart-quiz/ SUBSCRIBE TO MY CHANNEL Every month, I release 4 actionable and practical videos to help you accelerate your personal growth and overcome your biggest challenges. https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=spaceandstillness CONNECT WITH ME ON: YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/spaceandstillness Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christinaspaceandstillness/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theheartalchemist/ Website: https://christina-lopes.com/

Nick Polizzi has spent his career directing and producing feature-length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. Most recently, Nick directed The Tapping Solution and co-edited Simply Raw – Raw for 30 Days. His current role as producer of The Sacred Science—a documentary about explorations in the Amazon to learn about traditional, healing practices—stems from […] The post The Sacred Science with Nick Polizzi appeared first on Divine Insight.

In this warm and enriching conversation, Nick shares blessings from three different spiritual traditions, which you can use before meals to funnel love directly into your food. To listen to full episodes, and gain access to a full one-hour lesson from one of the world's leading personal growth experts, free bonus learning tools and resources, and more, go here: www.hayhouseworldsummit.com

What is “green medicine”? Tune in this week as the incredible Nick Polizzi shares his knowledge on herbal remedies. Nick shares his wounded healer story and then we dive into the history of herbalism, some of Nick’s go-to herbs for calming the mind chatter and easing stress, as well as what to expect when visiting an herbalist. And you don’t want to miss his #1 tip for all of us!    * * *   About Nick Polizzi Nick Polizzi has been making documentary films for the past ten years. The titles he has been a part of include Remedy: Ancient Medicines for Modern Illness, The Sacred Science‚ Simply Raw – Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days‚ and The Tapping Solution. His work is guided by a fascination with the healing remedies of civilizations around the world and how they can be used to heal the diseases of today. Nick is driven by a calling to honor, preserve, and protect the ancient knowledge and rituals of our ancestors.   Documentary: Remedy: Ancient Medicines for Modern Illness All about herbs! The green medicines that have been used for thousands of years. And it goes into the specific diseases that they can treat. “I think that people are really surprised to hear that you don’t need to turn to conventional medicine to treat just about any illness. There are all kinds of alternatives that you don’t tend to hear about from your doctor.” ~ Nick It’s a nine-part series. Each episode goes after a specific health condition. It covers anything from autoimmune disorders, depression, stress, all the way to bacterial infections like Lyme Disease, all the way to heart disease, cancer, sexual health, reproductive health, and fertility. Each one of those areas of health, or systems of the body, are covered and then into the specific herbs that can be used to alleviate a lot of the symptoms that are commonly associated with it. You can watch it here at https://lw255.isrefer.com/go/remedy/org/20190523   What led Nick to this path? He’s a “wounded healer”. In his late 20s he began experiencing debilitating ocular migraines. Went to the number one neurologist in Connecticut tried various medications that didn’t help. The last prescription offer was one that would change his mood and emotions. He came to the realization that modern medicine wasn’t going to help. Nick tried EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), acupuncture, acupressure. Finally he determined by exploring with an elimination diet that coffee was a trigger.   Why herbs? Before this documentary he was immersed in Native medicings and Native healings. This led to a fascination of the healing potential in plants and herbs. There’s over 80,000 species of medicinal plants in the Amazon alone, less than 3 percent of them have been studied for their medicinal value. Of those 3 percent, some 15-20 percent of our cancer treatments are synthesized from compounds in those plants. For Nick, herbal medicine is one of the lowest-hanging fruits in terms of potential cures out there and he decided to shine a light on them.   History of Herbalism? Herbs will used up until the early 1900s. And was respected on par with surgery or drugs. The Flexner Report came out in 1910 and was funded by the Carnegie Foundation. This made it very hard to practice natural medicine in the United States. Natural medicine schools were closed and only those schools focusing on chemical-based medicine received funding or accredidation.   Plant Can’t Be Patented This makes it difficult to receive funding on research of natural, plant based medicines. Women have been burned at the stake for thousands of years for practicing just basic herbalism because of how effective it is.   Some of Nick’s Go-To Herbs Skullcap & Ashwagandha tincture for taming the mind chatter and easing stress. Reishi mushrooms are a powerful adaptogen. Increases creativity and reduces stress.   Herbalist Approaches They look for root cause and not just mask symptoms. They can spend up to two hours at the first visit to really pinpoint lifestyle and symptoms. Much more intimate experience and helps you get intune with your body and mind.   Nick’s Big Takeaway Be careful about book learning and learning secondhand. It’s a great starting point, but as we’ve been discussing today, experience is going to teach you more than any book could, any podcast could, any documentary could. These are great leaping-off points, let’s call them, so that you can start experiencing things yourself. You can talk about herbs all day long. Until you start ingesting that first herb and experiencing it yourself, you’re not going to fully understand the potential that your body has to heal itself, and also, what you might have been missing in terms of connecting to yourself and the world around you.     Deeper Dive Resources   The Remedy: Ancient Medicine for Modern Illness https://lw255.isrefer.com/go/remedy/org/20190523   Documentary: Sacred Science https://www.thesacredscience.com/author/nicpol3/   BOOK: Sacred Science https://amzn.to/2VD1xS9   BOOK: Sacred Science Cookbook https://amzn.to/2VYee9K   Save the Amazon https://www.savetheamazon.org/rainforeststats.htm   Susan Raven - Raven Crest Botanicals https://ravencrestbotanicals.com/   Ron Teegarden - Dragon Herbs https://www.dragonherbs.com/ron-teeguarden-s-bio

What is “green medicine”? Tune in this week as the incredible Nick Polizzi shares his knowledge on herbal remedies. Nick shares his wounded healer story and then we dive into the history of herbalism, some of Nick’s go-to herbs for calming the mind chatter and easing stress, as well as what to expect when visiting an herbalist. And you don’t want to miss his #1 tip for all of us!    * * *   About Nick Polizzi Nick Polizzi has been making documentary films for the past ten years. The titles he has been a part of include Remedy: Ancient Medicines for Modern Illness, The Sacred Science‚ Simply Raw – Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days‚ and The Tapping Solution. His work is guided by a fascination with the healing remedies of civilizations around the world and how they can be used to heal the diseases of today. Nick is driven by a calling to honor, preserve, and protect the ancient knowledge and rituals of our ancestors.   Documentary: Remedy: Ancient Medicines for Modern Illness All about herbs! The green medicines that have been used for thousands of years. And it goes into the specific diseases that they can treat. “I think that people are really surprised to hear that you don’t need to turn to conventional medicine to treat just about any illness. There are all kinds of alternatives that you don’t tend to hear about from your doctor.” ~ Nick It’s a nine-part series. Each episode goes after a specific health condition. It covers anything from autoimmune disorders, depression, stress, all the way to bacterial infections like Lyme Disease, all the way to heart disease, cancer, sexual health, reproductive health, and fertility. Each one of those areas of health, or systems of the body, are covered and then into the specific herbs that can be used to alleviate a lot of the symptoms that are commonly associated with it. You can watch it here at https://lw255.isrefer.com/go/remedy/org/20190523   What led Nick to this path? He’s a “wounded healer”. In his late 20s he began experiencing debilitating ocular migraines. Went to the number one neurologist in Connecticut tried various medications that didn’t help. The last prescription offer was one that would change his mood and emotions. He came to the realization that modern medicine wasn’t going to help. Nick tried EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), acupuncture, acupressure. Finally he determined by exploring with an elimination diet that coffee was a trigger.   Why herbs? Before this documentary he was immersed in Native medicings and Native healings. This led to a fascination of the healing potential in plants and herbs. There’s over 80,000 species of medicinal plants in the Amazon alone, less than 3 percent of them have been studied for their medicinal value. Of those 3 percent, some 15-20 percent of our cancer treatments are synthesized from compounds in those plants. For Nick, herbal medicine is one of the lowest-hanging fruits in terms of potential cures out there and he decided to shine a light on them.   History of Herbalism? Herbs will used up until the early 1900s. And was respected on par with surgery or drugs. The Flexner Report came out in 1910 and was funded by the Carnegie Foundation. This made it very hard to practice natural medicine in the United States. Natural medicine schools were closed and only those schools focusing on chemical-based medicine received funding or accredidation.   Plant Can’t Be Patented This makes it difficult to receive funding on research of natural, plant based medicines. Women have been burned at the stake for thousands of years for practicing just basic herbalism because of how effective it is.   Some of Nick’s Go-To Herbs Skullcap & Ashwagandha tincture for taming the mind chatter and easing stress. Reishi mushrooms are a powerful adaptogen. Increases creativity and reduces stress.   Herbalist Approaches They look for root cause and not just mask symptoms. They can spend up to two hours at the first visit to really pinpoint lifestyle and symptoms. Much more intimate experience and helps you get intune with your body and mind.   Nick’s Big Takeaway Be careful about book learning and learning secondhand. It’s a great starting point, but as we’ve been discussing today, experience is going to teach you more than any book could, any podcast could, any documentary could. These are great leaping-off points, let’s call them, so that you can start experiencing things yourself. You can talk about herbs all day long. Until you start ingesting that first herb and experiencing it yourself, you’re not going to fully understand the potential that your body has to heal itself, and also, what you might have been missing in terms of connecting to yourself and the world around you.     Deeper Dive Resources   The Remedy: Ancient Medicine for Modern Illness https://lw255.isrefer.com/go/remedy/org/20190523   Documentary: Sacred Science https://www.thesacredscience.com/author/nicpol3/   BOOK: Sacred Science https://amzn.to/2VD1xS9   BOOK: Sacred Science Cookbook https://amzn.to/2VYee9K   Save the Amazon https://www.savetheamazon.org/rainforeststats.htm   Susan Raven - Raven Crest Botanicals https://ravencrestbotanicals.com/   Ron Teegarden - Dragon Herbs https://www.dragonherbs.com/ron-teeguarden-s-bio

