Max Casa: [00:00:06] Minerals are literally the foundation of our physical health. Not just our physical health, we've got to keep in mind our enzymes are totally mineral dependent, our biochemicals, our hormones, our metabolism. Just about every single biological function is totally run dependent on our mineral levels. 

And magnesium is, in my opinion, the most important one for us to be focusing on because it's responsible for over 42% of the enzymes in our body. 42% of our electrical being is totally run and dependent on magnesium alone. This is Max Casa and you're listening to the Life Stylist Podcast.

Luke Storey: [00:00:49] Hey there podcast friends. Luke Storey here from lukestorey.com bringing you another banger of a show. Here are just a few of the things you'll learn about today on Episode 454 of The Life Stylist Podcast: the intersection of John C, Lily, LSD, dolphins, and float tank History; how AIDS shunted float popularity in the 1980s; why the brain loves to let go of its connection to the skeletal muscles; the four different brain states involved in this therapy; the heightened states of consciousness that can be achieved during the float experience; mixing psychedelics with time in the tank and kloat therapy, that's kloat with the K. You'll learn what that means soon; using light and sound inside a float chamber for an enhanced experience and why the type of magnesium used is so important; achieving magnesium saturation-- topical versus oral; the magic of max vitality salts; how sodium borate might be as effective as borax for clearing nanobots and graphene oxide; the many variations of the float tank and which are best for home or commercial settings; the fascinating world of info medical devices, and finally, how to get over claustrophobia and what to do if you don't have access to a float tank. 

If you've already joined my podcast email list at lukestorey.com/newsletter, then the show notes, audio, video, and written transcripts for this episode are already sitting in your inbox. But fear not if you missed that boat, you'll find all the resources for this one at lukestorey.com/float. 

Our incredible guest today is my friend Max Casa, the shamanic sensei. He's an accomplished lifetime martial artist, performance coach, and medicine man. This guy works tirelessly to spread his knowledge on the benefits of floating, magnesium, minerals, and energy and hopes to help others like you strengthen and balance their mind, body, and spirit. 

And by the way, if you like me, are keen on getting a float tank of your very own in your home or perhaps your wellness center, here's what you do. Go to this link, lukestorey.com/maxvitality. Once you're there, you're going to score 10% off your order of Vitality Salts, and or $2,500 off your float tank by using the code LUKESTOREY at checkout. Again, that's lukestorey.com/maxvitality. 

All right, folks, that's it for the setup. Let's go ahead and get our float on with Max Casa on the Life Stylist Podcast. This, Max, is going to be the first-ever Life Stylist Podcast wherein myself as the host, and you as the guest are going to be doing a magnesium foot soak. 

So for those that are just listening, you might want to watch the video at least of this portion because when you said, hey, I'm going to bring over my new foot soak buckets and your Max Vitality Salts, I was like, "Yeah, bro, let's do it." I don't think there's any risk of electrocution, so we have no reason to not do it.

Max Casa: [00:03:51] Yeah, man, this is going to be one epic show. I'm pumped. Buckle up.

Luke Storey: [00:03:55] Awesome. All right, set us up, man. Line them up, bartender.

Max Casa: [00:03:59] Let's do it. Yes, we got the Vitality Salts here. And do we got the scoop? But really, I think this is like a half cup. Honestly, with this stuff, with all the co-factors and everything, it's a power blend. So really, you only need two tablespoons per foot soak.

Luke Storey: [00:04:15] Really?

Max Casa: [00:04:15] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:04:16] So let's see. With stuff like that, I always feel like it's not enough because I'm just extra. Like you sent me a couple of these bags a few months ago, and we have this rad tub, I'll show you when we get done. Like a Japanese soaking tub. This is like a months-long project to just get this thing. It sat in the front yard for months and we went through all this drama, renovating the house. And then finally we had the bathroom ready to move it in. And no one would lift it. 

Like no plumbers, no contractors. It was 425 pounds. So eventually I had the idea to hire a piano moving company and they came in in like 15 minutes. Boom, boom, boom. It's four people, a special dolly. But when you sent me your salt last time, I think I poured the whole bag in there because it's such a big volume of water.

Max Casa: [00:05:05] Yeah, Yeah. Sure.

Luke Storey: [00:05:06] So but I probably wasted it. Probably it's too much more than you needed.

Max Casa: [00:05:10] Yeah, well, it's good. I'm sure you had quite the night. But yeah, it's funny about the piano movers because you can imagine moving the float tanks to somewhere no one wants to touch for liability reasons, but the piano movers, they come in and get the job done.

Luke Storey: [00:05:24] Oh, you've done that too, with your tanks?

Max Casa: [00:05:25] Yeah, dude, we got to do because we're zipping around in much different countries and everything.

Luke Storey: [00:05:29] That's funny.

Max Casa: [00:05:30] I got a team in every country. Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:05:32] Really? That's funny, dude, because I called around to a few Jacuzzi and hot tub companies, figuring like, when people move from one house to another and they want to take their hot backyard hot tub with them, someone can move it and none of them would do it. They were just like, "What are you talking about? We don't move tubs." I'm like, "You move hot tubs." They're like, "Not yours." So anyway, all right, are you ready to go in here?

