In this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, I chat with Dr. Blaine Lints, a former Navy SEAL and performance physiologist, about boosting performance, muscle, and resilience through flexible strategies. We dig into his research on ketones, caffeine, and theacrine, plus his work using Ibogaine for TBI recovery. I also break down how physiologic flexibility ties it all together for next-level performance and recovery. If you’re into cutting-edge performance science, brain optimization, or just want to hear two nerds talk physiology and Navy SEAL mental toughness, this one’s for you. Sponsors: Beyond Power Voltra 1: https://www.beyond-power.com/michael13 Tecton Ketone Esters: https://tectonketones.com
In this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, I chat with Dr. Blaine Lints, a former Navy SEAL and performance physiologist, about boosting performance, muscle, and resilience through flexible strategies. We dig into his research on ketones, caffeine, and theacrine, plus his work using Ibogaine for TBI recovery. I also break down how physiologic flexibility ties it all together for next-level performance and recovery.
If you’re into cutting-edge performance science, brain optimization, or just want to hear two nerds talk physiology and Navy SEAL mental toughness, this one’s for you.
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase performance, add muscle, improve body composition, and do all of it within a flexible framework without destroying your health. Today on the podcast we've got Dr. Blaine Lints. He is a PhD and a performance physiologist and former Navy Seal.
He's specializing in the intersection of extreme environments, cognitive resilience and recovery. His dissertation at Florida State University investigated how caffeine plus theatre supplementation, along with ketone mono esters in includes cognition and endurance during heat induced fatigue. And so some research that was inspired by the challenges that tactical and special operator populations, uh, face.
Uh, he is also a crazy man and has completed professionally in [00:01:00] Ironman triathletes. Uh, he is also done some work with the psychedelic assisted therapies for traumatic brain injury, including that he was a participant in the UT Austin ICA clinical trial. So his goal is to translate cutting edge science to tools to enhance human performance and post service recovery.
So we talk about all of those great things from ketones to cognitive function, to being more resilient, antifragile, uh, and even touch a little bit on his experience with, uh, ibogaine. So you probably saw in the media, which is great, uh, Texas Pass. The proposal for funding ibogaine research to the tune of the, I think, the highest amount that's ever been pledged towards psychedelic research, which is great.
So some of the early work there, uh, shows it to be quite promising, but like all things, we need more formal research, uh, to get an idea what are the [00:02:00] true outcomes and what is going on. I think I really enjoyed this episode. And again, the other reason I like. Interviewing people on the extremes as the extremes inform the means.
So maybe you're not doing the triathlons and heat or running any of these types of studies, but I bet there's probably a couple nuggets you can take away for your own training and the performance. So today on the podcast, one of the big sponsors is the Physiologic Flexibility Certification. Uh, that is run by me.
So it opens this coming Monday, which is October 13th, 2025. Uh, best place to get all of the information on that is on the newsletter. I have a ton of information coming out as of this recording, and it'll be open for one week. So if you're looking for a way to increase your own resilience, become more anti-fragile, recover faster, and just [00:03:00] generally be much harder to kill, this is the certification for you.
Uh, it's broken down into four components. Uh, the first one is temperature, the second is pH. The third is expanded fuels. We talk a lot about lactate and ketones. And fourth is how you regulate oxygen and CO2 or air. It's my premise that if you get better at each one of these areas, that'll make you more resilient and generally just much harder to kill overall.
Now, again, this isn't gonna replace any of the basics. This is for people who are already. Getting, I'd say a B or so in exercise, sleep, and nutrition. But this gives you the framework and the direct actions of what to do next. Uh, in it, we do have some technology and we've got other ways to do it, literally without any technology.
So you don't necessarily need to have an expensive cold plunge or a sauna. Those things are helpful. But we've got high cost and also low cost and freeways. You can [00:04:00] accomplish all of the above. And the other good part is most people haven't exposed their physiology to those four areas a lot. So you don't need a ton of time to see some big benefits there.
So if you're interested in that as the only time right now, it'll be open this year since we're at the end of the year. Uh, go to the newsletter if you have any questions, you can hit reply on the newsletter. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Uh, also we have a link down below for my friends over at, uh, Teton Ketone Esters.
Uh, as of this recording, they're in the process of getting all the new products done and finished, uh, that you will hopefully be able to purchase very soon. A link might be live by the time, uh, this goes out. Uh, so check them out. Uh, I am an ambassador for them, so I do make a. A few bucks, uh, off stuff, but it is by far my favorite, uh, ketone.
And we get all super geeky on ketones here in the [00:05:00] episode. And this particular molecule they use is BHB, bonded to glycerol. So what this allows is a ketone ester, so you can get relatively high levels of ketones and it completely dissipates into BHB, which is the ketone itself. And then glycerol, which is the backbone of the triglycerides.
So your body will use glycerol directly. So there's no other stuff in the component, there's no one three butane dial or anything else like that. So, uh, by far my favorite ketone. And again, full disclosure, I do some work, uh, with them and I am an ambassador to them. On the training side, if you're looking for at-home advanced training, uh, this is very portable.
Uh, check out my friends over at Beyond Power with the V Ultra one. It is like a little cable box you can attach to your rack or other implements or the floor. And what I love about it is it allows you to change the strength curve and you can do different amounts for concentric and [00:06:00] eccentric components.
So example I use all the time, but I still love doing this. If you're doing a seated row, you could maybe pull back with say, a hundred pounds and then I can have a higher amount of eccentric that is literally ripping the handle back to the device. I've gone up to as high as 160 pounds. Again, I would not start there, but it allows you to change those components, uh, especially if you're doing any, uh, phasic work.
So set up to my buddy Cal Dietz. We've got a link, uh, somewhere around here too for the Phasic two book that I was a co-author with him on. But the Vion Power Vulture device lets you do that, replaces a cable stack and allows you to do all sorts of other cool stuff. Uh, last part on that is it gives you feedback directly.
So if you're a big fan of, vertical or I should say velocity based, uh, training, which I am, you get all of that feedback directly as you are using the device. So you get a, uh, measurement system. In addition to replacing a cable stack and allowing you to do [00:07:00] changes in concentric eccentric, you can add virtual chains, inverse chains.
All sorts of just really fun stuff. So check them out below. Uh, heads up, full disclosure, I am an affiliate for them, so that is an affiliate link. Uh, I like the device so much. I called up Elliott and asked and peruse them to see if I could be an affiliate to help them out. Uh, so there we go. Uh, make sure you check out the fex Cert, the newsletter, and enjoy this podcast with Dr.
Blaine Lints.
Audio Only - All Participants: Welcome to the podcast, doctor. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. And congratulations. I heard you just did your defense and you're now officially PhD, correct?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yep. As of, uh, about five weeks ago. Thank you.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Nice. That's awesome. How
Dr Blaine Lints: does it feel? Feels good. I'm still, uh, trying to figure out exactly what's gonna be next and reaching out to different companies, so there's a little bit of uncertainty there, but.
It's nice to have a little [00:08:00] break and transition period and, uh, figuring out what the next steps are gonna be.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. And I know we're gonna talk about some of the work you did on your PhD and for special populations or even people doing work under high levels of fatigue. Tell us about some of the research you did.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so my first of the dissertation studies was in a tactical population using a combination of caffeine and theacrine, uh, and comparing that to a caffeine and placebo arm in a randomized crossover. And in that study we found that the combination of caffeine and theacrine, as you'd expect, outperformed placebo similar to how caffeine did.
But not only was there a cognitive enhancement, but that cognitive enhancement persisted. Further into the intervention. So, two plus hours after ingestion of the combination participants were still seeing [00:09:00] improved cognitive performance, uh, even compared to caffeine and placebo. So in total we saw more, more significant differences that were, considered positive when it came to the combination, uh, even compared to caffeine, which is pretty interesting.
And a little bit surprising. And one of the more noticeable findings was that the response variability during certain cognitive tasks was, uh, decreased. So we saw more correct answers and more I guess less variability between the timing of the responses. So being correct more often and having more consistent responses, uh, over time does have a direct application to military populations.
The second dissertation study that, oh, do you mind if I ask a few questions about the first one there? [00:10:00]
Dr Mike T Nelson: I tried a ton of tea cream when it first came out and I didn't notice hardly anything. And then I know some of the other studies said that you had to combine it with caffeine, and then I couldn't figure out, well, is it just the effect of the caffeine or is it the combination?
So it's interesting that you did it compared to so the control group was just placebo in some form, correct?
nobody: Yep.
Dr Mike T Nelson: And then you had trine with caffeine, and then you had caffeine. Uh, what were the doses on the other two arms? So
Dr Blaine Lints: 300 milligrams caffeine, and that was so not standardized by body weight.
And then, uh, the combination group had 150 milligrams of each, so it was a total of 300.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Okay. So even the dose was the same if you wanna do a dose equivalent?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And one thing Dr. Arin, my, my advisor, he is done a few studies in our lab working with caffeine theacrine. [00:11:00] And what has been seen in the past, as far as my understanding goes is that Theacrine on its own generally hasn't had a positive, uh, reception and scientific literature, or that's what I would agree
Dr Mike T Nelson: with.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, or just, uh, in the bro science literature people don't seem to love having theacrine on its own. And one anecdotal observation that I've had is that even mixing 300 milligrams of caffeine plus a hundred milligrams of theacrine seems to hit with less of a. Caffeine jolt that you would expect with 300 milligrams of caffeine.