Psychedelic plants have been a part of our human heritage since we first rocked in the unsteady cradle of civilization. Last time we talked with Nick Polizzi, author of books like The Sacred Science, documentary filmmaker and explorer of ancient medicines about our culture’s fascination in hallucinogenic herbal traditions. This time we are exploring more psychoactive herbs, how they have been used and abused, and their effect on the modern world. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Psychoactive herbs have been a part of human culture since it began. In the last century, we saw an explosion of interest in hallucinogenic experiences as Westerners begin to explore the herbal traditions of other cultures. That exploration has its possibilities and changes. Today, we're talking with Nick Polizzi, author of books like The Sacred Science, documentary filmmaker and explorer of ancient medicines about our culture's fascination in hallucinogenic herbal traditions. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode 116: Forgotten Medicines with Nick Polizzi On Today's Episode of A Healthy Curiosity, you'll learn about: Exploring beyond modern medicine The ancient wisdom of indigenous cultures Getting comfortable with growth Impossible healing made reality   Nick Polizzi has spent his career directing and producing feature-length documentaries that explore the power of traditional medicine. His quest for ancient cures has taken him around the world into remote cultures that still practice these fast disappearing methods. Nick's current role as founder of The Sacred Science stems from a calling to honor, preserve, and protect the knowledge and rituals of the indigenous peoples of the world.  Connect with Nick Polizzi: www.thesacredscience.com The Sacred Science Book   Work with Brodie: http://brodiewelch.com/level-up   Get Our Self-Care Manifesto You have the right to take care of yourself. When you take care of yourself first, everyone around you will benefit and will let you get more done in less time. If you need a reminder, just go to our webpage and click the download button. Then print and hang the manifesto on your wall or fridge or wherever you want so long as you get to see a positive reminder every day. Remember: Self-care is not selfish; it is essential. Share Your Healthy Curiosity Thank you for joining me on today's episode of A Healthy Curiosity, the podcast that explores what it takes to be well in today's busy world with healthcare strategies through Chinese medicine. If you enjoyed today's episode, please head over to iTunes and subscribe to the show. Share your favorite episodes with your friends on social media to help us spread the word and help more people achieve optimal health throughout their busy lives. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to tell us what you'd like to learn more about!  

In recent years, we have seen an increase in people who swear by plant medicine and herbs for treating their ailments. And while more research emerges that supports the claim that a certain plant compounds have incredible healing properties, herb and plant medicine is often frowned upon when it comes to treating chronic conditions. But is there some truth to the power of plant medicine, herbs and Ayahuasca (an entheogen/ psychedelic plant) or is it just mumbo-jumbo? And, if it is so great, why aren't we using it in modern day medicine? In this podcast, I speak with Nick Polizzi. Nick has spent his career directing and producing feature length documentaries about natural alternatives to conventional medicine. In this episode, Nick will share his own personal story about how modern medicine gave up treating his chronic migraines and told him that it eventually would kill him. This led him to discover the power of plant medicines, EFT, herbs, and Ayahuasca to heal the body, mind, and spirit, and live a vibrant, healthy, energetic life.   In this podcast, we'll cover: Why modern medicine often gives up on patients with chronic disease How Nick managed to cure debilitating ocular migraine in only 6 months (after modern medicine had given up on him) How a sweat lodge ceremony works Ayahuasca – Is it really just another drug to get high on? Scientists have only studied the properties of 3% of all plants on the planet (and the real truth why we aren't studying more) Ayahuasca ceremonies – how to use them for spiritual healing Why your conventional doctor is unable to help you treat your disease using herbs and plant medicine Nick's personal experiences with Ayahuasca and sweat lodge ceremonies How your personal beliefs can block your healing process Nick's new docu series Remedy: Ancient Medicine For Modern Illness – How to use herbs for treating modern epidemics

After a conversation with Nick Polizzi, author of Sacred Science - An Ancient Healing Path for the Modern World, Sue and Candace discuss how our physical place changes our herbal options. For many herbalists, the term "Be Here Now" serves as a guidepost for the type of healing they offer. Human beings are just as changed by by the area they are transported to as plants are. Recognizing and adapting to the change makes a big difference for the healer and the patient. Today, we talk about these and other issues on Real Herbalism Radio podcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nick Polizzi shares his lessons as he documented the healing journey described in Sacred Science - An Ancient Healing Path for the Modern World. When we awake to our true selves, or are ready tot do so, the plants will call loud and clear. If you ignore the call, they'll just call louder and louder until you have no choice but to listen. Today, we're talking with Nick Polizzi, Author of Sacred Science, documentary film maker and explorer of ancient medicine about following the call of the plant world into sacred healing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nick Polizzi sits down with Sandra Ingerman for a conversation around what shamanic practices have to offer the Western world.

Nick Polizzi returns to the Mindrolling Podcast to discuss the ways that sacred medicines can transform how we relate to death, fear and the world at large.

On this episode of the Be Here Now Network’s Guest Podcast, Graham Hancock joins Nick Polizzi to talk about re-examining the history of humanity and the role sacred medicines have played in our development.

Can praying over your food change the way you eat? This show with Nick Polizzi will turn your idea of alternative healing on its head. In the heart of the Amazon, “alternative” medicine healing ceremonies can produce baffling results (even for skeptics of the Western World like me). Nick Polizzi is the director of the documentary, The Sacred Science. His work explores holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. His most recent film is The Sacred Science, which follows a group of terminally ill patients who searched for healing in the Amazon jungle.

Can praying over your food change the way you eat? This show with Nick Polizzi will turn your idea of alternative healing on its head. In the heart of the Amazon, “alternative” medicine healing ceremonies can produce baffling results (even for skeptics of the Western World like me). Nick Polizzi is the director of the documentary, The Sacred Science. His work explores holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. His most recent film is The Sacred Science, which follows a group of terminally ill patients who searched for healing in the Amazon jungle.