Max Casa: [00:05:55] Yeah, man. Born ready. Let's do it.

Luke Storey: [00:05:57] All right, so we have our-- oh, God. Oh, my God. That feels good. I'm doing this every episode.

Max Casa: [00:06:02] Dude, I wouldn't blame you.

Luke Storey: [00:06:04] Oh, my God. It's pretty hot, too.

Max Casa: [00:06:06] That's toasty. That's what you want, though, for optimal magnesium absorption, really is as hot as you can handle.

Luke Storey: [00:06:13] Really?

Max Casa: [00:06:13] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:06:14] I've heard different theories on that. I've always assumed that the hotter the better because I feel good in a jacuzzi, hot tub bath, or whatever when it's super hot. But then I interviewed someone and they were telling me that even if you put your skin in cold water, you still absorb stuff. Because I always thought, oh, your pores closed because they contract with cold. And then I figured the hotter the better and the more they open. But I don't know. Do you feel solid about that, that if it's hotter, you're going to get more absorption?

Max Casa: [00:06:45] Yeah, for sure. I'm glad they brought up the pores, but it's not just the pores, it's getting absorbed through. And actually primarily, especially with transdermal magnesium absorption, it's the hair follicles. 

Luke Storey: [00:06:57] Really? It goes in through a little follicle?

Max Casa: [00:07:00] Yeah, dude, it's crazy. It's like you see the skin and a little piece of hair. There's a little canal along the side and we've literally captured a laboratory now, magnesium ions getting absorbed through the hair follicles directly into the bloodstream, where it could be used by the body right away versus oral supplementation. We're talking like nine to 12 months to have any impact on red blood cell magnesium levels at all.

Luke Storey: [00:07:22] That's super crazy. I'm sure you've listened to Morley Robbins before. He's on Matt Blackburn's Podcast a lot or was until I think they had a fight about iron. Now I don't know if they're homies anymore.

Max Casa: [00:07:36] Yeah, I don't think so.

Luke Storey: [00:07:37] Health industry-podcasting relationships are fluid sometimes, but he is always talking about the RBC, the red blood cell level of magnesium. And I've heard him talk about that, too, how you can take it for months and months orally and still not get that level of saturation that you could from transdermal.

Max Casa: [00:07:57] Big time. Yeah, I know even with his protocol I know they say starting off the day with transdermal magnesium absorption and ending the day with transdermal magnesium absorption, just because it's so rapid and effective. Oral is still a powerful tool, but it's the long-term play and I'm big, especially on magnesium, hitting it from all sides. It's one of those things you got to hit from all sides just due to that burn rate, which Morley has coined. 

So transdermal is definitely king there in that sense because it's rapid, you'll start seeing effects right away. And another cool thing about transdermal, too, is it actually has another reason. When you were on Blackburn's the other week, its a fire episode.

Luke Storey: [00:08:37] That was fun, dude. We went for three hours. He's referring to Mito Life radio. My old friend Matt Blackburn, yeah, that was a funny one.

Max Casa: [00:08:46] Yeah, dude, that was good.

Luke Storey: [00:08:48] Three hours. I kept waiting for him to shut me up and he just kept going, so I was like, "All right." Don't give me a microphone and no time to end because it'll never end.

Max Casa: [00:08:57] Yeah. No harm, dude. I'm glad. That was awesome. It was cool seeing you guys reconnect there, which is awesome. But with the transdermal, it's cool because so I remember in that episode you had talked about taking the capsules and emptying them on your tongue, which is great. Something I also subscribe to just because you allow your biology in your body to have that say and connect to them at that deeper level.

And even just taking that minute to connect to their body and ask your body, hey, is this something you want me to funnel down you right now before I pop five magnesium or whatever it is? It's putting it on the tongue and connecting with your inner being and seeing how it reacts and is a powerful thing to do.
But that's why I love transdermal because transdermal, your body really has to say. We can leverage that body's natural feel-safe mechanism to open up the hair follicles and the pores to soak up more magnesium when it needs to when it wants it. And then what we see is around the 45-minute mark, oftentimes it closes up. So it starts to close those off once the magnesium levels are topped off and it won't soak anymore in.
So really leveraging your body's natural feel-safe mechanism through the skin is awesome.

Luke Storey: [00:10:09] Wow, that's cool. Like iodine, they say, I've never tested this or verified this, but I've heard it said that if you take Lugol's iodine, which is a brownish rust color, and if you put it in your skin and it disappears and disappears at the point at which it stays colored, they're saturated with it or something like that. I forget how it goes exactly.

Max Casa: [00:10:31] Yeah. Totally.

Luke Storey: [00:10:32] But it's an interesting idea to introduce things transdermally versus orally. But yeah, that part that you caught something I'm interested in researching more, but there's so much information in how something tastes like the flavor profile of different foods and when you put them in your mouth, the enzymatic reactions that take place and you're starting to prepare the rest of your digestive system for what's coming. 

And I've always felt weird, not that it stopped me, but just pounding tons of capsules and tablets and supplements, and I picture them as like these little bombs going off when your stomach acid melts the cellulose of the capsule or whatever, then your body is like, what is all this shit?