So I almost feel like it dampens some of the effect, and that's why I'm guessing that in this perception could be a little off. But my perception has been that the pre-workouts that have contained theacrine haven't seen to, uh, gain as much traction. And I think it's because it doesn't feel like it's doing as [00:12:00] much.
But in the case of our study, we saw that despite, we didn't have the subjective reports to really assess this, but potentially if it did blunt those things, it didn't really matter. We saw improved performances over the entire duration of each study visit, whereas we saw an initial bump with caffeine, but it dropped off after exercise.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Interesting. And just so for the listeners, you're talking about a terine or Theacrine, not L-theanine because there is correct combinations of caffeine with Athene, which is an amino acid, which, uh, out maybe some of the jitters or some interesting cognitive data on that too. So did you wanna describe how, what is, uh, trine or theacrine?
I've heard it pronounced both ways. What exactly is it as a compound?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. So Theacrine is the, I guess the chemical and trine is a branded form of it. I know. Which is so weird. It's like, why make
Dr Mike T Nelson: them so similar in names? And I know the guys, everyone gets confused who did it. No disrespect to them, but it's like, come on man.[00:13:00]
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. So Sophia Cream can be found from, uh, a few different plants from my understanding, but the primary one is those Camelia Qis I believe it's pronounced, but I might be butchering that. And, uh, it's also metabolite of caffeine. So it. Acts in a similar way, mechanistically to how caffeine does, except the half-life is a lot longer and you end up with a smoother, more prolonged duration of its active effects.
However, it's it's been reported to not have the same, uh, development of a habituation to the compound. So you can theoretically take it on a daily basis and you wouldn't need to increase the dosage at all in order to see the same effect as you did with that initial dosing, which is one of the issues that comes along with caffeine.
Another issue with caffeine in certain individuals who are susceptible to this is that they may experience some side effects that are a little bit [00:14:00] counterproductive to high performance in the, especially in the wrong situations. So things like elevated heart rate that's a little bit excessive for the situation.
Feelings of elevated blood pressure or even elevated blood pressure. A little bit of anxiety, jitteriness, shakiness, like actually impaired cognition and motor control at some extent. So Theacrine helps to get around some of those just because it's smoother and longer lasting and doesn't seem to cause the same effects.
And so the idea with the combination with caffeine is that you get the best of both worlds. It's not perfect, but at least in the context of what we were able to measure in the research, it actually did pan out to look like it was, uh, giving off the best of both worlds when it came to what caffeine has to offer in a positive way while extending those effects over, several hours compared to just, one to two hours of really active duration.
Dr Mike T Nelson: And how did you measure [00:15:00] cognition here? Because I know you did it under a simulated stressful condition, correct.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so, so the exercise intervention was, uh, 10, 10 rounds of one minute of hard running and then two minutes of, walking into jogging and the running intervals were generally at a hundred to hundred and 20% of VO two max.
So that was what the exercise stressor was. But the cognitive tests we used in that study were a combination of reaction time tests using a dyna vision board, so hitting the different spots on the board For anyone who's not familiar with that it was just a 32nd task. Uh, hit red, don't hit green.
So a little bit of a, inhibition. Yeah, a little bit of that going into it. We also used a trays or flaker task, which was like using a Nintendo li where you are watching a screen with your, with a, an avatar of yourself, and you are moving to different targets depending on what [00:16:00] what is indicated on the screen you're looking at.
So those were the two that we used besides the kin arm. And the kin arm is, uh, an augmented reality robot. And has you sitting in this chair, resting your head against looking down at a mirror, which is reflecting a TV overhead. And it, it sounds a little bit goofy but it's actually really cool because it's, it appears like you're looking into this 3D setup and you get these robotic handles that, that move around and you.
We basically go through a couple different games, uh, or cognitive tasks with that. And one of those is called the object hit and the void, which we also jokingly called Falling Shapes, but basically hit two of the eight shapes and ignore the other six, and they'll come faster and faster down the screen over a couple minutes to the point where by the end of those couple minutes, you're gonna be overwhelmed and you're going to be missing shapes that you were supposed to hit, and you're gonna be [00:17:00] accidentally hitting shapes that you weren't supposed to hit.
It's not a, there, there have been people who have gotten a perfect score on that, but generally it overwhelms people and it definitely overwhelms me when I'm doing it. We also use the, uh, the two back, which, uh some people might know as the N back. But this the n back is used in a variety of different ways.
Sometimes it uses letters, sometimes it uses shapes. I'm sure there are other variations of the test. But basically in, in our variation, you see a sequence of shapes appearing one at a time. So you might see a square triangle, uh, oval, long triangle, circle, that sort of thing. You're given a button box in each shape.
You're indicating yes or no, whether the current shape you're seeing is the same. You saw two previously. So it's this pretty, pretty irritating working memory task where you're constantly having to update on the fly the last two shapes you [00:18:00] saw and click yes or no. And sometimes, uh, when I was doing that, I'd get a little overwhelmed and you just hit no a couple times and re restart and then, uh, and then get back in it because it is a little bit, uh, difficult, especially when you're dealing with fatigue.
The other, uh, kin arm task we use was, uh, the anti Scho task, which is a test of, uh, it's using eye tracking and you're basically given, uh, an object in the center of the screen. And depending on whether you're doing the pro or antis cods you're looking in the direction of an, of a stimulus or you're looking away from that.
And, uh, that can be a little bit frustrating too because you're trying to control your reflexive eye movements a little bit, which becomes a little bit difficult. But that's actually where we saw a lot of the, uh, the biggest effects when it came to the benefits of the caffeine theacrine combination, uh, further into the visit that, yeah, those were the cognitive tests.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So would you agree that a CCO is like this fast [00:19:00] reflexive eye movement? So if I have like my fingers here, you would say, okay, uh, look at the one that's moving. Right. So that would be like a CKO movement and then you could say the antis would be Okay. The one that moves look at the opposite one, right?
Yeah. So you have to inhibit your normal air quotes, reflexive response to look at the thing that's moving. So you're doing the opposite of that task.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, that's exactly right.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Have you, did you see any difference between the Secod versus the antis cod or were they both. Did they all follow the same patterns?
Dr Blaine Lints: So we specifically saw better performance on the anti scho test with the combination compared to caffeine, but almost in everything as you might expect, caffeine and the combination of caffeine and theacrine outperforming with placebo at almost every time point.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Was there any, and this might not have even been in the study, I don't know how you would do it, but [00:20:00] before they did the task, was there any perception of, oh wow, I had caffeine, I feel like I'm gonna do better on this test, or, Ooh, I had this other com.
Like any matching of what they feel is their perception versus their actual performance?
Dr Blaine Lints: So yeah, we didn't do any subjective assessments or anything formal when it came to that. And there was really nothing that stood out, uh, as far as, just things that, that we heard when listening to participants or discussing, uh, their experience with them.
So there, there really wasn't any of that, which was a little bit, uh, surprising actually. Especially because in, in some individuals, 300 milligrams of caffeine can be a high dose. Oh yeah. Everyone was a habitual caffeine consumer and we did that to minimize chances that anyone would, have a panic attack or any sort of like, really counterproductive effect from it.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Cool. [00:21:00] Very interesting. And then I assume that the idea of doing the exercise is you're not just looking at standard cognitive tasks. You wanna see, is there any difference under some sort of stress to try to simulate different operations and things of that nature? Correct.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And that was what the high intensity exercise was designed to do, was just create, uh, an additional stressor to then impact cognition.
And exercise isn't always necessarily going to precognition that at some point it might improve it. And for some individuals, the exercise protocol just wasn't sufficient to impair performance. And that's one of the things that I really tried my best to overcome in the ketone mono ester study where, uh, I really tried to make sure that the exercise was going to impair cognition.
And I think for the most part we did that. But yeah, we'll get to [00:22:00] that in a bit.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Anything else about this study that you thought was interesting or noteworthy? And then do you use teare in combination with caffeine yourself? And how do you use it if you do?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. So in 2022 I got a little bug to start competing in something.
And I had a sense when I was younger that I would've been able to turn pro in Ironman triathlon. So, so I was like, oh I think I could do that again. And I saw, uh, the Tokyo Olympics where Christian Blumenthal, I don't know if you know that name, but he is, uh, I know the name. I
Dr Mike T Nelson: don't know a ton about him.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. He, uh, has produced a VO two max over a hundred.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Was that verified? I have my doubts about that 'cause that's
Dr Blaine Lints: so Okay. Other worldly, you may have heard that. Yeah. I think like 7.7 liters or something insane. But so, so it's really high. But their coach, Ola Alexander [00:23:00] Boo. I love what he has put out and Oh, he is got great stuff.
Yeah I think he is really cutting edge on a level that not many other people in endurance, uh, exercise science are at. And he said they triple checked everything with it and that he believes in the numbers. So who, who knows? Uh, but anyways, uh, when Christian Bal was winning the Tokyo Olympics the commentator on tv, he said he trains like 35 to 40 hours every week.
And I had never heard of training numbers that high. I'd heard of like 30 hours a week, maybe 35, but like no one that's consistently putting up 35 to 40 hours a week. And he didn't have the body type at all. With the typical triathlete, he has like a very large, uh, he actually has a chest deformity that produces this like very large barrel chest.
And he looks more like a speed skater than he does. Uh. Any sort of endurance athlete. And so I got really [00:24:00] interested in that and how much he trains and how successful he was in the transition he made to Ironman triathlon three months later after the Tokyo Olympics he broke the Ironman distance world record at I believe Ironman Cosmo with a time of seven hours and 21 minutes.