Can praying over your food change the way you eat? This show with Nick Polizzi will turn your idea of alternative healing on its head.

Can praying over your food change the way you eat? This show with Nick Polizzi will turn your idea of alternative healing on its head.

Today I'll be talking with Nick Polizzi, founder of The Sacred Science, documentary filmmaker of The Tapping Solution, and and the author of a brilliant journey into plant and indigineous wisdom The Sacred Science. And that's just what I want to talk with him about today, about an ancient healing path for the modern world. The Sacred Science Self-Improvement & Self-Help Topics Include: What were Nick's early experiences with religion? What were his early experiences with spirituality? What happened after he was hit by lightning? How did he end up getting ocular migraines? What was he doing that caused the migraines? How did Nick Ortner of the Tapping Solution help cure his migraines? How did he end up making a documentary of Shaman in Peru? How did he get 8 volunteers for a shamanic healing adventure? What is plant spirit and plant subtle energies? How can plants help us to heal? How did the people who went to Peru begin to heal? What did he learn from the shaman? What was his first ayahuasca experience like? What is the medicine of Toe' and how did it help one of the participants? How can we do shamanic work wherever we are? What's the importance of a tribe? What is “the work” and how do we bring a connection to nature back where we're at? Why are our kids our greatest teachers??? What are 10 questions of self-inquiry we can ask to begin our journey's today? To find out more visit: TheSacredScience.com/NewBook Nick Polizzi on How Shamanic Practices, Journey's, and Ayahuasca can Transform & Heal Your Life! Health | EFT Tapping Solution | Nick Ortner | Spiritual | Spirituality | Meditation | Inspirational | Motivational | Improvement | Self-Help | Inspire For More Info Visit: www.InspireNationShow.com

This week on the Be Here Now Network’s Guest Podcast, Nick Polizzi is joined by ethnopharmacologist Dr. Dennis McKenna for a conversation about the science of psychedelics and the study of plant medicine.

David visits with author, director, and producer, Nick Polizzi. Nick is known for his outstanding films “The Tapping Solution”, “Simply Raw - Raw for 30 Days”, and “The Sacred Science”. Join the conversation as David and Nick discuss “The Sacred Science” and the importance of protecting the ancient knowledge and rituals of the indigenous peoples of the world.

Nick Polizzi created a documentary taking eight severely ill patients to the Amazon for thirty days to experience a natural healing using indigenous medicine — a journey through a both physically and mentally life-transforming experience. Listen to this outrageous trip, expand your perception, and even find the answers that traditional medicine has not been able to give you.   Key Takeaways: [:18] How far will you go to heal? [1:18] Nick Polizzi´s career [3:21] Tracking an indigenous medicine man in the amazon [3:59] The gurus in indigenous cultures [5:05] What is important in the ceremonies and rituals? [6:01] Confronting your own mortality [7:04] Adults more grounded; physically and mentally healthy. [7:22] The elders in different cultures [8:37] Rites of passage [9:31] Willingly putting yourself in discomfort is very powerful. [10:07] To force yourself to face fears. [10:56] Ancient wisdom and the contribution to health [11:41] Reverence for the medicine [12:41] Being thankful and connect with the medicine you are about to take [13:30] Documentary [14:35] Severely ill patients that were looking for anything to save their life [17:35] Remove any distraction you might have that would allow you to escape from who you really are. [18:34] You and nature, nothing else [18:50] Disease as an opportunity for spiritual growth [19:35] Confront thoughts. [20:10] What happened with the patients that participate with the documentary? [20:59] Biggest takeaway from the whole experience [21:25] Perception of death and dying [21:41] Shamans do not heal, but remove the blocks that prevent the patients from healing themselves. [23:00] What is the thing that you do everyday, that makes a big difference in your life? [24:56] Connectedness with everything around [25:51] Fear of giving up the person we think we are [26:44] Get into yourself, and just be. [27:15] Jjvirgin.com/nick [27:58] Have the right breakfast. [28:22] jjvirgin.com/products [28:40] Listeners’ questions [28:48] How do you stay healthy when travelling? [28:56] Habits give you freedom [29:02] What do you need to pack? [30:01] Burst training [30:50] Room away from the elevator [31:04] Facebook page JJVirgin fanclub   Mentioned in This Episode: Jjvirgin.com/nick Facebook page JJVirgin fanclub

This week welcome to the show Nick Polizzi. He has spent his career directing and producing feature-length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. Most recently, Nick directed The Tapping Solution and co-edited Simply Raw - Raw for 30 Days. His current role as producer of The Sacred Science—a documentary about explorations in the Amazon to learn about traditional, healing practices—stems from a calling to honor, preserve, and protect the ancient knowledge and rituals of the indigenous peoples of the world. Questions we ask in this episode: What inspired you to make the documentary ‘Sacred Science’? What is ayahuasca? Western medicine encourages us to take a pill to fix the problem. Can we do this with indigenous medicines? We are living in a world that keeps us constantly distracted. What impact is this having on us (not engaging in our own truth)? You mention the “way of being” that is taught by elders in the Andes and Amazon. Please explain. Shop: http://shop.180nutrition.com.au/ This week we are doing it with the awesome Nick Polizzi. Nick is a documentary maker and he is the man behind the doco, The Sacred Science. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s just a fascinating documentary and I’ll read the synopsis right now about it straight off the text. [00:01:00] It says, “Witness the story of eight brave souls as they leave the developed world behind in search of deeper answers. Living in seclusion for one month in the heart of the Amazon jungle, these men and women take part in the powerful healing practices of Peru’s indigenous medicine men working with centuries old plant remedies and spiritual disciplines.” [00:01:30] It’s just fascinating. We get into Nick’s own personal journey as well. We discuss ayahuasca, which is something that I have done myself as well and that’s why it was just great to get Nick on and talk about this with him and Stu as well today. In this conversation I have no doubt you’re going to find this very fascinating. Now Nick has offered very kindly to all our listeners if you want to watch his documentary for free now you can go to a special link which is thesacredscience.com/free-screening. [00:02:00] Just find the website. Thesacredscience.com/free-screening. Then you can watch the documentary for free. After you listen to this interview I have no doubt you’re going to want to go back and check it out. The other thing I will add I want to give you as well because talk about ayahuasca. I actually documented my own ayahuasca journey three years ago in blog posts. They are on the 180 Nutrition website so if you want to check them out as well, go back to 180nutrition.com.au. Go to the search field on the home page and just search for ayahuasca and that’s going to bring up the five blog posts I wrote. [00:02:30] There’s little videos in there too and I document all of my thoughts, and feelings, and everything in there. It was a very personal journey for me and one I’m very glad I shared. I have no doubt you’ll find them useful as well. Anyway, so there’s two things for you there. We do discuss all of this in the podcast as well if you want to make notes. Of course the links will be on the actual blog post of this interview as well when it’s released. Anyway, let’s go over to Nick. Enjoy. Hey, this is Guy Lawrence. I’m joined with Stuart Cook. Hey, Stu.   Stu Hello, Guy. How are you? Guy I’m absolutely great actually. Our awesome guest today is Nick Polizzi. Did I get that right? Nick Yeah. Guy Yeah, brilliant. Nick, thanks for coming on, mate. It’s the first time we’ve explored this kind of topic and I’m very much looking forward to sharing it across with our audience today. Just to kickstart the show, mate, if you were on an airplane flying to Australia right now, and you sat next to a complete stranger, and they asked you what you did for a living, what would you say? Nick Man, I’d ask them how much time they had? I guess they’d have a lot of time. What is that, a 15-hour flight? Guy Yeah. Exactly. Nick I guess I’d say I’m a documentary filmmaker, author, shamanic explorer, adventurer. Somebody who is constantly on their own evolutionary path. The medicine path I guess. Stu Yeah. What reaction would you get from that normally as well? What would that be? Nick I guess it depends on who we’re talking about? Are we talking about a suit or are we talking about a girl who just got back from Burning Man? Stu Burning Man. Exactly. Yeah, two very different conversations, right? Nick [00:04:30] Yeah, but I’m starting to find that there’s actually a pretty large cross-section of the population here in the States at least that are really interested in this kind of inner work. That kind of idea was something that even 10 years ago that wasn’t really being talked about very much. Yoga was a big deal. Yoga was this foreign thing 10 years ago or 15 years ago here in the States and now everyone and their grandmother does it. I think that we’re primed. Full Transcript & Video Version: http://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/nick-polizzi-interview/

Nick Polizzi is the director of the groundbreaking and award winning documentary, The Sacred Science, which follows eight westerners with serious illnesses to the amazon rainforest where they seek help from indigenous healers. Nick discusses his fascinating journey making the film, as well as the astounding results that the patients achieved after 30 harsh days spent deep in the jungle.