Max Casa: [00:11:17] Big chance.

Luke Storey: [00:11:18] I don't know. I still do it, but whenever I can, if it's something that's not too caustic or just foul-tasting, I will empty it out. Just pour it in my mouth or into a smoothie or something like that.

Max Casa: [00:11:28] Yeah, totally. Even the ones that are pretty foul tasting, like the vitamin E, isn't particularly great tasting, but that's one of the best ways for you to really tell and connect to the medicine and see like, as you smell it. I tasted. Is it rancid? All that stuff, I really connected with it, I feel is a powerful tool. 

One thing I want to touch on too, I feel could be interesting as we talked about the red blood cell magnesium levels, it's widely thought of as the most accurate magnesium blood test that we have to date. But actually, there is one that is superior, ionized magnesium. Are you familiar with that?

Luke Storey: [00:12:02] No. 

Max Casa: [00:12:03] So you actually get an ionized magnesium blood test. There's only like 250 labs in the states that do this kind of testing. So it's not as wide known or well documented, but because how much magnesium is in your red blood cells isn't the active form. And you can test the active form of magnesium in your body through the ionized magnesium test.

Luke Storey: [00:12:23] Really? Interesting. We're going to have to find a lab that does that and put it in the show notes.

Max Casa: [00:12:26] Big time. Yeah, we got some.

Luke Storey: [00:12:29] By the way, the show notes, folks, will be found at lukestorey.com/float. It's funny because I wanted a have a really focused episode on sensory deprivation tanks, chambers floating all the things. We just get off on magnesium tangent, but it really is a huge piece of that.

But while we're at it, just in the sake of continuity, I know that you put a lot of thought into creating the Vitality Salts here. For those watching the video, you can see this. And I find it really interesting that I want to see if this is what you use in your tanks, you're using magnesium chloride flakes rather than the other one in Epsom salt. It's magnesium--

Max Casa: [00:13:13] Sulfate.

Luke Storey: [00:13:14] Sulfate. And then you've got potassium bicarbonate, sodium borate, sodium ascorbate, and of course high vibes. And it says here on your bottle that these flakes are 47% magnesium chloride by weight, which I think is much more than Epsom salt. So maybe break down the different types of bath salts. 

And then also I think something that I'm new to is that a lot of these Epsom salts and magnesium flakes that you can get online from Amazon or whatever, which is usually where I order mine are potentially, if not likely to be contaminated with mercury and heavy metals and other nasty. So maybe just break down the whole bath salts download and then we'll get into the float tanks.

Max Casa: [00:14:01] Totally. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you breaking that down. It is good. It is solid breakdown. But yeah, really the floating was where it all started. So previously, I was soaking many people in magnesium sulfate or Epsom salts, until I started really diving down the rabbit hole of magnesium and learned that Epsom salt has a sneaky cousin named magnesium chloride. What's so cool about magnesium chloride is it actually has 230% more magnesium by volume than Epsom salt. 

So all the float tanks, we talked about float tanks but all the float tanks in the market, unless you're using Vitality Salts are filled with Epsom salt commonly because it's a cheaper alternative. Magnesium sulfate, they still think it has the magnesium in there, but not nearly as much. And like you had touched on, much of the magnesium on the market is tainted, unfortunately, because it's sourced from mines that are above ground and it's getting acid rained on and has all pollutants in there, especially mercury, which isn't a fun one.

Luke Storey: [00:15:05] To put it mildly, I'm going to take a mercury bath. Oh, God.

Max Casa: [00:15:12] Yeah. It does more harm than good, typically. So what we did is we sourced the purest magnesium chloride on earth, and then magnesium has three powerful known co-factors and two of them can be absorbed transdermally. So the three co-factors for anyone listening, the first one is vitamin B-6. And vitamin B-6 recommend getting from Whole Foods bee pollen. 

So organic bee pollen, it's one of the first things I put in my body in the morning when I go to the fridge, I down my water after gratitude practice and I go over, grab a couple of tablespoons, start funneling the bee pollen. What's so cool about the bee pollen is it helps your body soak up in your cells, soak up more of the magnesium into the cells.

Luke Storey: [00:15:54] Oh, really?

Max Casa: [00:15:54] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:15:55] Wow. 

Max Casa: [00:15:55] And organic bee pollen is the best whole food form there. Bee, you really always want to offer whole food forms when possible. And the other two co-factors, we've got potassium bicarbonate which you had touched on. Potassium bicarbonate it's great because it helps your body get more of the magnesium, not just into the cells but into the mitochondria, where now magnesium can be used via the Krebs cycle to make more ATP energy. That's a really cool one there too.

Luke Storey: [00:16:21] So I noticed on your site where you have the floats, you have the Max recommends and then you have just a few products on there. And one of them was this adrenal cocktail product that looked really interesting and it has the potassium in it. Do you think that your soaking salts are giving you potassium in the same way, or are we absorbing that mineral of potassium?

Max Casa: [00:16:48] I do believe so. So the potassium bicarbonate aspect is interesting. So you got the first half, the potassium, which naturally has its benefits like you're talking about for the adrenals. And it's really good at helping balance out the magnesium as well. But I'm more fascinated with the bicarbonate aspect of potassium bicarbonate.