And I thought that was insane. So I got really interested in I'd already been interested in, exercise science, especially when it came to endurance exercise, but I really got into it then. So I started get, I instantly looked at who's his coach. 'cause I have to know what his coach is doing.
And that's how I found all of Alexander Boo. But that, that all got that, uh, that spark going again for competing in something. So yeah, in 2022 I think it was in, in May, I went from having been lifting primarily for the past few years to I wanna do an Iron Man. Uh, and there was one in five months.
Oh wow. So I signed up for it went full power training while I'm doing [00:25:00] the PhD.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh wow. You're really crazy. I did it.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, it was, uh, and it's, it is what it is. That whole process beat me up pretty bad. But the first one I did in nine and a half hours. I did a half Ironman.
I think about two months after that race, and then the next year I knew that I'd be able to turn pro if I had some good races. So I did. I went I did that same Ironman again the next year, and I did a half Ironman at the same location, both Chattanooga and, uh, did really well at both of those races, and that was enough to make me eligible to turn pro at the end of 2023.
So I got that pro license. I only competed once as a pro, and it was, it's pretty wasn't my best race by any means. So I, yeah, I got pretty crushed, uh, trying to train to turn pro at the same time as doing the PhD. And, uh, yeah, I don't know if I'd say I regretted [00:26:00] it, but I ended up getting like pretty, pretty sick on and off for a couple months.
It was definitely being reflected in my blood work. Looked on my blood work. Like I had HIV that hadn't quite progressed to aids, so I went and got checks for all that. But yeah, it was rough and it took its toll on my mental health as well. And actually that whole thing led into the next year and that's, what led to the IGA stuff.
But yeah I can't even remember what your original question was or what made me go off on the, uh, the Ironman tangent, but I know it was somehow connected.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh yeah, no, I was just wondering like, how do you use, oh yeah, cream. Have you found it's good for performance? Do you do more cognitive stuff?
Because I would imagine I've never done triathlons by any means, and I've worked with a couple very, eh, middle of the road triathletes, there's still a cognitive aspect to it that I think people would, on the outside looking in, would probably think that there, there isn't, [00:27:00] maybe not to the degree of.
American football or stuff like that, but I don't know what your thoughts are on that.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so I, I definitely think there is a component to it. When it comes to maintaining your cognition, I I personally did take the combination for a few of my key training workouts and for some of the races I, I did like it because I don't necessarily need a huge adult from caffeine.
I also, I don't know exactly what goes on with this mechanistically, but if I have a too large of dose of caffeine, uh, in conditions when I'm already a little bit stressed, I tend to bonk much sooner. And yeah, bonking is not normally something I ever have an issue with. So I really like to using the combination in that context.
And I think during a long endurance race, especially if you don't feel like constantly refeeding, uh, little doses, which isn't that hard to [00:28:00] do, but it's something to at least try out in training and if it works for you then it works. And I felt like it worked well for me.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Very cool. Do you think the reason caffeine would be predisposed, you debunk would be stress levels are too high?
Would, do you think you're burning through glucose at a faster rate than because of it, or if there's maybe just some nervous system effect? I don't know. I'm just curious.
Dr Blaine Lints: So, yeah, super, super speculative. And I don't really understand the bioenergetics of it that well, but I get the sense that it was causing me to burn more glucose.
And I know there's, it's a little bit debated, but the, increased reliance on fat and increased, uh, increased triglycerides in fatty acids, releasing the bud. I have my doubts about those studies. Yeah, they were early on
Dr Mike T Nelson: and yeah.
Dr Blaine Lints: So yeah that's how I feel as well. And, uh, yeah, I got the sense that [00:29:00] it just increased my reliance on carbohydrate.
And it also just increased my energy, uh, expenditure a bit. And and who knows, maybe it could have just been from the, velocity of changes or something like that. Something was happening a little bit more abruptly and, it might not have been an issue if I really stuck through it for a while, but it did seem to impair performance if I had too much caffeine.
So because of that, if I was doing caffeine in race, I might have a very low dose before the beginning of the race, but primarily wait until about three, four hours from the end of it in order, until I actually started, uh, ingesting regular doses of caffeine.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And we know from the literature, high doses of caffeine are also lytic.
They're gonna impair performance. But usually my understanding of that literature is it appears to be more strength and power sports, like very high doses. And it's probably a coordination effect to some degree. 'cause if you've ever taken [00:30:00] too much caffeine and had to do like a motor output, there's, I found there's definitely the sweet spot where at rest I don't feel good.
But doing the lift I feel better. And then if I go beyond that, I just don't feel good doing the lift at all. Like, I feel like I, like I. I can't get my body to do what it's supposed to do. It's a weird feeling, not in addition to just being jittery. It's just almost like a, an insecurity thing. It almost just feels like way too foreign and my performance just drops.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And who knows with endurance, like things like sodium bicarb or betaine. Yeah. And I'd say more so sodium bicarb. It's traditionally talked about having an genic effect on like shorter, higher intensity, uh, endurance disciplines. It's being used more and more often in very elite ultra endurance sport. So in Tour de France or in Ironman the top athletes. It's my understanding that they are [00:31:00] using sodium bicarb in their training and their racing. And yeah, if there potentially is some small improvement in an economy or some, something like that and it's just not detectable in research when you test for an hour, but over the course of eight hours or four to five hours on consecutive days for three weeks eventually, that sort of thing could definitely add up.
And who knows, maybe that's also part of the reason why if caffeine was impairing some of the movement efficiency or coordination or something like that, and then it was basically increasing stress and by the end of a several hour hard bout of exercise, you're really noticing the effects.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And as like no matter what compounds you're studying, caffeine, bicarbonate, betaine, whatever, there's a big difference at the elite level between. Something that was clinically significant. IE we have stats to show that this is their quotes, a real effect versus an effect that might be significant to an n of one elite level [00:32:00] athlete.
Yeah. Like the amount of, and you would need to power a study to find small differences that may be significant to an individual. Like most studies, at least in exercise phase and fortunately are probably not powered to, to do that. Yeah, I think that not by you, but I think in general that tends to be forgotten.
'cause you'll have these arguments online of people that are like, oh, look at the P value there. It's just too small or this isn't good. And I'm like, if we know the downside and the downside doesn't have a negative, like just do an N oh one experiment and if it works for you, for whatever reason, you're your better is better.
And then we can argue about how would we design a trial to look at that and then look at the mechanisms and. But a lot of times you're gonna have to have more than eight to 12 people to even try to get to a significance level to detect these small changes and who's gonna pay for it and run the study and, all this kind of stuff.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And I'm a huge believer in just using some of the research to help guide your starting point. Yeah. But at a high level I don't put a [00:33:00] whole lot of stock in that. I think, yeah. Everything has to be tried individually and seeing if it works for you and, uh, it doesn't really matter what the research averages, uh, tell you if it's not doing or it is doing something good for you.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I've often joked that the athlete is sitting in front of me, doesn't they want to know that I read the research and can guide them to a better pathway. But if they did something and they can show in a timed event that they got better. They don't give a rat's ass about the 17 studies that shows it's not supposed to work.
Yeah.
Dr Blaine Lints: And that's, yeah. That actually and I know there's, uh, potentially some ergo litic effect with, uh, with beet root juice or with, uh, with nitrates, uh, at a certain fitness level. But that's definitely been my impression. I take a shot of beet juice and I tend to feel like it does hurt my performance.
I don't know how. You know how I haven't tested it super rigorously, but pretty consistently that's been [00:34:00] the effect that I've noticed. And I have produced, uh, a vo two max of 76 before, which Oh, nice. In, in the research. That's great. It's like typically above 60, is that threshold for where, uh, beete root juice might be helpful for you?
But I still like taking beere juice for general health sometimes, but, uh, just don't feel like it's been helpful for me during competition.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Awesome. So how'd you get into studying ketones then? Were you looking for other potential compounds that may mitigate, uh, the effects of fatigue on cognition?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so the original interest in ketones was. Probably around ketogenic diets and then hearing that, ketone mono esters were being produced and that they were really elevating blood ketone concentrations without having to go on a ketogenic diet. And I think at the time there wasn't a whole lot known about them, but I was aware that the DOD was pouring a lot of funding into researching them and better [00:35:00] understanding them.
And I'd also heard that they'd been helpful for diving injuries. Or for preventing o oxygen toxicity when diving which is a big concern when diving on a rebreather. You're, if you're diving on pure oxygen you're only allowed to have so many excursions below 20 feet.
Which really isn't that deep. And even just, forgetting to pay attention to your depth for a minute could lead to you ending up at 30 feet and you just weren't aware. 'cause it's pitch black and Yeah, you really have no awareness of where you are. So if you could negate some of those effects with just a supplement, then sweet.
But then the next thing I had heard about ketone Monos was that. They were being administered for the treatment of brain injuries.
And so, so I was like, okay, well they're helpful for brain injuries. They're probably helpful prophylactically if, you know you're gonna get a brain injury. But there's this like maybe physical impairment that comes along with them that's been seen in some areas of sports science research and [00:36:00] all this kind of pointed to like, okay, why isn't the military using like, stuff like this more to help prevent all the blast injuries?
Or, help minimize some of the damage Because, 'cause we were getting exposed to tons and tons of over pressure exposures during even training. And they try to make it safe, but ultimately, like some of the stuff just comes with risks and you're gonna have to eat it.