Nick Polizzi has spent his career directing and editing feature length documentaries about holistic alternatives to conventional medicine. Early on, Nick directed “The Tapping Solution" and co-edited "Simply Raw - Raw for 30 Days". His current role as Producer of "The Sacred Science" stems from a calling to honor, preserve, and protect the ancient knowledge and rituals of the indigenous peoples of the world in the amazon rainforest. You can grab a copy of the sacred science film here: http://amzn.to/12vMUAp Thanks for tuning in, - David Benjamin HealthyWildAndFree.com

Lucas:              Welcome to the Yoga Talk Show, your one-stop destination for all things yoga, health and wellness.  So hello and welcome, everyone.  This is Lucas Rockwood, and I'm here today with Nick Polizzi, who is the creator of Sacred Science and he was also heavily involved with Simply Raw, two films that most of you are probably very familiar with.  And if you're not familiar with them, you'll be familiar with them very soon.                           I met Nick about a year ago in New York city at a conference, and it's really interesting.  There's kind of frontline people and then behind the scenes people, and it's interesting because the behind the scenes people do a lot of the heavy lifting and a lot of the conceptual work and so it was really interesting and exciting for me to meet Nick, who was involved in the film Simply Raw, which already had a huge impact on me and my life and on a lot of our listeners' lives as well.                           In any case, Nick's going to be talking to us today about his wild adventures in alternative health, raw food, herbal medicine and medicinal healing.  So thanks for joining us, Nick.   Nick:               Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.   Lucas:              So as we're having this chat, you're right in the middle of a big launch of Sacred Silence, which is a film that you shared with me about a year ago.  And for people who are listening who have never heard of anything kind of off the wall, medicine man, healers, (01:23) give us an overview of what that whole project was all about.   Nick:               So just going back to Simply Raw, I've been involved in a couple films before The Sacred Silence, and both of them were about alternative healing strategies.  One is the Tapping Solution that's all about meridian points and tapping on different spots on your upper torso while going through traumatic events from your past and releasing pain that way, which is more of a Chinese medicine style.                            Then Simply Raw came along, and that was more of a nutrition-based, super food-based film.  As we made those movies, while we were interviewing the different experts that you saw in each of those, (02:05) it felt like a lot of them, when we asked them about the origins of their teaching, were turning to more indigenous practices, in particular Shamanism.                            So we kind of took note of it, but when we were making those films you kind of keep your eye on the ball and keep creating the film that you're making.  But I was really curious about Shamanism by the time I had finished making those two films, or being involved in those two films.  So once those films were out, the next project for me was, hey let's at least take a look at Shamanism, figure out what it's all about.                            And we sort of scoured the globe for the most Shamanic-rich cultures, and the Amazon has one of the most, if not the most, dense percentage of Shamans per capita on the planet.  So we went down to the jungle, started doing some research.  Not only is there a really thriving culture of Shamanism, medicine man, I'm not sure if your viewers are familiar with this idea of the indigenous healer.  (03:14) The Shaman is somebody who plays the role of both the priest, the healer and the wisdom keeper in any given tribe.                           If you look into different parts of the world, most indigenous cultures have a Shamanic-type structure, where there isn't really a government, there isn't really a -- what interested us most about the Amazon was that not only does it have a very rich lineage of healing in a lot of the remote cultures that live within the jungle, (03:50) but the jungle itself is home to over 44,000 species of plants, less than 3% of which have been studied by modern medicine for their medicinal value.                            So we thought to ourselves, okay so on one hand we have what we're looking for.  There are amazing medicine men, medicine women in this culture that are doing incredible work, but on top of that they have the benefit of a pharmacopeia of amazing healing plants that haven't been studied by modern medicine yet.  That's what led us down to the jungle, and that's what pretty much culminated in the film, The Sacred Science.   Lucas:              So you're this guy and (04:25) what makes you want to make movies about energy healing, about raw food, about medicine men?  Most independent filmmakers are making movies about two disturbed teenagers wandering across the Brooklyn Bridge and things like this.  What prompted you to do this?  Did you have a health crisis in your life?  Is there a health crisis in somebody else's life?  Is it just something that's always fascinated you?   Nick:               I never really knew what it was until at one of the film festivals we were in, during the Q&A it just popped out and I realized that that was probably what it was.  I realized what it was.  (04:59) I was hit by lightening when I was 16, and it's really interesting how we a lot of times forget or compartmentalize and disregard some of the significant things that have happened to us in our life as just being, 'Oh, that can't possibly be contributing to where I am now.'                           But once I got hit by lightening, and it wasn't some crazy, sacred thing where I was on top of a mountain and it just happened and it was this amazing, enlightening experience.  I was playing basketball in my driveway and it was during a thunderstorm, and lightening came up as I was going up for a lay-up and hit my basketball hoop.  I was after that, a much different person.  It did something.  I don't know how woo-woo you want to get, but it definitely shifted something inside me, and there were a lot of episodes I had that were unexplainable.  Nick Ortner, producer of The Tapping Solution, a good friend of mine, helped me through and was fascinated by.  He had no way of understanding them, neither did I.                           I didn't need to be sold on holistic medicine.  Let's put it that way.  I didn't need to be sold on energy work.  That was something I already had a dose of, probably too soon, without having any way of understanding what it was.  But I probably was initiated into some sort of spiritual healing practice when I got hit by lightening when I was 16.   My career has somehow manifested in such a way that I get to make films about this stuff.  So that's the origin probably of how I started on this path, and then once I started making films about alternative medicine all the rest of my career kind of just filled in by itself and that's where I am right now.  (07:11) I'm on this path of trying to figure out how to legitimize a lot of these archaic, traditional healing methods that have been kind of discarded over the last 1,000 years.  So I don't know why I love this so much, but it's kind of all I ever want to do.  It's really all I want to do is create films that explore new healing modalities.  Sorry, that was a long answer.   Lucas:              No, no, it's interesting.  I think if the sky parts and strikes you down, I can imagine that would have a profound impact on everything thus forward.  One thing that I'd like to ask you about, because you've gone down in the Amazon, you experienced some really freaky, alternative stuff.  One thing that I find in the alternative world, and this is me speaking as somebody who's guilty of this, as anybody else, but as soon as we get into the alternative world we immediately assume alternative is better.  We throw away all the conventional stuff.  So I'm just curious.  You took some pretty ill people into the jungle and you took some people who would normally be on very, very conventional medicines to very alternative medicines.  I'm wondering your totally biased opinion, how did you walk away from that?  (08:26) Did you walk away thinking, hey this is the answer or this is an answer or how did your perception change in terms of finding a balance between allopathic medicine and traditional healing medicine?   Nick:               I think I walked away with a feeling that might not be as interesting as I wish it was.  I think my feeling was that some of these methods are extremely effective at treating certain illnesses.  The neurological disorders, like Parkinson's, incredible.  (08:59) There are things going on in the jungle right now that are going to be probably heard about relatively soon, plants that are being discovered that it's like night and day with what you're seeing right now on the market for Parkinson's and MS and things like that.                           But other things, like cancer, one of our patients in the film had extreme results, beneficial results from cancer.  A few of the other patients didn't, and that was kind of how it was.  And I think that's probably why people look at our film as being reliable or trustworthy, is because we show you both.  We're showing you what does work, what doesn't work.   But I think that my overarching feeling about these modalities is probably a little bit more boring now than it was before I went down there.  I think I went down there with this idea that, wow this is all going to cure everybody.  (0948) But I think that my feeling right now is that modern medicine and natural medicine are both very important, and modern medicine is extremely good at treating acute conditions but it's terrible at treating chronic ones.  I think that Amazonian medicine and indigenous medicine in general is really good at treating the chronic conditions.   So I think they both have a very substantial role to play.  It's just that one of them is dominating right now, and we need to sort of leave some breathing room for the natural medicines to come in.  David Wolfe says it really well.  He says 200 years ago, if Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall you wouldn't be able to put him back together again.  Now you can.  But you also have ridiculous increases in chronic conditions, too, right now.   So I think that both of them are very valid, and I think our mission really is to just give voice to the natural medicines that have sort of been ignored or discarded, discredited over the last 200 years.  So that's how I feel about it.  Just as a wrap up, the beautiful thing about the Amazonian traditions and other indigenous healing traditions, in Siberia and in Australia, is that they treat you from within, so that even the patients that didn't get healing results in our film still email me now talking about how even though their body didn't heal the way they wanted it to there were life-changing spiritual transformations that happened that they continue to feel the benefits from.   Lucas:              Yeah, I think there's no question that the mind aspect in healing is just really coming to the forefront right now and it's pretty undeniable to bring that into any kind of healing modality.  When I was a teenager, I used to spend summers in the Sierras in California, working at about 10,000 feet with a string of burrows.  