And really it could be sodium bicarbonate, could be potassium bicarbonate, because what we want for the cofactor magnesium is the bicarbonate. And that's what's getting the magnesium into the mitochondria, which is really, really cool.

Luke Storey: [00:17:16] Do you think that's also at play if you make your own magnesium bicarbonate? You can get soda water and you can make your own?

Max Casa: [00:17:25] Totally. And that's why magnesium bicarbonate, for anyone that doesn't know, you can take typically use a crucial for powder magnesium carbonate and you mix it with soda water, use a soda stream and make magnesium bicarbonate.

Luke Storey: [00:17:38] I got to do that.

Max Casa: [00:17:39] Dude, that's like 52% bioavailable, which is like--

Luke Storey: [00:17:44] I used to order the bottles from PristineHydro, premade. It's just ridiculously expensive and really expensive to ship because they're so heavy glass bottles. And then Matt and other people said, "Dude, you can make this for like $0.05." And I don't know why I have this resistance to buying a soda machine. I feel like it's going to blow up or it's going to be hard to make or something. So I got to get on that.

Max Casa: [00:18:07] Yeah, totally. And then the bicarbonate citrate gets more into the mitochondria and then the third cofactor is we talking about a little bit before, but the boron or the sodium borate, which is one of the most powerful antioxidants on planet Earth. And it's fascinating how it isn't talked about more, especially in the health space for all the benefits that it has. 

One is an antioxidant, which again helps lower levels of oxidative stress in the body naturally by definition. And that's going to help with our magnesium because oxidative stress is what's burning the magnesium. So it actually helps keep magnesium in the cells longer as a result, which is a really, really cool thing. Obviously, there's so many benefits of boron that I'm sure we can dive into as well, but it's great we're good at it right now, dude. 

Even there's a lot of studies with transdermal boron. Within seven days of use, if you're just soak your feet in the stuff for like seven days straight, there's a lot of studies that show it over doubles your free testosterone levels.

Luke Storey: [00:19:08] Wow. That's wild. Yeah. When I saw that in the ingredients of the Vitality Salts, I was wondering about and I haven't looked too deeply into this, but there are issues with things like nanotechnology and nanobots, spike proteins, graphene oxide, stuff that's being sprayed in the sky, stuff that people are unwittingly injecting into themselves because they're scared to get a flu, etc. 

And so there's some maybe kooks or maybe geniuses, time will tell online that are advocating the use of borax like what you would use to clean a tub, which is some form of boron. And that if you take baths in this borax or even drink it, that it has the ability to neutralize the spike proteins and the nanobots and the graphene oxide and all this nasty stuff. Is that something you've looked into at all? A. And B, is the boron in here like the same form that would be in a powdered borax, or is it a different form?

Max Casa: [00:20:09] Yeah. Good question. Yeah. I wonder if they're onto something. Knowing the power of Boron, I wouldn't doubt it. But yeah Borax is like 12% typically. You can get borax like a dollar store, it's like mule team borax. It's like 12%.

Luke Storey: [00:20:29] That's the one everyone recommends.

Max Casa: [00:20:30] Yeah. So it's interesting. That's like 12% boron. What all these people in this community is touting is the benefits of the boron itself. So sodium borate is the chemical formula there. So for me, I'm not about diving into the laundry detergent in my bathtub just because it's a cheaply made formula and because there's a lot of sketching like we talked about the mercury and other tainted substances in there. 

But I believe they are into something. And that would be with the sodium borate, which is the boron there, the pure boron. Now, with all the the 88% other added ingredients in there.

Luke Storey: [00:21:10] Right. So whatever is the constituents that make it into a white powder or dissolve in water, there's other stuff in there basically.

Max Casa: [00:21:18] Totally. Yeah. So in this it's just the pure boron, it's not the borax, which is the laundry detergent besides all the other mixes in there, I'm sure there's still plenty of benefits there.

Luke Storey: [00:21:27] Sure, sure. Yeah. At one point I was making the borax solution, the water and drinking it and stuff, and at some point early in the pandemic, because I don't know if people were shedding on me or what was going on. Anyway, I digress. Let's get into floating. 

So all these different ways to get magnesium in your body, the foot baths, you've got these incredible salts that are well sourced and you put together a really cool formula. But what of course, I really wanted to talk about at depth was Floating man, which I'm a huge fan of. I've been doing it for many years. Not as often as I would like. It's always been a dream of mine to get set up at home with a float tank. 

If I had one at home, which I will someday, I'm going to get one of your freaking tanks one of these days we'll go look at the garage and see if I'm dreaming or if I actually have room for one. But I feel like I would do it at least once, if not twice a week. I would find the time because I find time to meditate. I do all other things, take care of myself. There is nothing to me that alleviates stress like a float. 

So let's go back, I think a great place to start some people will have floated will be somewhat familiar. Some people are like, "What are you guys even talking about?" So we'll try and give a blanket overview for people. Take us back to the history of it and John, see Lily and all of the crazy shit that went on in the beginning of the float industry essentially.