And, I didn't know why that wasn't getting implemented more so, so all this had come together. And then not only that, but I'd heard, okay, cognitive benefits with the ketone mono esters. And of course some of that I think was around the initial hype and, making them into this panacea that, that they aren't really.
But it's been documented, uh, in research that the ketone mono esters can preserve cognition in certain conditions of hypoxia during prolonged endurance. So there's a pretty nice study of a. Using a hundred kilometer ultra [00:37:00] marathon and, uh, continually ingesting ketone mono esters throughout that.
And seeing that participants who did have those ketones were able to preserve their cognition at baseline levels throughout the entire thing. Whereas if they didn't have them they saw a drop off. So they weren't making anyone better than baseline, but they were able to preserve in certain conditions.
So, I was really interested in environmental stress because that was a big issue in the SEAL teams. Guys were. Having heat strokes and stuff we go do land warfare training, uh, in Eastern California where during the summer it gets over 120 degrees and you're carrying a lot of weight and you're working pretty hard in, in these conditions.
And I carried a machine gun. So I'd start out these long patrols to contacts with tons and tons of movements over several hours at a hundred pounds, uh, over, over my baseline weight. And that would, include 30 pounds of weapon, [00:38:00] 40 pounds of ammo, your body armor, your water, your helmet, your radios, your, your basic medical gear that you're gonna have with you and stuff like that.
So it ends up. Adding a lot of stress on you. So this heat issue was something that we were seeing a lot, and I got really interested in environmental stress. I knew there was a ton that could be done as far as the preparation when it came to exercise for preventing heat injuries, uh, and optimizing performance and heat.
And we just weren't getting told about any of that. Like not a single time. Did anyone talk about heat adaptation or AC affirmation or acclimatization? Yeah, no, no one said anything. You would think that'd
Dr Mike T Nelson: be the first thing because we've got, I know, tons of well-documented literature on that.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And everything just came down to like, like no preparation around that.
Like, just be hard, tough out which of course, like a lot of these guys were way tougher than me. So I, I did have to like really prepare myself physically in order to just hang with everyone else. [00:39:00] But yeah, I got interested in that and I knew that cognition would drop when you began to overheat and.
There, there are a bunch of reasons why that occurs, but some of it is probably related to a decrease in blood flow to the brain. And I'd seen other studies shown that ketones increase blood flow to the brain. So it just seemed like this natural area to test ketones in. And I'm, I was really blown away and I'm still blown away that no one has tested ketones with heat stress.
So I was fortunate enough to have that idea and be as far as I know the first person to conduct a study using ketone mono esters and heat stress especially in a tactical population. So that's how the idea came about.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And the other part, I think people forget too, when you have that much just sheer gear and mass on you, you severely restrict your body's ability to dissipate heat.
Like not only do you have a huge amount of workload, your [00:40:00] efficiency goes down, you have all this stuff you're trying to move around, but that stuff. Also is limiting how well you can basically, radiate heat and get and dump heat into the environment. Also on top of it being heavy as hell.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah.
And within a couple minutes of starting anything beyond a stand, so even walking with all that gear on long sleeves, long pants. Yep. You, your clothes are probably soaked and then get on the ground and, use the terrain and now you're covered in sand and so you are a big wet blanket covered in sand.
Yeah. And then the issue just compounds more and more. So yeah, it really blew my mind that there's such a lack of awareness of what could be done to help optimize performance in those conditions.
Dr Mike T Nelson: And what year was this just for reference?
Dr Blaine Lints: So I checked into Seal Team five in 2013, uh, April I graduated SEAL Training April 19th, I think, and then [00:41:00] I think following Monday, which is 22nd I checked into Team five and yeah, it was really over the next four years that, uh, I was doing this stuff, so I got out in August of 2017.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, okay. Got it. Cool. So hopefully it's better now, but yeah it's, and I've heard similar stories from other people from years ago of you studying exercise physiology. You just take for granted somethings appear simple, but then you realize like a lot of people have never studied any of this stuff, and it's just I think there's a lot of things that just continue because that's the way we always did it. Like, yeah, there's a lot of that kind of goes around too, I think.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And some parts of the community have a lot of innovation and
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yep.
Dr Blaine Lints: Things that are pushing progress but in some of the areas, especially when it comes to some of that stuff related to physical performance preparation, there, there isn't quite as much.
And I think, [00:42:00] uh, it's a pretty low hanging fruit to, to get at if you really want to improve the whole unit's performance and operational capabilities.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. A similar idea, I did a talk years ago for DARPA on metabolic flexibility, and my argument to them was, yes, you have to have a huge infrastructure if you're moving a large group of people, but.
How about you train people for ability to use fats, ability to use carbs, ability to fast, ability to take in other amounts of food, make sure they can still operate their job with precision, but you're training them on extreme ends and that could include, climate, thermal environments, whatever, before they actually do that formal training instead of trying to control the external environments as best you can, because you're gonna be way limited on that.
And if you're trying to insert a small group of people, you can't have a big infrastructure period. Like that's just not an [00:43:00] option. So how about we map out what are these things with metabolic flexibility and other areas we can train them in so that you can train them up, they could go into it knowing they can still perform their tasks because they've done it in training of, oh, well I haven't really eaten anything for 24 hours, but I've done in training up to 36 hours, so I know I can still execute these things.
So I'm not as worried about things that normally they'd be worried about. So,
Dr Blaine Lints: yeah, I completely agree.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So why did you started looking at ketones and what did you find in the study?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so the findings were in a lot of ways more interesting than we initially expected. So the layout of the study was, uh, it was about a three, three and a half hour visit.
Participants would come in, they'd be given a standardized breakfast, so bagel cream, cheese, banana pretty high carb, and I think it was like 400 calories total. So light, we also gave them four milligrams per kilogram of [00:44:00] caffeine with that. And that was for a bunch of reasons.
We'd done past work with caffeine, but also we thought it would be. Less ecologically valid to have them not be taking caffeine to participate because the military population is one that is generally very habituated to caffeine and is going to take it before doing work like that. So we thought it made more sense to include it than not.
And we were also trying to do the study as efficiently and as low cost as possible. So we had two, two arms in it as a crossover, and one of the conditions received ketone mono. The other one received, uh, isoc caloric carbohydrate and 45 minutes after eating and the caffeine uh, which gave them time to absorb all that.
We did the first series of cognitive tests and then we had them start 45 minutes [00:45:00] of exercise on treadmill. And this exercise consisted of a 5% grade. It was in a heat chamber set to about 95 degrees and 45% relative humidity. And they were also wearing a weight vest that was, uh, 20% of their body mass.
The average speed was about four and a half miles per hour for this. So it was a extremely brisk walk up and incline with weight in a heat chamber on. And some of the participants were even working at five miles per hour. So yeah, it's hauling ass. Uh, yeah, like borderline having to jog because it's such a fast walking speed.
Yeah. So they did 45 minutes of that did a midpoint cognitive test, another 45 minutes of exercise, a post cognitive assessment. After that, we had them take off their weight vest and then they did a time to exhaustion test at 90% of their velocity at [00:46:00] via two max. So the average time for that was eight minutes.
And. Most, most interestingly, and surprisingly, we actually saw that time to exhaustion performance was about 27% longer in the group or condition receiving the ketones. So nine minutes versus 7.1 minutes, and 71% of the participants had longer time to exhaustions when they received the ketones.
So that was very surprising, counterintuitive and went against the grain of what research has typically shown. And it was definitely opposite of what we hypothesized would happen. But less surprisingly, we saw that cognitive performance on the one back and two back was improved in the ketone condition, uh, compared to the carbohydrates.
And it's, it's important to note that the carbohydrate condition isn't like a, it's not nothing. It's something helpful. It's something that would be advantageous to have. And the fact that they were also taking caffeine [00:47:00] in both conditions, which I think was smaller or decrease the margins between the two conditions.
And we still saw improvements with the one back and two back I thought was pretty, pretty strong. And yeah, we saw slightly bigger effects when it came to the two back, and I think that's just because the two back is a more cognitively demanding task than the one back. But they both. They are tests, both tests of working memory and sustained attention.
Another one that one of my, uh, committee members and secondary advisors, Davis Moore brought up was that the brain region that's most heavily used during the one back and two back is actually one of the brain regions that's susceptible to having a loss in blood flow during hyperthermia. So I don't know a ton about that, but that's what he mentioned. And it definitely helps explain our results. We did not see any differences on some of the simpler cognitive tasks like the dyna vision reaction time. Same with that object hit and avoid task. [00:48:00] But it's important to note that actually with the object hit and avoid on average, we saw improved performance throughout the visit.
So it. Either the test wasn't hard enough or the exercise protocol wasn't hard enough to sufficiently cause a drop, because you can imagine that if you made that exercise protocol 20 hours long and yeah. And made everyone bonk, like at some point there's gonna be a drop in performance on every measure of cognition.
But we just didn't see that. And so I think that was an issue with the cognitive test, but at least with the one back and two back, we were able to see differences. And with the ketone conditions we actually saw very slight improvements, whereas we saw pretty marked decreases in performance when receiving carbohydrates.
So overall very interesting and I think the fact that. We saw improved performance on our high intensity performance test at the end with the time to exhaustion really addresses that, that issue that I would have if I were leadership involved with, [00:49:00] uh, deciding what kind of supplements that guys might be taking in an operational setting, right?
Because if you have to decide between physical performance and cognitive performance, you really have to be nuanced with knowing all the information that you're that, that's going into this to make a really good decision about if it's worth it to take these. But the fact that we still saw a benefit in that sense really makes it clear to me that, it's just one study but.