One summer I was up there and I met this guy.  He scared the pants off me, actually.  He would spend the entire winter in the cabins that I would live in when I was up there.  And spending a winter at 10,000 feet in the California Sierras is like spending a winter on the moon or Antarctica or something.  Nothing should live.  In May, there's still snow everywhere.                           He was this big, big, giant guy, nearly seven feet tall, didn't have any meat left on his body.  I kind of got his story, and he'd been coming there and he considered himself the caretaker of this cabin.  Nobody had ever hired him, nobody ever knew he came but he'd been the winter caretaker for something like 25 years.  He had really, really bad gear, so he would come in on cross-country skis, come in about 35 miles on cross country skis.                           In any case, I thought this guy is going to know these plants.  I was spending all this time on the land and I was fishing in the creeks and I was really trying -- the truth is, there isn't much.  When you get that high, things really start to die.  But I figured this guy's going to know the land.  It was interesting, he did.  He knew every single thing you could eat, and again, there weren't many.  And he knew about the different kinds of fish and how the fish were originally brought in and they weren't native and all these kind of things.                           What was interesting to me, I think it kind of relates to what you were saying, is (13:27) a lot of times the biggest revelations are really pretty subtle.  His big thing, his big take away from the Sierras was this willow bark.  This willow bark, he discovered, was similar to aspirin, which was helpful in terms of pain from his walking around in bad shoes, but he also found that it had this anti-aphrodisiac property, which he thought, of course, a solitary male basically living like a monk in a hut.  He thought this was going to be the next big thing.  He thought if they just gave this to teenage boys, like the truancy and the delinquency rates were going to completely drop through the floor.  But it was interesting and it was really, really subtle.  He'd find a natural form of pain relief and a natural way to deal with what would normally drive a man from the forest, which is his libido.                           Interesting stuff.  (14:29) So I also know in the film, there was one gentleman who didn't make it.  Is that right?   Nick:               Yes, that's true.   Lucas:              That's pretty heavy.  How did that impact you?  How did that impact the group?  Were you prepared for that?  How did that go down?   Nick:               I was not prepared for that.  (14:49) As much as we knew it was a possibility, obviously we took very sick patients down to the jungle, we were prepared for it in terms of on the ground with the right services and everything that somebody would need, but in terms of emotionally I wasn't prepared for it.  I'm an optimistic guy.  Even though I throw myself into pretty intense situations, I always like to sort of expect the best result to happen.  I wasn't mentally or emotionally prepared for it, and it was a really intense experience.    The gentleman who died, he was suffering from neuroendocrine cancer, and he was one of my -- I hate to say this, but he was one of my favorites of the patients.  He and I bonded really well beforehand during our interview.  We visited each patient in their home before we went down there, and got a read on who they really were and he was just such an incredible guy.  And of all the people that you see in the film, he's probably the guy, even though he's got a serious health condition, he's probably the guy you least expect to be the one that passes away.   In the beginning of the film, we tell everyone five people get real healing results, two people leave disappointed and one person doesn't come back, period.  So everyone knows that somebody's going to pass away.  Some people think what we mean by that is they're going to stay down there and become a Shaman, but I think most people understand that there probably is going to be somebody that passes away.  Most people don't think it's going to be this person.   In a really kind of tacky or inappropriate way, the fact that he passed away was incredible for the shaping of the movie, and I think that he's the kind of guy who is probably humorously, from wherever he is now, looks at it as being the perfect addition to this project, because he was so about what we were doing and he was such a sweet soul and he knew, later on after talking to his family, his loved ones, they had all said goodbye to him before he even came down because his condition had worsened since we had seen him during the interview.  So he knew, his family knew that he was going to pass away.  He just didn't let us in on it, so it was kind of a surprise.   So yeah, he's an awesome guy and it's really more sad for me, not from the project's perspective but because I just wanted to spend -- I wanted to be friends with him.  He and I had plans to hang out afterwards.  But from the perspective of the film, I think it really gave us the opportunity to talk about our society, conventional Western society's relationship with life and death, and that was a gift because a lot of what the healers in the jungle talk about is this dying process.  It's this fear of the unknown.  (17:50) The dying experience, when you boil it down to its essence, really comes down to the fear of the unknown, which is a fear that we experience every single day.  It's just that when you die you really have no way of peaking around the corner and seeing where you're doing.   So Gary's passing gave us the opportunity to really go into that, because it shocks the audience.  When you see somebody pass away in a documentary that you're attached to, in real time, it brings up a lot of issues.  So it gave us the perfect opening for one of the medicine men, named Habin, to talk about life and death and all the misconceptions and all the crazy storylines and how desperately we avoid even thinking about it here in the West and how alive and part of the healing culture it is down in the Amazon.  Something that is looked at as being a gift, and it's not nearly as feared as it is here.  So it was a really mixed bag, but like everything that's happened with this film, it really turned out to be perfect.   Lucas:              (18:56) So I guess the million-dollar question is if you had to do it all over again, would you cast him?  Would you bring him down again?  Do you think you made the right choice?   Nick:               Yes, I do, 100%, 100%.  Listen, if I had reason to believe that his passing could have been avoided by him staying up here or having some other course of treatment, then I would obviously not have brought him down.  But this man had tried everything, and he was paying like, gosh, I'm trying to remember what the figure is, I don't want to misquote him because he says this in the film, but I think he says he was paying $2,000 or $3,000 a month for a shot that he was getting to sort of keep the cancer at bay a little bit, but it was still failing.  And he had no money.  He had no ability to afford it.  It was not something that was covered by his healthcare.  And he said he was sick of it and it made him feel terrible and he was in pain every day, and this was his last and final option.  (19:51) So 100%, I would have brought him down, I think it was a perfect way for him to make his transition.   Lucas:              Interesting.  (20:02) Nick, before we wrap up here, tell people about what you're working on next, how they can get a hold of you and if they want to see what you're up to and how they can connect with your films.   Nick:               Sure.  First of all, we have a free screening going on right now.  It ends tomorrow, Thursday, October 17th.  So if you want to watch Sacred Science for free, just come visit us, TheSacredScience.com/screening and you'll get the information you need to register and we'll send you all the details you need to tune in not only to the film but also to a bunch of really awesome guest speakers that we have presenting.  Most of them have already presented their material, but we have links to all those things that will be sent to you via email.  So again, TheSacredScience.com/screening and you can watch the film for free.                           In terms of what we're working on next, this film has really opened up a lot of doors.  The first two films were great, in terms of giving us great experience on how to actually go about making film, but this one has been in a ton of film festivals and we've had a lot of opportunities surface since it's been released.  It's kind of a tough decision for us.  (21:13) We want to either go further into Shamanism itself or start making a film or two about some of the lessons we've learned that have come up from the ceremonies we sat in, things that we've noticed about society that are really quirky and conspicuous that we'd like to point our cameras at.                           (21:38) One of our next films is most likely going to take us to the Siberian Steppes and into some remote regions of China and Mongolia, to sort of track down the earliest and potentially the most Shamanic traditions there are on the planet.  (21:57) One of our other films are going to be addressing an institution that has existed for thousands and thousands of year and that may or may not be serving us.  So there's two different films.  We'll keep you posted.                           If you join us for the Sacred Science free screening, you'll get all kinds of updates about future films as well.   Lucas:              Sounds great, Nick.  Thanks for all the information.  Speaking of your new films, one thing that resonates with me is everywhere I go I feel like people are desperate for rites of passage and ceremonies, and I think a lot of the interest in ayurvedic medicine, in medicinal healers, in Shamanism, I think a lot of it comes back to that.  So many people have lost their faith in whatever it is, so it's interesting stuff.  I'm excited to see what comes next.                           Again, thanks so much for joining us.  (22:49) Everybody listening, check out SacredScience.com, and thanks, Nick, and we'll talk to you real soon.         You've got questions?  We've got answers.  Welcome to the FAQ round.  If you've got something that you want to ask, send your questions to Podcast@YogaBodyNaturals.com.  And now, let's hear what's going on with our listeners.   Miranda asks:   Q: (23:14) I've done a bit of research, and the correct term for my condition is Lordosis.  I can't stretch my arms or shoulders back very far.  I'm not sure if this is connected to that or something different.  Wondering if the yoga trapeze will help to straighten this out.     A: If you don't know, the yoga trapeze is an inversion device that we manufacture and we teach students how to use.  It's really fun for spinal decompression.  It gives you traction on your spine.  It's really great for passive backbends.  We actually do core work and upper body strengthening poses on it as well.  It's great for functional strength.  It's kind of like a yoga version of a TRX, if you've ever seen one of those at a gym.  You can do a lot more on this than you can do on a TRX.   In any case, Miranda, in terms of Lordosis, is this going to help?  It's really hard for me to say.  I'm not a medical expert in terms of that condition.  