Max Casa: [00:22:53] Yeah. Happy to, man. Yeah. Once a week is great. I hit up Creo yesterday. Dude, that center was awesome.

Luke Storey: [00:23:02] It's great.

Max Casa: [00:23:02] Yeah, it was really cool, men.

Luke Storey: [00:23:03] Shout-out to Creo. Anyone visiting Austin, incredible facility, community center, floats, ice bath, saunas, all the things.

Max Casa: [00:23:11] Yeah. They've got three tanks down there. So actually, I hit a sesh as I tried to every single day. It was just different being out of Hawaii.

Luke Storey: [00:23:19] Really? Do you float every day?

Max Casa: [00:23:20] Yeah, man, for sure. Dude, I haven't yet today, but-- 

Luke Storey: [00:23:22] You're living your dream, bro.

Max Casa: [00:23:25] Especially in Hawaii, for anyone who doesn't know, too, we're in the middle of a cross-country move from Oahu Hawaii, the tropics down there. We were living on a self-sustaining farm at the base of this sushi volcano. And, dude, it's incredible. Just soaking up all the skills there. And you met Sammy a little bit earlier, too, but having the six-year-old there and schooling with her and teaching her all the things and all the adventures, it was a really, really cool process, dude. 

So we're in the middle of a move now, so I'm able to float every day. The past couple of days I hoped in there. But for anyone that doesn't know, floating is really a powerful healing tool that's totally been exploding, especially on the West Coast and Europe for the past 10 to 20 years. And really floating involves usually getting in a big egg-shaped Hottub-type tank usually with the lid over the top. You may see some of the tanks in our site where we have the open tank styles as well, which is cool. 

But inside this tank is one of the most unique healing environments on the face of planet Earth hands down. Because inside this tank you've got 10 inches of water. But these 10 inches of water are supersaturated with over 1,000 pounds of therapeutic grade magnesium saltherapeutic-gradets, commonly Epsom salts, unless they're filled by Vitality Salts, of course. But even the benefits of Epsom salts alone have been well known and well documented for hundreds of years at this point.

So it's not just that, but this creates an extremely buoyant saltwater solution, so buoyant for anyone that's listening. You can literally take a bowling ball, put it in the water, and it would easily float to the top like a cork. So this is a unique environment. It enables effortless, floating, truly. But it isn't just the 1,000 pounds of magnesium salts that makes this environment so unique because inside this chamber it's also totally void of all sensory inputs altogether, meaning that in one of these tanks, as you know, there's no light in these things, not even a single photon of light. 

There's no sound, because not only is the tank itself sound resistant, but the user's also wearing earplugs. There's no smells, there's no taste, there's no movement, there's no speech, and there's not even a sensation of touch inside the chamber, because the saltwater solution and the air inside the tank is precisely heated and kept at a constant 94 degrees Fahrenheit. 

And what's so magical about 94.5 is it's the exact same temperature as the external layer of your skin or your epidermis. So they got the air and the water, same temperature as the skin. So usually what happens in the first session or two is user's brain begins to lose sensation and awareness of where their body ends and where the water begins, which can lead to profound spiritual, oftentimes life-changing experiences inside the tank that I'm sure we'll get into. But ultimately floating is as easy as getting inside the tank, laying back, and floating.

Luke Storey: [00:26:21] What if you had a way to structure the water you drink so that it powerfully benefits the brain by calming your brain waves almost instantly? When you drink water that's properly structured, the left and right hemispheres of the brain interconnect and enter a state of coherence. And this makes complete sense when you consider that 99% of the molecules in your brain are water. 

Well, I recently stumbled upon a company called Analemma Water. And they created a quartz wand that's been proven to dramatically improve the structure of water in seconds. And once it's treated, it lasts years. There are other ways to structure water, but the problem is that it doesn't stick. Once the water is exposed to EMF radiation or other negative influences, it goes back to its chaotic state. So I treat all of the water we, our pets, and even houseplants drink with Analemma Wand. It's just incredibly cool. 

And if you want a detailed and scientific explanation of exactly how it works, give a listen to Episode 431 where the inventors break down all the research and science on this thing. It's pretty incredible. In the meantime, get yourself one at analemmawater.com and use the code LUKE5 to get 5% off your purchase. Again, that's A-N-A-L-E-M-M-A analemmawater.com.

What are the origins of Floating? From my understanding, which I'm sure is limited, it was invented, or at least made popular by this guy named John C Lilly, and I've read about him and his unique approach to science and life in many different sources, like in the pioneering psychedelic circles. He's known there and of course, he's known in the float world.

But I think he was a really interesting guy. I don't know how much you know about him, but maybe if you could tell us what you know about his research and how he was involved in floats and then people can go learn more on their own, because I've heard some crazy shit about him, like taking acid, going in a float tank and putting a dolphin in a tank next to him and trying to telepathically communicate with him. Just crazy shit. I don't know how much of it is true.

Max Casa: [00:28:27] Dude, you haven't done that yet?

Luke Storey: [00:28:28] No, I'm working on it. I got to get a dolphin into the garage when I can think. What do you know about this guy?