If it's doing that, and it does seem to be helping with heat stress mechanistically and practically, and there's the chance for it to decrease the, uh, damage caused by a brain injury, like seems like a no brainer to me. Obviously there's the very high cost of the ketone mono esters. There's still 30, 40 bucks per serving and potentially double that in order to have a dose that's really going to be effective for brain injury.
But I think that, uh, science as, as far as my understanding goes, is a little bit [00:50:00] up in the air about what's actually going to be really effective for mitigating those effects. But I still believe it's gonna be better than not having them at all. So, and the dosage you used, was it 25 grams?
Yeah, so we did two administrations of 25 grams. And the average blood ketone concentrations we saw were at a, at the 45 minute mark, we saw an average of 2.2 millimole, and then at the 90 minute mark after that, that second 45 minute about exercise, we saw a 3.8 millimole.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Okay. So pretty significant blood ketone measurements, which is useful.
We don't know where the ketones are going or the rate of appearance or disappearance, but it's a good marker to say that at least they are showing up. They have definitely are, in the blood and moving around.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And yeah, there is a little bit of debate among the ketone community about what kind of dosage is necessary to see a benefit and what might start to impair performance and, [00:51:00] uh, and all of that.
But we knew that if we actually wanted to answer the question of do these have an effect on cognition? We wanted them to be very clearly into ketosis, so we wanted them to be at least over two and preferably around three millimole.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Did anyone complain about the taste? I'm just curious.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, everyone complained about the taste.
But the thing that we did do very well and we took this, uh, we took this from a different study. I can't remember, I think it was one of, uh, chi PFE studies, but we used sucrose, Okta acetate, which is a, uh, a bitter, bitters that are al alcohol, not, I'm not a big drinker, so I don't know like the correct terminology.
But basically it's this powder that we bought that tastes like. And you add it to the placebo product, and it's not identical, but it's potentially worse tasting. And so we had actually more people, slightly more people guessing that they [00:52:00] had received the ketones when they were actually receiving the carbohydrates.
We asked them at the end of their second visit, uh, which they thought they received. So we did a better than 50 50 chance of blinding is I think 47%. Got it right. So yeah, they both tasted gross, but I, and I didn't confirm this, but my impression was that more people actually thought that it tasted worse, uh, when they received the, uh, the placebo product.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, interesting. That's one way to do it make, instead of trying to make your ketones taste better, you could just make your placebo taste worse.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And it was pretty bad. I tried both of them and it was slightly different, but it lingered the placebo just lingered around in a different way, which is hard to imagine because the, the raw ester already taste pretty horrendous on their own, so
Dr Mike T Nelson: yeah, they're pretty bad.
And the full disclosure, I do work, do some work for the ketone company Tecton. And so they have a similar product. It is a ketone nester, and it's BHB [00:53:00] bonded to glycerol and it actually tastes pretty good. So I'm probably biased towards that, but I think that, yeah, the ketone escrow research is super interesting and it seems like, I think more the extremes you go to, it seems like ketones are more beneficial, and that could be extremes of all the way into.
Pathologies are like you're looking at with heat, stress and physical movement and then looking at even more demanding cognitive tests. It just seems like the more extreme ends, ketones tend to perform better. If I were to make an overall, probably overly simplistic generalization,
Dr Blaine Lints: yeah.
As well as sleep and recovery. Yep. And, uh, yeah. And if I had unlimited amounts of money to spend on, I would imagine that I'd be having them before bed every night. But yeah, I don't have that kind of money, so. Yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: And one interesting I've noticed, 'cause I've, uh, I have the luxury of playing with them a lot is I [00:54:00] think there's some other direct CNS uh, benefit at higher doses.
Like I've noticed 20 to 30 grams on days. I'm doing grip stuff that I don't think is gonna be a good day, like more often than not. I've had a 20 or 30 gram dose, and it turns out that session within, 20 to 30 minutes is pretty damn good. And I've hit, sometimes an all time PR or at least 90, 95% of that on a session that I thought was just a complete throwaway session.
I was already warmed up. Whatever. The interesting part is, I don't notice that effect on days that I'm well rested and everything else is good and my stress levels are lower.
nobody: It's,
Dr Mike T Nelson: and that's happened and a bunch of times, again, N oh one completely anecdotal, all that kind of stuff. But, and in anecdotally we've seen reports that if you're more sleep deprived, you have more, maybe glucose brain issues, people feel like the [00:55:00] ketones are more beneficial.
And I've even noticed that. Yeah. So like, I'll use 'em sometimes later in the day, on a day that's just, oh man, my fatigue levels are pretty high. But if I'm well rested, everything else is good. I still notice some benefit, but it doesn't seem to be as much. It just feels like they get me back to baseline on those days.
I'm just, for lack of a better word, more depleted or higher levels of fatigue. My HRV score is dog crap, like they just seem to work better under those conditions.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. And it's interesting you mentioned the, uh, the CNS effects because it's something I've noticed too, but there was a paper that was recently published and I don't remember the authors and I only skimmed the paper.
So hopefully I'm not misrepresenting, uh, their findings. But my understanding is that they actually showed that in a arresting context that ketone mono esters did. Yeah, I think it was ketone mono esters orally ingested, didn't increase brain blood flow which would. Yeah, [00:56:00] go against our mechanistic explanation for why they might have helped with cognition during our heat stress study.
But, uh, another possibility that there is something related to sensible drive and something in that area that could have been, uh, helping the exercise and leading to improved time tube exhaustion performance, and also benefiting the cognitive aspects of it. If the heat the brain blood flow thing wasn't necessarily the case, but it could also have been the conditions that they were measuring it and weren't conditions where you would've needed to see an increase in brain blood flow because there, if it's just a resting condition, then maybe nothing's gonna change or it's even gonna have a decrease because of the, uh, improved efficiency that you get out of a ketone molecule versus like a carbohydrate.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And my biased opinion is I think glucose metabolism in people is more variable than what we realize. And we know this from TBI concussion, things like that. It just puts a monkey wrench into glucose metabolism. There's early studies showing ketones will still cross the blood-brain barrier can serve as a [00:57:00] fuel lactate can do the same thing.
So my little hypothesis is that I think brain glucose levels or metabolism is more variable and I think takes a hit when stress is higher. But I can't really point to any direct data on that. 'cause we, we can't do like an insulin clamp across your brain like we can across a muscle. So we're real limited on like how we can look at it and we can try to get some interference from, MRS studies and different things like this.
But if I were to pause it, a theory, that would be my pet theory,
nobody: yeah.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Cool. And then, uh, briefly as we wrap up here, I wanted to talk a little bit about what are some things, uh, after people are maybe done with, uh, deployment or servicing or people in other high stress, uh, professions. I know you were part of the IBOGA study down there in Texas, correct?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. So in, in January I was a participant in UT Austin's clinical trial on Ibogaine [00:58:00] four special operators with TBI. And the study was I believe as similarly designed as possible to Stanford's Iboga study that was published in nature in 2024. Which was remarkable. I don't know if you've seen the study, but the, was it Nolan
Dr Mike T Nelson: Williams?
Is that right? Yeah. Tell us about it though.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so, so that study used 30 special operations vets all had TBI, I think they were out of service for an average of 7.7 years. And I think 50%, uh, might have been like, is ma massive numbers either had prior suicide attempts or had suicidal ideation.
I think it was like 80%. Almost everyone had depression, anxiety and pretty high levels of disability and according to the World Health Disability Survey or scale so what they found was that with a single treatment of Ibogaine, I believe it was, uh, [00:59:00] 10 to 12 milligrams per kilogram body mass of Ibogaine.
So probably around a gram of it. They saw pretty remarkable reductions in everything, uh, even several days after the treatment. But definitely at one month post-treatment, I think 80 to 90% of the participants had complete loss of all disability, uh, anxiety, depression no more suicidal ideation. The cos Ds as far as those, uh, variables that I just mentioned were all between two and three.
And every aspect of cognition that was tested in that study also improved with moderate to large effect sizes. So it was, yeah pretty insane finding from a single treatment, especially when we don't have any any real treatments for slowing or dealing with brain injuries. And what, what.
The [01:00:00] VA typically does is symptom management, which comes in the form of SSRIs, sleep meds go and no go pills pills for migraines and, uh, a bunch of things. I don't know all the drugs, but I'd been taking a bunch of medications before just because some of the issues I had and my, none of my combat experience was super, super heavy.
I did have some in Iraq in 2016 to 2017. But what did happen was once I was transitioning out of the Navy, I started to have really bad insomnia issues that would persist for several months at a cycle. And it would get really bad and it'd keep coming back and it would come along with a bunch of other stuff like, like being depressed.
And it slowly started getting worse and worse. And then I started doing triathlon and adding that stress on top of it with school. 2023. 2024 started to get rough for me. So when, uh, I got an [01:01:00] email from Navy Seal Foundation saying that UT Austin's doing a study on ibogaine, I was like, oh, yes, sign me up.
Because the last time I'd heard about Ibogaine, uh, I was actually offered it for free, but I thought, oh, I don't think I wanna like miss a week of my training and stuff. Like, this was in 20, 20 19, I think. I was like, yeah, I don't wanna go miss this to go do this crazy psychedelic in Mexico.
But then when it came at this time, I was like, okay I'm definitely doing it. So I went to Mexico in January of this year and, uh, yeah, I had some really. Really amazing benefits from it. And it's made me such a believer in the, potential. If I began, I'd already been a believer in a lot of these psychedelic medicines for a variety of issues, especially ones that are gonna be considered a little bit treatment resistance, uh, by conventional standards.