The thing I would recommend is working with a teacher, if you can, and perhaps working with a physio or a chiro who could perhaps give you more structural integration information.   Jola asks:   Q: (24:18) I would like to take up yoga class, but which one would you recommend?  I've never done it before.  I'm 64.  I walk my dog every day, and I'm reasonably fit.  I've had back problems in the past, so I have to be careful about bending down.  I'm an anxious sort of person and get a lot of tension in my shoulders, and it takes me ages to get to sleep at night.  Sometimes I don't sleep at all.   A: Great question, Jola.  In terms of what type of class I'd recommend, I always say the same thing.  Do the type of class you love.  So if you're somebody who likes something intense and strong and athletic, no matter what your age, I'd take a look at hot yoga, take a look at power vinyasa, ashtanga-style yoga.  The great thing about yoga is it's great for any ages.  We have students even coming to our yoga teacher training courses in Thailand who are well into their 60s.  We've had people in their 70s.  So it's not an age-restrictive thing.  Of course, your body's not the same at 64 as it was at 24, let's be honest here, but you can still do a lot of things with yoga and you can get all the benefits.  So that's if you're on the athletic side of things.   If you prefer a more calming practice, if you like meditation and if you like quieter classes, take a look at local classes that might be called hatha yoga, they might be called yin yoga, they might be called restorative yoga, sivananda or integral yoga.  Some of these classes might have chanting and they might have Sanskrit words and perhaps even things connected to deities and religion.  That may or may not be of interest to you, just as a word of warning, but many of them will not as well.  You can always feel comfortable asking the studio about those things.  It's always a good thing to ask, if you do have concerns about that.   In terms of your nightly sleep, using gravity yoga right before bed is very, very effective.  We also teach a belly breathing routine that's very, very effective for falling asleep at night.  We'll try to link to it here in the show notes.  Belly breathing is when you lay on your back, you relax your belly completely and you breathe in and out through your belly, usually to a four count.  So you inhale for one, two, three, four, and then exhaling for four, three, two, one.  You keep your chest still, your face relaxed and you breathe just into your lower abdomen.  So your belly swells and fills on the inhale and it falls and collapses on the exhale.    And what this does is it has a very strong effect on your central nervous system, and again, you switch from that sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system.  You switch from your right nostril preference on the exhale to your left nostril preference on the exhale, and your body starts to really calm down.  So that would be my suggestion for you.   Susan asks:   Q: (27:02) I had pots break 14 years ago and never healed properly, so cannot walk for more than a block without so much pain.  I cannot use this foot in the yoga swing but could use the knee.  I have carpal tunnel in both wrists.  I cannot lift weights, use bands, do push-ups, et cetera, and will not be able to use my hands in a yoga trapeze.  Do you have any tips for using the trapeze that way?  I bought it to release my back pain.   A: Okay, Susan, this is a great question.  I'm not sure.  You said you had a break.  I'm not sure what kind of break this was.  I'm guessing you broke something in your spine.  I'm not really sure.  In any case, it sounds like you have quite a bit of pain in your body.  The yoga trapeze is fantastic for getting traction on your spine.  The one caveat to that is you do need to be able to get in and out of it and you do need a fair amount of mobility to be able to utilize it.   Now, there is another inversion device which is very, very common.  It's just a lot bigger and a lot more expensive, but it's called an inversion table.  You might have seen them before at a chiropractic office or at a health fair.  It's a long table.  It looks like a massage table, and it tips and goes all the way back and you can invert on the table.  This might be something that might be more appropriate for you.  With carpel tunnel, with pain, if you can't do any kind of resistance training, this might be a safer thing for you to try.  So think about that.   Q: (28:27) I'm morbidly obese, I'm 5'2" and 223 pounds.  I'm on a disability pension so I'm limited on the food we can afford.  I eat lots of tuna, chicken, potatoes, frozen veggies, et cetera, because the fresh stuff is out of my price range.  Would you have any tips on losing weight?  Also, what other products other than the yoga trapeze would you recommend for me?   A: In terms of other products, I wouldn't recommend anything.  If you're on a tight budget, just to natural activities that you love.  If you like to walk, go for a walk.  If you like to dance, put on a DVD and dance.  Put on some music and dance.  If you like to play with the neighbors or the kids or whatever it is, do that.  There's this myth that in order to be thin or lose weight you have to do extreme exercise.  It's almost never true.  In fact, almost always the opposite is true.  We have a sister business that I own and we do a lot of work with obesity and weight loss, and our most successful clients do little or no extreme exercise at all.  Usually they do natural activities, just like walking around, playing in the park, very, very natural things.  It's not necessary to get extreme.  So that's the first thing.   In terms of eating healthy on a budget, this is a real challenge.  Cheap food is fattening  food, and that's a really, really sad state of affairs but it is a reality.  Healthy food is more expensive, and people like to tell you that it's not but good food costs more.  And that's just part of the situation.  Now all of that said, there are plenty of options that are lower in cost and almost equal in terms of nutritional value.  It sounds like you found quite a few of them.  Frozen vegetables, for example, are nearly as good as fresh vegetables.  So that's perfectly fine.  Your cheaper meats, like tunas and chickens they're not too bad either.  What I might recommend, if you're a meat eater, is go and try to get less common meats, like organ meats and like leftover pieces from really high-quality meats, for example you might get organ meats from grass-fed cows which would normally be very expensive.  The organ meats will be very inexpensive and they're very, very nutrient-dense.   But all things considered, if you're thinking about investing in products, I would for sure invest in good food.  And it doesn't need to be super expensive, but for sure it's going to cost more than even takeaway food from a restaurant.  So with all that said, please keep in touch and let's see if we can figure out some good tools to help you and we'll go from there.   Esther asks:   Q: (30:56) What is your view on eggs?  I'm eating organic, free-range, cruelty-free eggs pretty much every day for breakfast with spinach and avocado.  What alternative, high-protein, vegetarian breakfast could I eat?   A: Eggs are really, really interesting.  If you've been hanging around YOGABODY for a while, you know for over decade I just eat plants, so I haven't eaten eggs in a really long time.  But in my day, I've eaten plenty of eggs.  Eggs are interesting in that they have a very, very bioavailable protein.  They seem like an animal food that we are made to eat, more so than other foods even in that they're very easy to digest.   A couple of problems with eggs.  First of all, they come from chickens.  Chickens are a really messed up animal.  It's kind of like a poodle.  You know when you see a poodle, like you go to Central Park in New York and you see these poodles getting walked around and this poodle looks sort of like an Easter Bunny/fur coat/I don't know what it is.  It's really a mutant, and a chicken is very much like that.  It's a very strange animal, and it's fed terrible, terrible foods like GMO corn and all kinds of really crappy grains.  A chicken in the wild eats all kinds of things, like rats and mice and bugs and grasshoppers and leftover garbage.  Chickens are really wild scavengers.  And then they put them in cages and feed them really crappy food and antibiotics, and it's really a disaster.   In terms of eating organic, free-range eggs, I feed these to my kids.  You've just got to be careful.  A lot of the free-range is kind of a joke.  A lot of the free-range just means that instead of being in cages, the chickens are just all on the floor smashed into each other.  It's really no better.  There are more and more and more truly cruelty-free eggs available, and I'm a huge supporter of that.   So here's the deal with eggs.  Eggs are a great source of protein.  Eggs are also very allergenic, and people develop allergies to them.  The breakfast you talked about, eggs with spinach and avocado is something that my daughter loved beyond belief.  For two years straight, every day she wanted eggs with spinach for breakfast, and suddenly now she won't eat eggs and it hurts her stomach.  She's developed an egg allergy, and it's very common.  If you talk to body builders, weight lifters, they often develop egg allergies as well, from over eating eggs.  It's the white of the eggs that people develop an allergy to, the protein.  I'm not sure why.  I haven't seen any compelling research to explain why.  I have a feeling it's because, like I said, the chicken is a funny animal.  I don't believe in it as an animal.  I think there's something wrong with it.    So that said, eggs from any other animal are better.  If you can get duck eggs, for example, if you can get ostrich, any other kind of egg you could possibly get are going to be more nutritious and more natural than a chicken egg.    In terms of other high-protein, vegetarian breakfasts, the best breakfasts are not breakfast.  Breakfast food is crappy food, by definition.  The sweet cereals, the breads, the grains, all that stuff is gross.  Eat dinner for breakfast.  I like to eat leftovers from dinner for breakfast.  Anything is great.  Since you're a vegetarian, you just want to avoid the dairy.  Dairy is so inflammatory.  It's really a disaster of a protein.  So if you're not eating meat, you want to make sure you're getting a good high-fat, high-protein breakfast.  One thing that I like to use are sprouted lentils.  Sprouted lentils are really, really great because a lot of the starch has been eaten in the sprouting process, so they're protein-dense, very, very easy to digest, very inexpensive and very fast to make.  But the best breakfast food is not breakfast at all; it's dinner eaten for breakfast.   Q: (34:31) I'm confused about conflicting information about fruit.  There's been a lot in the news about how fruit has too much sugar and should be avoided.  What's your view on this?   A: Yeah, so fruit is really controversial.  There's this guy out there called Durian Rider, and he says you should eat 30 bananas a day and then there's other people out there, Dr. Mercola tells you if you eat more than 5 pieces of fruit a day you're going to explode.  I guess I fall somewhere in the middle.  I come from a raw food background, so there's been periods of my life where I lived exclusively off of fruit, and at certain periods in my life I did really, really well off just fruit.  At one point, I had less than 5% body fat, really great energy.  