Max Casa: [00:28:35] Yeah. So I studied a good amount. He's quite the character, for sure. But really, at the root of it, there was a debate going on in the 1950s, like '40s, '50s between physicists and philosophers. And really were trying to debate on the origin of human consciousness. So what makes a human being conscious and aware at all? So many of them believed when it came down to the theory that they were testing, that John C Lilly was testing as well was they believed that the only reason that we're conscious and aware right now in this moment is because our brain is being stimulated from external stimulation. And as a result of this stimulation, it's lighting up different levels of our brain and giving us this conscious experience that we're so blessed to be experiencing right now in this moment. 

So John C Lily wanted to test this theory ultimately, and he ended up creating this perfect environment, this theoretical environment, to block out all sensory inputs altogether. And that's where the float tank was originally born, which is really cool.

Luke Storey: [00:29:44] Wow. And did you hear of him taking LSD in the float tanks?

Max Casa: [00:29:52] Yeah, among many substitutes. Yeah. Dude, he was a big ketamine guy from my research as well and--

Luke Storey: [00:29:59] Wow. Interesting.

Max Casa: [00:29:59] LSD in there. But even to date, it's fascinating. His research was government funded as well. So they were able to take it and do some things like float with dolphins, things that other people may not have been able to do. I believe he took his tank, one of his chambers, a sensory deprivation tank, which at the time was totally different. It looked like you weren't laying down it at all and it didn't have any salt in it at all. It was just water.

Luke Storey: [00:30:27] Oh, interesting.

Max Casa: [00:30:28] You actually got in it from the top. It looks more like one of those magician escape techs. You pop in like a whole astronaut helmet right there.

Luke Storey: [00:30:40] Interesting.

Max Casa: [00:30:42] But what he ended up doing, he ended up taking one of his tanks and installing it above a dolphin pool and floating there regularly and definitely mixing it with some psychoactive substances on occasion, as we do. And yeah, so LSD and ketamine in particular. 

But what came out about his research was he was able to build this relationship with the dolphins and ultimately totally decipher what the dolphins were saying to each other and how they were trying to communicate with him. And he's made some of the most profound research to date on dolphin communication with human beings.

Luke Storey: [00:31:22] Oh, really? Wow. What a fascinating cat. I remember when I was a kid in the '70s, there was a film called Altered States, and it was a psychological thriller. And of course, I didn't know about him at the time, but if I'm not mistaken, I think that film was loosely based on him and his work, and it didn't go well in the film. It was a gnarly film, but it involved float tanks and LSD and mind control, MK-ULTRA shit, whatever it was. I haven't seen it since I was a kid in the '70s. But it's interesting to think it's been around that long. 

Another thing that I heard is I always wondered when this started becoming popular, I guess maybe 10, 15 years ago or something, I learned about floats and started doing it and it was relatively obscure. There were very few places where you could do it. Even in LA I think there was two locations where you could float.

Max Casa: [00:32:19] Wild, dude.

Luke Storey: [00:32:20] And so I was like, okay if this was happening and gaining popularity in the '60s and then into the '70s among certain circles and there were more people manufacturing these tanks, those samadhi tanks, those metal coffin ones, and they were out there and then it just disappeared. 

And I heard somewhere that the popularity subsided when the AIDS epidemic happened in the early '80s and people didn't want to go get in water that someone else had been in, in fear of getting AIDS or something like that. Do you think there's any truth to the float tank's popularity getting stymied by that period? Is there any truth to that?

Max Casa: [00:32:59] Yeah, I believe so. And I think not on similar to-- well, let's just say this. Yeah, definitely a connection there for sure. But with that, I do believe that there was some much like we see today with COVID, some potential governmental influence to try to get people off of floating as it was gaining popularity, much like they do with the psychedelics and other things like that as well. 

But AIDS epidemic was just a powerful tool to be able to stay in that for sure. But yeah, naturally people have that in the back of their head. They don't want to be bathing in water that someone else has been bathing in, even if it was just one other person.

Luke Storey: [00:33:38] Yeah. Understandably so, I've tried to bring people to floats, some people have objected for that reason, that's gross. What if somebody peed in that water? Their pubes are floating around in your face, whatever. And I try to explain, though, the water's really filtered. How do you guys do the filtration in your tanks? Obviously, if you're using it at home, you just want to prevent any bacteria or stuff. If you're just the only person using it, you'd still want to sterilize the environment.

But for someone who has a center, what longevity, speaking to the ones you make specifically if someone wanted to open a center and have four or more float tanks in there, how is the water cleaned in between users and how many times can it be cleaned in a day and all the stats on that part?

Max Casa: [00:34:29] Totally. Yeah. Happy to dive into it. So basically as soon as a floater leaves the float tank, they leave the float tank and the owner of the center, or if it's a residential unit, there's a pop on their phone and there's a button on their phone that will turn the filtration system on and immediately every single molecule of that saltwater solution will begin getting pumped and filtered through, first off, a micron filter. And then it's blasted with ultraviolet purification, so UV light and ozone purification. 

So every single molecule of this water is getting passed through micron filter, UV light, it's getting ozonated. It's going through hair traps before it goes back into the tank. And even when it's back in the tank, one just about nothing can live in a solution that is that extremely saline already. It's over two, nearly three times as buoyant as the Dead Sea.