And yeah it took having my own like personal really [01:02:00] profound experience with it to really make me a believer in it. And then, you look at the results, the Stanford study, and I imagine this UT Austin study's gonna show something similar. But the benefits that it's having just from the single treatment are beyond anything else that, that we have available.
So I think, uh, it's important that guys know about it and that they can take advantage of it.
Dr Mike T Nelson: And the good part is Texas just passed, I wanna say was it $50 million? Yeah. For research, for psychedelics in general, which I think is amazing. I think it was the highest amount pledged to any psychedelic research at one time.
So yeah, largest public.
Dr Blaine Lints: I, and I don't know that there's never been a larger private donation or something like that. Right. But public donations, I should say.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr Blaine Lints: It's super exciting.
Dr Mike T Nelson: What did you, were you apprehensive going into the treatment? So for people listening, iboga is, or Iboga is where it's from?
Ibogaine is a drug. It's not a short, 15 [01:03:00] minute thing. It's a multiple hours from what I've heard, I've, I haven't done it myself. I was at a center in Costa Rica where they do, uh, five M-E-O-D-M-T, ayahuasca and also Iboga. So along with Combo and a couple other things. And we would be there with people who were getting ready to do I bga because that was like the shaman who was working there was definitely a very much a one-on-one thing where Ayahuasca was typically more in a bigger group setting.
I did have some crazy eye drops once that caused me to sit in a corner and rock myself back and forth for about an hour, not knowing what the hell was going on with me. And I asked the shaman afterwards, I'm like, I said, what the, I said, what the hell was that? That was like the weirdest feeling of I could feel like traumatic things coming up, but there was nothing specific.
Like, I couldn't put a name or anything on it. And like, the only thing I could think about was like grabbing my knees [01:04:00] and like rocking back and forth was the only thing that made me feel better temporarily. And she was like. Oh yeah, I got some of these new eyedrops from these Brazilians. She's like, ah, they don't fuck around with stuff.
I think they put a bunch of iboga in 'em this time. I was like, oh shit. But that's my only very limited experience with that. But were you apprehensive about it and how did the experience go?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so, so actually you mentioned five DMT, which we should talk about today or sometime, but yeah.
Because that's in insane on a different level, it being strapped to a rocket
Dr Mike T Nelson: ship.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, it's, uh, yeah that's the only experience I've ever had in life that I, that was so powerful and incomprehensible that I can't make sense of it still. And it, yeah, it's on my mind quite a bit because of how incomprehensible that experience was.
But yeah, iboga is a, actually the opposite of five M-E-O-D-M-T in many ways where [01:05:00] it's the active component of it is usually about four to 12 hours. And the Iboga trip is, uh, is actually a little bit faster acting than what the experience would be like if you took the whole plant of a boa with Oh, so they're using the isolated form?
Yep. Yep. So they extract, which. I think is a little bit easier to research. Yeah, obviously you can standardize the doses of that, right? It's not variable from plant to plant. It's faster acting and is as far as, uh, my understanding goes, it is what has the primary active effect on halting opioid withdrawals.
But yeah the experience for most people is probably gonna be 10 to 12 hours. And that's just the peak of it. And it's not a classical psychedelic, so it's more commonly referred to as in an rogen, which just means it's a waking dream promoting compound. And it has a lot more lucidity than what you'd experienced [01:06:00] with other psychedelics.
So, during the experience, I'd say the most stereotyped trip that people have is generally a life review of emotionally salient memories. And this could begin as early as childhood. Sometimes people even have visions or experience themselves in the womb. So before memory has even began to develop and throughout their life, they see these different memories from a very logical point of view, and seeing how they affected them, uh, and steered the course of their development over time.
And some of these events might be traumatic and sometimes they can be like very difficult to go through the, which is why it's you gotta be. Potentially prepared to have a rough 12 hours if you take this. Yeah. 'cause you might be experiencing some things that you've been trying to shy away from or you've been suppressing for a long time.
Luckily, my, or who knows if it's lucky or not. All these things can it, good or bad is always context dependent. But [01:07:00] I had a very gentle experience with it. It was very comforting. It was very enjoyable to me. I felt pretty euphoric. I felt like I was floating around. I didn't see a whole lot of visuals.
But one of the most interesting things to me that stands out about Iboga, that kind of puts it in a league of its own is and sometimes people ex experience this with other psychedelics, but for me. I'd never experienced this before, where you can really communicate with your subconscious or an aspect of yourself that you're not able to communicate with, uh, in a normal context.
And some people feel that they're, they're talking to God if they're religious and that's the perspective they take on it. But for me, I felt like I was able to communicate with my subconscious and it's so direct and obvious that it was almost as if I could think a question in my head and I would be shown an answer, whether it's through [01:08:00] like seeing an image with closed eyes or seeing or just hearing something or it's being told back to me.
But it was just this conversation with myself and, it was very interesting, very direct and very easy to make sense of. So there wasn't any like having to interpret or try to figure out how does this fit into the rest of my life and what I'm here to do. So that's the main experience.
And then I had about another 24 hours of pretty intense nausea after that. So whenever I'd get up, uh, I would start throwing up. So I just tried to stay put as much as possible, and I was eventually given some, uh, some IV zofran after a while so I could, yeah, so I could sleep. So that, that part's uncomfortable.
But what was really big with Ibogaine was that and mechanistically this could be because it, it causes a huge release in G DNF and BDNF over several weeks after you take it. Because Ibogaine is stored as not nor iboga in the brain and fat [01:09:00] cells for so long after it's in ingestion.
But for several weeks after. I was able to have a very different perspective on all of my behaviors and patterns and even, I'm having a conversation with someone and I noticed that, oh I'm defensive and I'm, I am feeling defensive in response to what was just asked, or something like that.
And I could. Notice that and then decide to stop doing it. And it was as really as easy as that. Sometimes if, uh, if you or anyone you know has had issues with depression, you might think, oh, why don't you just be happy? Right. Stop ruminating about the depressing things and, uh.
It's obviously not that easy but after I began for me, it was that easy and a lot of those habits stuck with me. So that was actually the big part of it. And it, yeah, it's important to, for people to keep in mind that, just 'cause the IGA experience [01:10:00] wasn't your whole life review that you were hoping it would be.
Doesn't necessarily mean you can't get the benefits. There are tons of benefits that come after and and since January I've had one headache or migraine. I haven't been on any of my medications since then.
And overall doing a lot better. So I'm a big believer in, in IGA now, and I'm really excited about what's coming with, uh, the US research that's gonna be start getting done in Texas and stuff.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. It's fascinating and I think there is some, is there still some cardiotoxicity risk and other. Monitoring of, vitals during it, because I believe there is some risk factors there, or is that kind of overblown? Or is it one of those things where it's pretty variable from one to the next?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah.
So from a lot of the research that had been done on Ibogaine, uh, which had focused around opioid addicts there was reported to be a one in 300 death risk from QT prolongation.
nobody: That
Dr Blaine Lints: [01:11:00] would lead to PS DuPont. And what had been done in the past and what was done for my participation in this study was that they gave us IV magnesium sulfate because magnesium, those firsts.
Yeah. And that is the first line treatment for Torsades. That's what they do prophylactically for us. I get the sense, and I went pretty hardcore reading the literature on this, reading about people's experiences, reading the things related to the bleedy tradition in Africa.
Because I just, I'm really excited about this and I get the impression that it probably is a little bit of an overblown risk in a healthy individual. But that's dependent on, doing the right pre-screening, making sure, you're basically homeostatic mechanisms for blood are all working properly.
Making sure your heart's not susceptible to QT prolongation at [01:12:00] baseline. And also all of those risks increase if you're trying to detox off a drug addiction. So I believe all of the deaths that had been reported in, like in scientific literature were during a detox setting. So as far as I know, there have been no deaths of any military or special operators or anything like that who are getting properly pre-screened and then going down to Mexico to do the treatment.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Do you mind saying where in Mexico was that?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so there, there are a couple different reputable clinics in Mexico. Th there's an organization called Vets Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, and they fund guys to go to ambi o. I didn't go to Ambi OI went to the mission within. Okay. Which is, it's a little bit smaller.
But still a great experience. It's it's pretty close to the San Diego border, so I don't know exactly [01:13:00] where it was on, but it was on the west coast and it was overlooking the ocean in a gated private community. Very pretty but still, having to go to Mexico. And then there's also beyond Iboga, which is in Cancun and that, that facility has a lot of options to pay more money to have a more luxurious and personalized treatment there.
They do a lot of work with detoxes as well, but I actually recently had a conversation with the founder of, uh, a US based organization called The Illuminating Collective. And he and their facility are working under religious exemptions in Texas.
And they're going and they're about to do their first ibogaine treatment in the US fully, legally.
Uh, and that's gonna be in October, so Oh, wow. Really excited. Yeah, super excited about that. And they offer all of the, the earth medicines or all of the more popular ones. So Ibogaine, ayahuasca, psilocybin, Mescalin and I believe there are some others that they offer as well. [01:14:00]
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. The reason I mentioned that is because it feels like ibogaine is the more popular psychedelic now, and my little air quotes, and we've seen this with Ayahuasca and other ones too.