I was able to work about 12 hours a day and maintain about a 3-hour per day yoga practice.  Kind of extreme, but I was fueled by fruit during those days.   These days I'm a lot more conservative about fruit.  First thing I'll tell you is it has a lot to do with climate.  Where you live really affects your sugar metabolism dramatically.  Your age dramatically affects your sugar metabolism.  So what I mean by that is on the internet if you search around for these 80/10/10 guys or these fruitarians, the ones that look really, really good, and there's some really, really healthy-looking people out there, women in particular that people get really excited and they say, wow these people look like models.  They look fantastic, and they're eating bananas and peaches all day, so maybe I should go do that.   The truth is, that might work for you.  It might work for you in the short term.  I've never seen it ever, ever, ever work in the long term, and I'm paying attention and I know people who've tried and they really deteriorate with age.  So if you look at that fruitarian community and you look at the people in their later 30s, in their 40s and especially the people in their 50s, it's a train wreck and they have oxidative stress and they're aging really rapidly.  And I haven't seen their blood work, but I promise if you were to do a glucose tolerance test it would be a disaster.  Your weight, if you're only eating fruit, tends to be manageable.  On any kind of whole food diet, your weight usually stays under control.  But that has nothing to do with your hormones and that says nothing about your fatty acid levels and things like this.    I went off on a little bit of a rant there, but let me just tell you thing about fruit is that the fruit we're eating today is nothing like the fruit we had even 100 years ago.  Let's talk about an apple, for example.  A wild apple is a bitter, mealy, barely edible thing.  A modern apple, I can eat literally five or six of them in one sitting and I can still want more.  So yes, our fruit is way, way, way sweeter than it used to be.  This has been done through selective breeding, in some case GMOs, but mostly just selective breeding.   And so what this means is when we're eating fruit, we want to focus on low-sugar, high-micronutrient fruits.  That tends to be things like your berries, like your cucumbers, like your tomatoes.  Yes, cucumbers and tomatoes are fruits.  Anything seed-bearing is a fruit.  And so you want to try to avoid the really, really, really sweet ones like watermelon and bananas.  Those are very, very sweet.  They're not bad for you, but it's a lot of sugar.  That said, if you're an athlete, if you're very active, that can be a great source of carbohydrates for you.    The thing about fructose, especially concentrated fructose, is it's one of the most lipogenic things on the planet.  What lipogenic means is lipogenesis, it goes into your liver and starts forming belly fat very, very quickly.  So were you to try to gain a lot of belly fat really fast, let's say you were a method actor and you wanted to gain a bunch of weight really, really quickly, the absolute best way you could do that is to eat a whole bunch of fructose.  It would be really, really easy to gain a bunch of fat.  And the reason is, is because of the way it's metabolized.  And so you need to be careful with fructose, especially isolated and concentrated fructose.  So high-fructose corn syrup, like the stuff that's in soda pops, everybody knows you should avoid that.   But if you're eating fruit, here's just a general, general rule.  You shouldn't be eating more than five pieces of fruit per day, and if you're eating other kinds of processed carbs, if you're eating any kind of grains, any kind of starches like breads or rices or pastas or any of that stuff, you need to be even more careful.  So sometimes you'll hear people about going on a fruit-free diet and losing weight.  Well, this is true and this does happen, but a lot of these people, they haven't given up their processed carbs.  So they stopped eating fruit, but they're still eating lots of bread and lots of pasta and lots of rice.  I would be much more interested in you getting rid of the grains and eating more fruit, because they're more healthy, they're more micronutrient-dense.    But as a general rule, again, I've gone on a real rant here, but about 25 grams of fructose a day or less is a good rule of thumb.  Depending on the fruit, that could be just a couple of pieces or it can be about five pieces of fruit, if you're eating low-glycemic fruits.  High-glycemic fruits, there's nothing wrong with them as long as you're active and as long as you're not eating too many other starchy foods.  When people get into plant-based diets, oftentimes they end up eating all kinds of crazy starchy foods all day long and their blood sugar levels get all out of whack.   Q: (39:53) Is there any limit on how often we should be eating beans?   A: Beans or legumes are a really interesting food.  We tend to think of them as a protein food, but they're actually pretty starchy.  Most beans are around 10% protein, so not that high.  Certain beans, like soy beans, are extraordinarily high in protein, but of course they have a couple of drawbacks that make us not want to eat them all the time.  I like legumes a lot.  I've come to like them more and more over the years, and I'll tell you why.  I've learned how to prepare them better.  Most beans give you terrible gas and bloating.  They have oligosaccharides, which is a form of sugar, that we're unable to digest.  But there are simple ways to overcome those digestive issues.   It takes a little bit of work.  Specifically, buying beans dry, soaking them overnight and then cooking the snot out of them.  That's one option.  So you buy beans, you soak them overnight and you cook the crap out of them.  It really, really helps with digestion.  Of course, that cooking is not that great for the protein, not really that great for the micronutrients.  But anyway, that's the way to do it.  The other option, which I'm a huge fan of now and at any given time I have fresh lentil sprouts in my kitchen, is sprouting lentils.  Lentils come in quite a few different varieties.  They have very, very unique flavors.  Some are peppery, some are more sweet.  And when you sprout them it eats quite a bit of this starch.  It makes them much more protein-dense, makes the protein more bioavailable, it eats a bunch of the sugars, it's predigested.  And then I'll very likely cook them, stir-fry them or boil them in soup and they're very fast to cook, very easy to cook.  You don't have to cook them nearly as much, and they're great for you.  So I'm a huge fan of legumes.   They do have some anti-nutrients and things, which people get a little bit too hung up on them.  You just need to learn how to cook.  If you don't know how to cook, I would say beans are not for you.   Marilou asks:   Q: (41:43) Why is it so hard to lift up your upper body when on the floor doing bekasana?   A: Bekasana is a frog pose.  You lay on your belly, you bend your legs, you reach back and you grab your feet and you lift your chest up.  That all sounds fine.  Do a Google search for it, bekasana, it looks really easy and then you go to do it and you feel like you're dying.  It feels like your kneecaps are going to explode and your heart's going to burst.  Why is it so hard?  There are a couple of reasons, Marilou.  Your shoulders tend to be tight, and your upper back tends to be tight and you really need to open up there to lift up and it's just a really intense, awkward position.  So that's about all I have there.   I will tell you, you'll make progress really quickly.  If you practice it every day, you'll make progress really quickly.  Just be careful with your knees.  Be really careful with getting adjustments in this pose.  A lot of teachers like to sort of sit on you, and I do not like that in terms of your knees.  It could be really risky there.  I hope that's helpful.   If you have questions, please send them to Podcast@YogaBodyNaturals.com.          It's now time for the bendy body nutritional tip of the day.  Raw food, edible insects, tropical oils, why not?  It's all fair game.  Here we go.  Let's talk nutrition.   (43:03) Today's nutritional tip is all about water.  The conventional wisdom is drink eight glasses of water per day.  The only problem is, what the hell does eight glasses of water mean?  Is that 8, 8-ounce glasses?  Is that 8 liters of water?  Is that 8, 12-ounce glasses?  Who knows what that is?  So here's my thing with water.  You need to drink a lot more than you think.  There's a couple of reasons for this, but one of the biggest reasons is the food that you're eating right now tends to be very dehydrated.  A lot of people eat packaged and processed foods, and even the meats and things like that that they're eating tend to be dried.  They're not nearly as wet and as water-dense as they should be, which means we need to drink more water.     (43:46) So how much water?  Well, I like to drink about two liters per day.  When I'm in Thailand, I might drink as much as five or even six liters per day, which sounds crazy but it's really hot there and I do a lot of yoga and I sweat a lot.  It really depends on you.  But for almost everybody, I find that a little bit over hydrating makes them feel really, really great.  It reduces your hungry, it helps with elimination, helps you clear up your digestion and your skin.  So it can be really great.  So if in doubt, I'd ere on the side of drinking too much.   (44:17) So how do you do this?  People get really stuck.  The first thing is keep a bottle of water on your desk, and at your home keep a bottle of water on the counter.  And by bottle of water, I don't necessarily mean a store-bought bottle of water.  I have glass bottles at home that I filter water and put them in, and when I just leave them around on the table I end up drinking them all.  There seems to be no limit to the amount of water I'll drink if it's sitting around.  So literally, a jug of water on the counter, on my desk and I will drink it down no problem at all.  I'd encourage you to do the same.  If you're somebody who's out and about all day long, carry around with you a water bottle and carry a large water bottle, a nice big one.  That will help you to drink more water.   (44:57) The second thing is, add something to your water.  The things that I like best are lemon, fresh lemon, cucumber, sounds gross but it's good and then the last thing is we have something called Total Hydration, which is an electrolyte formula.  It actually helps you absorb 43% more water.  They've done clinical trials with firefighters.  It's not necessary for everybody, but if you're somebody who struggles to drink water, is chronically dehydrated, the signs of that are constipation which is very, very common, and headaches, it can be a big help.  If you're a hot yoga student, if you're an athlete, it can be really effective as well.  You can learn more about that in the YOGABODY store.  Regardless of whether you use Total Hydration or not, the key thing is drink more water.  Keep it around.  That's the simplest way to get it down.   You've been listening to the Yoga Talk Show with Lucas Rockwood.  You might not know this, but I live and die for your iTunes reviews and ratings.  So help me out.  Head over to the iTunes Store and give me some love.  And when you're done with that, you can grab the complete show notes, links to everything mentioned in this show, plus all kinds of other yoga shenanigans, at YogaBodyNaturals.com.  