Luke Storey: [00:35:23] Oh, really?

Max Casa: [00:35:23] Which is fascinating. And nothing will grow in there. 

Luke Storey: [00:35:25] Does anything grow in the Dead Sea? I guess that's why they call it dead.

Max Casa: [00:35:28] Yeah, not much.

Luke Storey: [00:35:29] Is there any algae or sea life in that thing at all?

Max Casa: [00:35:33] Dude, I don't believe so. I think it's pretty void of life.

Luke Storey: [00:35:36] In photos, it looks like an episode of Star Trek on a planet where there's no life.

Max Casa: [00:35:41] Totally. Totally. Yeah. Similar to the Earth. So you can imagine a float tank that's two or three times more concentrated than that, nothing is living in there. But even if there was chemical disinfectants also in there, which we don't use chlorine or bromine or anything like that, although if you operate a center you definitely can. We supply the food grade hydrogen peroxide. So 35% peroxide, dose it up and you're ready to rock.

After a session that just filters usually at least 15 minutes and in 15 minutes it will filter every single molecule of water over a dozen times through that system. So by the time the next client comes in, even just 20 minutes later, that water is literally cleaner than new for the next person literally.

Luke Storey: [00:36:24] Oh, wow. And how often would one need to change the water out and get all new salt and all the stuff in a residential or commercial application?

Max Casa: [00:36:36] So we've had centers that float eight plus floaters a day per tank. So imagine eight floaters in a tank. They filter it for 15 to 30 minutes in between each client they go and they've been able to maintain the same exact original saltwater solution with our filtration systems. When I first got into the industry, they had the answer to that question would have been every 30 days they have to filter it out.

Luke Storey: [00:37:02] Oh, damn.

Max Casa: [00:37:03] You keep them--

Luke Storey: [00:37:03] And then buy 1,000 pounds of salt.

Max Casa: [00:37:05] Oh, yeah, which is like 1,800 bucks, so that's an investment. Plus you got to mix it, which it's tough to dissolve a mound of salt this high in this much water. It takes hours. That's copious amounts of work.

Luke Storey: [00:37:20] How how do you get the salt to melt in that little volume of water?

Max Casa: [00:37:25] So we tried all sorts of things. We even tried a cement mixer just to save time on the installs. Maybe we're back to back and installs flying around and stuff and like, where's a cement mixer? Just, like, do it automatically. But most of the time I just end up popping in there. One of our team members with a deck broom, like a rubber broom and just go into town burrows.

Luke Storey: [00:37:47] Really?

Max Casa: [00:37:47] Yes, like hours. And then you get to a point where you can turn the filter on. It will cycle the rest.

Luke Storey: [00:37:52] Wow. Does it help if the water's kept warm?

Max Casa: [00:37:56] It does originally, but then the magnesium and the Epsom salts, there's this thermogenic reaction where when it's mixed with the hot water, the Epsom salts dissolving sucks out the heat. So you could put literally boiling water, 200-degree water in to mix this stuff within a second, it's just sucked all of the energy out of that water.

Luke Storey: [00:38:15] That's crazy. So the idea here is you want to have the air temperature, and water temperature, the same as your skin so that you're losing the sensation of having a body. How do you achieve that and maintain it for someone that wants to do a longer float?
I've gone to centers before and experienced, if I do say a 90-minute float, which is my preference, I would say at a minimum, in some chambers the air starts to get cold after an hour and then I start to I'm bummed out because like now I know I have a body. How did you master getting the water in the air to stay to maintain a temperature like that?

Max Casa: [00:39:01] Yeah, totally. I think for starters, it's interesting because that's definitely something we see in the industry, which is unfortunate because it does the tail end of those sessions, sometimes you catch them cold. But really the key with ours is one, the insulation of the chambers and then to the shape of the chamber as well, where it's precisely like it's narrow enough. 

It's spacious on the inside, but it's compact enough that it is really great. It's just maintaining the temperature and not having too much air escape out through the sides as well. So I say the insulation is really the biggest piece there.

Luke Storey: [00:39:37] And then what about if it's in an ambient environment that's already really hot? Like I'm thinking about getting one in my garage and right now there's no climate control out there and so it's probably 105 degrees on average in that garage, which I learned from having my hyperbaric oxygen chamber in there. And then I would get in there and it was like taking a sauna when you're not trying to, so I had to move it inside the house and it's unsightly and bulky and sucks. 

So I'm working on getting my garage outfitted to where I can control the temperature or at least have giant fans or something. Is your temperature control possible in a hot room, or do you need to have the room at 70 degrees or something in order to maintain the proper temperature inside?

Max Casa: [00:40:21] Yeah, totally. So with the pods, with the open float tanks, which look just more like a big open or really like a small pool, maybe the size of one of these rugs, like 10 by 10 roughly, for those of you put into a room definitely requires some more HVAC and build out and stuff like that. It's still equally sensory deprivation with the open float tanks, which is a common misconception. It's just an open float tank.

But now there's a heating panel that we supply that we install on the ceiling. So it's maintaining that temperature between the floater's belly and the ceiling there as well. And then the room would just be sensory deprived where there's no windows in the room or no light leaking in or anything like that. 