The amount of crazy questions I get from people I don't know who are, like one of 'em a couple months ago was. Yeah, I live in New York City and a friend of mine said he can get some ayahuasca. So we're thinking of doing it in our apartment this weekend. Like, what are you insane? Like, that sounds like the absolute worst idea I've ever heard in my entire life.
Or you hear of, well, I heard this clinic's really good and it's some weird clinic you've never heard of in a foreign country of, I don't know. I just get very nervous because there are obviously very legit places that are doing it by the book, that have medical staff that I know of, multiple people that have gone to those facilities.
Every single one of 'em said it was amazing. It was a great experience. They felt very safe. But unfortunately, [01:15:00] when anything becomes more popular, you're gonna have, we'll say very less reputable places and people who are just trying to, cash in on whatever the trendy thing is. And if anyone's had any of these experiences at higher doses, like even when I did Ayahuasca a couple times, especially the first time.
The one thing I was so glad, even though it was difficult, was I felt like I'm in a safe place. I know these people are watching out for me. I didn't ever once worry about my safety in any capacity. And I also had the thought of thinking, wow, like four or five glasses in, like I would be a wreck if I was worried about the place I was in or wondering about what was going on.
So not only from a physical safety, but a even more, just a spiritual safety of like not having to worry about that during the experience. So anyway, that's my little 2 cents and obviously a standard disclaimer. Most of these drugs right now currently are schedule one. [01:16:00] Drugs, which are highly illegal in the US to begin with.
So,
Dr Blaine Lints: yeah. And yeah, the less last thing you want to be worried about when you're, the IV games coming on and you're starting to potentially feel overwhelmed is, oh, am I gonna have, uh, some sort of cardiac event? Right? And they're not gonna be equipped to deal with it. And not only that, some of these experiences, I would say five, five M-E-O-T-M-T-I think should be approached with the most caution, even though it's only a five, five to 20 minute, uh, journey with that.
Is that Yeah under the wrong circumstances done in a not very smart thought out way. Some, or even sometimes in, in the perfect setting. This stuff can create some pretty long-term harm. So it's important to, to go in with very specific intentions and it's definitely recommended that you do it with professional oversight.
So you feel. Uh, safe doing it. And so you get the most out of the experience. 'cause I just like [01:17:00] with anything, a lot of these things have the potential to be, at worse they could be harmful, but they could be just an experience. Which is fine and it can it, it can even be fun.
But yeah, if you're wanting to get the most out of it for your own, uh, personal development then it's important to go into it with a lot of intention and have the right support network for after and integrating the experience into your life to, to get the most out of it.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and I think the other part, I've cautioned a lot of people that I don't think you'll ever know what you're gonna find.
And the one thing I was most worried about was, okay, do I have enough? I wanted to make sure I had enough space afterwards that if I did find something crazy that I didn't know anything about, do. Do I have enough time? Do I have enough space to actually work through that? And I think that's something people don't think about because you may find that a, it was a great experience.
Mine were [01:18:00] great, was definitely, very useful. The integration wasn't, in my case, very difficult per se. It was a lot of questions for many years, but it wasn't like completely different. I didn't have any amazingly traumatic things that came up. But going into it, I was like, huh, if I do, I wanna make sure I have enough space to, to deal with those because I may realize something now that I need to solve on the back end of it.
And I think sometimes people forget that there's a reason. Sometimes you don't have memories of certain things and being made aware of that is not always the easiest path to walk. It might be a better one in the end. But that's my other little, my little cautionary tale,
Dr Blaine Lints: yeah. Oh yeah. And with a lot of these, it can definitely be, uh, it can feel like you're taking a couple steps back before you get to go forward after the experience.
And that definitely applies in the case of starting to become aware of something like a repressed memory.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And my last question is so obviously I'm biased. [01:19:00] I work for the Care Institute. They do some stuff with functional neurology, clinical neurology looking at TBI, concussion, uh, trying to map out eye positions and figure out what part of the brain is having an issue.
And then if we know what other tasks the, that part of the brain does, they can train up that area of the brain to get it to, to transfer. 'cause as even if you put someone in an MRI, you may not be able to tell what part of the brain has been injured with A TBI or concussion. It's very hard to tell with just imaging.
So. My thought for years was, we know like, uh, compounds like DMT Ibogaine dramatically increase, like you mentioned, these neuro growth factors. We know that there's this almost this opening of a critical window. There's this high amount of neuroplasticity for weeks to maybe months after. It's variable.
The thought I've had for quite a while, which I know seems even more wacky, but I think might be more accepted now, is for very difficult cases. What are your thoughts about [01:20:00] if you did like a high dose psychedelic in a clinical, uh, supervised medical setting and then after did some more like functional neurology work or measurements or baselines before and after to see like from a function perspective?
'cause you're very similar with exercise fizz. I always think of like, what is the output of the body. Obviously there's qualitative and quantitative. Uh, one, do you think there would be some changes in these measurement like secod measurements, things like that? And then two, do you think treatment, if it was still needed after it, because you have this opening of a critical period and this opening of neuroplasticity, you could take advantage of that by trying to get faster changes in the brain.
Dr Blaine Lints: I, I have been also thinking, uh, very similarly to you on that.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Things so far, anyone said I'm outta my tree so far, but people are starting to come around to the idea now though.
Dr Blaine Lints: I question how you could [01:21:00] even think that wouldn't be right. A good idea. It seems very obvious to me, and I'll say when I went to my post-testing at UT Austin after the IBOGAINE treatment, so this was, uh, six days after I took Ibogaine, and three days after I got back from the retreat I had to go to Texas again and go do these two days of cognitive tests.
And it was very intensive. So about 10 hours total of cognitive testing. Oh, wow. Several hours, uh, doing f MRIs or exams in an fm RI doing many hours of clinician administered assessments, doing subjective assessments doing self-administered assessments with EEG. So it was very in depth.
And Yeah, I can tell you after I was done with that I was still like a little bit fatigued and beat up from the weekend. Yeah. So I don't think I was reaching a peak yet but I felt like Neo from the Matrix, when he realizes [01:22:00] he's the one I felt on it and I knew with some of the types of cognitive tests that I was doing, I was way faster after.
And it, it came in the, it came most obviously in the form of solving. Problems, which, uh, that sounds dumb now that I, I say it. Yeah. Yeah. But when, normally, when you're trying to solve a complex problem, you might run into a block and you might think you have an intuition about how to solve it.
And if you run into a block, you might get fixated on the fact that you don't know what to do because you ran into the block and you might wanna force it to work. But it was instant, like flexibility with it, being able to transition to a new approach to solving it. And it led to much faster completion times on some of these tests.
And yeah, it was my un unfortunately, I had to go into a very busy next couple months of school finishing my dissertation work. But it ended up working out all right, because I felt very sharp for it. I was very motivated, I was very, uh, resilient [01:23:00] to, to stress that, a couple months before might have gotten to me a little bit more.
And yeah, my, my thought was let's use this time of adaptability as effectively as possible and try promote as much growth as we can during this time. So yeah I was thinking the same thing and I, yeah, I'm actually going to do another, uh, it's gonna be a boa this time and in a slightly more ceremonial context, uh, in about four weeks.
Oh, cool. Yeah. And. Yeah this time it's all out of pocket. Like I'm paying for it with my own money. 'cause that's how much I believe in it. And now that I really have a sense of like, what you can get out of the Bo and Iboga I know this time I can go a lot farther with it.
So yeah I think there's massive potential to do that. And even if it was something like learning a new language that's someone asked something, someone asked me about, I was like, what if I took Iboga? And then right after I wanted to learn a new language and I was like, yeah, I bet you would learn the [01:24:00] language faster.
I bet anything you wanted to do, you could probably do it more efficiently than you were able to before that. I'm assuming you, you're not dealing with some sort of, uh, negative, uh, or difficult experience that you had to deal with during your trip.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, especially for sports performance, skill learning, I had James Fatman on the podcast, uh, so we talked about microdosing.
Which was great. And I shared the experience of even just on a smaller level using potentially, uh, microdosing to learn, uh, back roll kiteboarding. And the thing that I noticed that helped me the most is it slowed it down enough. I could feel like I knew more what I was doing. So the first time, like, so for a back roll is you're just kite boarding.
And then you go up and you basically do a 360 in the air and you land and you ride out of it. And so the first few times I would do it, I would go up and it was just like everything turned into a blur. I had [01:25:00] no idea where I was. I didn't know where the kite was. I just completely just lost. And so the two things that helped me the most was okay, figuring out, okay, how do I break down the movement to do a part of it?
And then it felt like with the microdosing, I could see the parts much better. It felt like I actually slowed the time down enough that I didn't. I would say execute it right away, but I felt like I knew where my mistake was each time, where before it felt like it was more of just a complete mess of, I don't even know what the hell happened, other than I just ate shit once again for the hundredth time.
Yeah. So I think there's the acute effects of it, and I do think that there's an increase in plasticity that, again, if you're using in the correct way, like you're doing better training or cognitive stuff or whatever, my guess is that you would see an increase in performance. Now, of course, people can use neuroplasticity in the wrong way and actually get better at getting worse too if you're doing the wrong stuff.
Right. So I don't think it's [01:26:00] a panacea and that's what, talking about integration and stuff like that, if you're integrating the wrong things now you just hyper plasticized your way and do something worse than what you did before. So you got Yeah, exactly. Worse, faster, which isn't a good thing.
But I do think that in the future, like that whole area of. What we can do with those increases in neuroplasticity, even independently of the compounds post, I think is a unexplored area so far.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, I agree.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Cool. Well, thank you so much for your time. And can you say what country you're going in to do the more ceremonial thing?