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The Sacred Science follows eight people from all different walks of life, with varying physical and psychological ailments, as they embark on a one month healing journey into the heart of the amaon jungle. Working with a handful of local shamanic healers and using a combination of plant medicine and intense spiritual exercises, the barriers between physical health and mental well-being are blurred and eventually eliminated altogether.

We feature 3 directors from the 34th Annual Mill Valley Film Festival: Joshua Dylan Mellars, dir. Play Like a Lion; Nick Polizzi, dir. Sacred Science; Paige Bierma, dir. A Brush with the Tenderloin." Artists Carla Oden & Sue Matthews speak about this year's contributions: "Illuminations: Día de los Muertos 2011" at SOMArts Cultural Center Bay Gallery, 934 Brannan Street (between 8th and 9th Streets), San Francisco, CA  94103?, October 8 – November 5.

For the month of February, Michelle and Seth are reviewing an overview of the Trauma from a psychological and physiology perspective. This week's mental minutes consist of Michelle coming to terms with living in an area that receives ice and snow; something she isn't entirely familiar with after having lived in California for over 30 years. Seth reveals some big changes in his life and expounds on the reasons why. There is a couple minutes of friendly banter regarding politics. From there, Michelle and Seth explore the physical ramifications of trauma. This is an important subject as so many deal with physical issues that may have their roots in traumatic events. *Resource: Much of today's conversation was pulled from "Trauma: Healing Your Past to Find Freedom Now" by Pedram Shojai, O.M.D. and Nick Polizzi. The podcast recommends this book as a starting place to begin the journey of working through your personal trauma. If you get involved with Mental, check out: ***NEW website: https://www.mental-podcast.com ***Hotline: Call or text: 314-690-5005 ***Interested in bonus content + direct access?: https://www.patreon.com/mentalpodcast ***Merch: New website and merch coming soon!