Or you can keep it a secret if you want.
Dr Blaine Lints: No, I'm, uh, I've always been pretty open about talking about this stuff, partially for trying to de-stigmatize, uh, some of this. And I like to think that if people like know who I am and know that I've at least got my stuff together, that it's maybe not.
Something stupid especially in the south here where uh, it's [01:27:00] weird if you have done any sort of, uh, recreational or psychedelic drug, whereas like where I'm used to living on the West coast is more the opposite, whereas Yeah, you were the weird if you didn't do that.
Yeah. And, uh, yeah, so it's been a different environment, but I've tried to be pretty open about my interest in all of that. But I am, uh, this one's gonna be in Mexico again, but it's gonna be in Tepo Lawn. I don't know exactly how to say it, but Sure. Uh, it's closer to Mexico City and this one, yeah, it's gonna be a little bit ceremonial.
It's run by. Canadians that have a close relationship with some, some Albanese elders in Gabon. Oh, very cool. Yeah, so they've been initiated multiple times and then they're, they go there every year to go meet with the elders there. And yeah who knows, I might be interested in eventually, uh, going to Gabon and having the full deal, because I've heard it's, uh, it's a little bit wild on another level, but [01:28:00] it looks insane because it's five to seven days, isn't it?
Yeah. And there, there are some cool reports that have been published in, they're like a, I don't know exactly what they're called. It's not quite a review, but it's in scientific literature, but there are some really. Old reports of Westerners going to participate in these initiations.
Yeah. In the bone. And the way they describe them is that you are, you're ingesting so much iboga until you basically go into, they say it's a coma, but Yeah. I, I don't know what's physiologically happening, but it sounds pretty hardcore. And, uh, sometimes people are in, in that state pretty unresponsive for like 24 hours.
So yeah. And I think some of the ceremonies,
Dr Mike T Nelson: don't they pretend even like bury people, like partially and stuff like that. I, yeah, that's what I've heard that I have number on it, but yeah.
Dr Blaine Lints: [01:29:00] I think that's part of, yeah, there's different sects of bleedy, which is the tradition that, that uses, uh, iboga as like the center of their tradition.
It's not quite a religion, but yeah, there is a burial that takes place for at least some of the sex when you go into that sort of comatose state. And that's where you're left to go. I believe your spirit is going to leave to the other world and you're gonna experience the great vision while you're there.
And then you're gonna return to your body and they're gonna place certain instruments in order to guide you out and guide you back in. And once you're back then you tell the elders very privately what you experienced during that. And it's all kind of part of it. But from what I've heard, there are.
There are some people be because of BOA and some of its alkaloids are so, have such long half-lifes. I've heard some people doing uh, a ceremony and not being able to sleep for like five days after o so [01:30:00] it, it's all part of the experience. Uh, I hope that is not me, but I know I'm someone who is, seems to be my sleep is very easily affected by anything stimulating.
So we'll see. I don't expect this to be quite as hardcore as what gets, uh, what I've heard about the initiation zing ga bone
Dr Mike T Nelson: and this is just iboga, did they do anything else before and after or it's just iboga in and of itself?
Dr Blaine Lints: Correct. It's just a bogo, which, uh, I think adding anything into the mix from a traditional perspective would be, uh, I don't know anyone that does, that's
Dr Mike T Nelson: why I was curious.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. But for Ibogaine, uh, typically at the retreats Friday night you might do iga and then Sunday they'll have you smoke five M-E-O-D-M-T. That's what
Dr Mike T Nelson: I've heard. Yeah.
Dr Blaine Lints: But yeah not for this. I think if I asked about that, they would probably will look at me with a disgusted book or something.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Cool. Well that's awesome. Well, thank you so [01:31:00] much for sharing everything. I really appreciate it. And where can people find out more about you?
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah, so, so now that I'm looking for jobs, I just made a LinkedIn like last week. That's alright. What kind of job are you
Dr Mike T Nelson: looking for? Maybe we can help you with that too.
Dr Blaine Lints: Yeah. So I think my. Yeah I'm interested in ketone research, especially with ketone monos, less, less so with butanediol. I am very interested in human performance and any sort of informa in intervention that could be used to, uh, optimize performance of a high level operator, especially special operations or at the tier one level.
Really interested in working with those populations. I'm very interested in endurance sports. But yeah, more, more recently with with this IGA experience, I would love to get involved with IGA research in any form, and whether that's more formally as a full-time job or [01:32:00] if it's even in a volunteering sense or just being able to assist on any, in any sort of scientific capacity.
With that work just because, I've some of the guys that go and do these treatments are really on their, last leg or Oh yeah. Whatever. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I've heard many times that, I'm going to kill myself if this doesn't work. And like, I don't even wanna go 'cause I'm gonna kill myself.
Like, those kinds of things. And they go and they're completely changed after. And I think for a lot of those guys those that's who you see the most, uh, significant differences, but just to see that happen over and then experience it at some level for myself really makes me want to do work with that because the supplements are cool and stuff, but it, it's it's like the comparison of taking your protein shake versus taking, uh, a bunch of anabolic steroids.
One of those is gonna do the job [01:33:00] much more effectively, much quicker. And let's ignore the negatives that come along with it. Yeah. It's hard to not be interested because my original intent for what I was gonna do with the education I have, uh, and the experience I have was to benefit the special operations community.
'cause that's where I, where I came from and what I wanna give back to. And just seeing the research that's coming out with Ibogaine and seeing it in person and, knowing friends that are having their lives changed by it. It, yeah, it's really piqued my interest in that. And I'm super excited and passionate about that sort of work.
So if there are opportunities along those lines, I'd be interested in that. My, my Instagram is, uh, at blankets, so B-L-A-I-N-E-K-E-T-S. And, uh. I don't have a, I don't have a Twitter or X or whatever.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that's probably fine. Yeah, it is. [01:34:00] After having some of those experiences, it's, I think if you're curious at all, it's hard to walk away from that and just be like, eh, that was cool on with my life.
I'm like, it is, like I, the last time I did DMT was probably, yeah, it was maybe three and a half ish years ago now, and it's something, was this five in Neo
Dr Blaine Lints: DMT?
Dr Mike T Nelson: Uh, no, it was before Ayahuasca.
Dr Blaine Lints: Oh
Dr Mike T Nelson: Okay. Yeah. I still probably think about it at least several times a week and it's been multiple years away. They had people there that did five MEO, so I got to watch that many times. I didn't do it yet, but that was just being next to people watching them was crazy enough. So I think having any of those experiences, especially if it goes well and it's in a safe environment. It's hard to walk away from that, not wondering like how does that work?
Like what is going on with all of that? Yeah, which I think is a good [01:35:00] thing, like to have some wonder and curiosity. I think that's a good thing to have, so. Yeah. I agree. Awesome. Well, if anyone has any info or anything else they can do to help you out, best place is Instagram then, correct?
Yep. Cool. Awesome. Well thank you so much for all of your time then today, and I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks Dr. Mike. It was great talking to
Dr Blaine Lints: you. Thanks for having me on.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Really appreciate it. Uh, huge thanks to Dr. Blaine for coming on the podcast here and sharing all of his wealth of knowledge from his dissertation work to his personal experience, to his experience, uh, with Ibogaine. Super fascinating. Uh, I would love any and all feedback on this episode.
Did you find it interesting? Are there components, uh, you'd like to hear more about? So any feedback please. Let me know or greatly appreciate it. Uh, make sure to check out all of Dr. Blaine's stuff [01:36:00] and all the information he's putting out, which is awesome. If you're interested in becoming more physiologic resilient, more anti-fragile, increase your ability to recover and just generally much harder to kill, check out the physiologic Flexibility certification.
It'll open October 13th through October 20th, 2025. It is the only time the rest of this year that it will be open. Best place to get more information is on the exclusive newsletter list. You can hop onto that below. If you have any questions about the certification, you can email me directly there. So in the sort, we talk about the big picture of why you want to be more physiologically flexible.
We do a deep dive into the research, but we translated into. Words you can understand so we're not just talking about a bunch of mumbo jumbo all the time. It is based on all the current research. I don't have the exact number of research references that I have in the search here, but I think it's [01:37:00] like 133.
I think I pulled like almost over 400 in the creation of it. A bunch of 'em, I didn't actually end up using. And then we have a whole bunch of just explicit action items. So not only will you have the big picture, you'll know what the research says about each item, and you'll know exactly what to do and how to set it up for yourself and for your clients.
So take that all out below, hop onto the newsletter by far the best place for that. Uh, if you are interested in training devices, check out our friends over at Beyond Power from the Vulture one. Uh, I've literally been using this. In some capacity every time I've trained in the gym here at home in the Extreme Human Performance Center, uh, which has been super fun.
Uh, I got to show it to a friend the other day. He was super impressed with it. And, uh, yeah, they did a great job with the device. Uh, it is expensive, but I've been really loving it so far. Uh, so check out. It is an affiliate link below, and then check out our friends over at Teton Ketone Nesters. [01:38:00] You have a bunch more stuff coming out.
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And if you can hit the old like, subscribe. Download, leave us some stars, review all that great stuff to make the algorithms nice and happy to allow us to keep getting, uh, great guests and increase our distribution over time. If you find someone that you think would enjoy this episode, please send it to them.
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Speaker 3: There's something wrong with his hearing aid. Yeah. What's wrong? I can't hear with it. Oh, no wonder. It's too far [01:39:00] away.
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