Then to answer your question, I was out in Massachusetts for a while and I got a garage in my tank, which I'll warn you, dude, if you wind up getting one of these things, it quickly became my new bed. So talk about the 90-minute floater, it starts getting cool at the end I'm in a garage in Massachusetts in the winter, rip-it-out all-nighter floats.

Luke Storey: [00:41:21] Really?

Max Casa: [00:41:21] Yeah, bro.

Luke Storey: [00:41:22] You stay in there all night?

Luke Storey: [00:41:23] That's the way to do it. Oh, my God.

Max Casa: [00:41:25] It's the John C Lilly way.

Luke Storey: [00:41:28] Oh, my God. Speaking of that, the duration thinking about his experiments with LSD, as a kid, when I was young and dumb, I used to take acid to go do something fun. Once in San Francisco, I went to the Pink Floyd Laser show at the laser area or whatever and it sounded like a great idea and it was. It was awesome. The only thing is the laser show is fucking 45 minutes and the acid trip is 10 hours. So we come out of there like, what do we do now? 

We're supposed to drive cars around the hills of San Francisco. Total nightmare. So really depending on what psychedelic you're working with, the duration could be a consideration, but maybe not in the case of if you're acclimated to floating for a long period of time and you're in a tank that can actually maintain the temperature so it doesn't get uncomfortable.

Max Casa: [00:42:22] Totally, you don't get worried, but it's a cool thing about it versus some of the plant medicines where I'm sure we'll touch on it. But the states in particular, the brain states that we're achieving inside of sensory deprivation are eerily similar to the heightened state of consciousness that people are receiving or achieving with these plant medicines, which is an interesting place to take it.

Luke Storey: [00:42:46] Has that been studied that people are going into high gamma or crazy, interesting novel brainwave states?

Max Casa: [00:42:52] Big time. And then that's one of the things that we talk about John C Lilly. We've hooked up FMRI's to floaters' brains nowadays and they were doing scans on him back then and what they saw, so many physicists and philosophers expected that when he went into the sensory deprived environment that his brain would almost totally dim out. That's their testing. 

But what they found was that his brain actually lit up. Again, many parts of his brain dimmed out like the amygdala, the fight or flight center of the brain, which is why it's being so extremely effective for killing or decreasing levels of anxiety or depression or helping steer people off of addictive pharmaceuticals like opioids and Xanax and things like that. 

But with that being said, they also saw so many parts of his brain light up like a Christmas tree, where really what they saw was the left side of the brain logic and the right side of the brain more creativity typically. And typically, these parts of the brain, as you know, work more independently, more by themselves. But within 15 minutes of entering the float tank, these two hemispheres of the brain actually began synchronizing and harmonizing in unison. 

And when this happens, both hemispheres of the brain working together. This is oftentimes what's happening with the many different parts of the brain that weren't connecting or contacting before. That's what we see with much of the psilocybin mushroom research as well. All these parts of the brain start communicating with each other. They enter these heightened states of consciousness, which is what's happening with these two lobes of the brain begin harmonizing together. 

It's called the flow state typically, but that's definitely responsible for many of the heightened states of awareness and consciousness people are achieving inside the float tank.

Luke Storey: [00:44:34] Wow. Interesting. Yeah, it was definitely true that when I started floating, I was at that point in my life definitely not working with psychedelics or anything, I was extremely sober and that's one of the things I really liked about floating. It's like every once in a while in a deep meditation, because I'd been meditating for years at that point, every once in a while you really hit that sweet spot where things get dreamy and you start getting these creative ideas or you're healing micro traumas and off-gassing stress, essentially.

But you can get into some pretty deep spaces, and I really love that. So I think that's a really useful part of floating for people that have no interest in or for whatever reason, just don't want to use those artificially induced, expanded states of consciousness wherein a float it's totally endogenous, like everything that's happening is happening within your consciousness and mind. 

It's like this darkness retreats that people are doing now and people have full DMT trips for just being alone in quiet darkness for a few days or however long they do it. Like Aubrey was telling me, he's like, Oh, it was like more powerful than ayahuasca. Just to shut your all senses down for a period of time and the next thing you're like tripping balls just off the chemicals that your own brain produces.

Max Casa: [00:46:02] Yeah, totally. Like you say, yeah. Aubrey in particular, I know we said by day two, like you mentioned, a full-blown ayahuasca experience. It's because what we see inside the float tank is steady. So when we're totally deprived or separated from stimulation, our brain has access to this pharmacopeia or much easier access to this whole pharmacopeia that we have inside of us. So maybe people that aren't looking, for me because I had experimented with or had my first experience with psilocybin mushrooms before floating. It was at a young age. I believe I was 16 at the time.

And after that, I was getting so many benefits from that. Those heightened states of awareness and consciousness that I started to look for other ways to achieve or tap into those heightened states of consciousness and awareness without the need for those catalysts, as you talked about.

And floating for me, dude, I was in I think it was my third float session and I was in the float tank and I experienced those hemispheres of my brain starting to synchronize there and for me it felt eerily similar, almost exactly like a microdose of psilocybin. That was back then on just my third session, I started to feel this synchronization there, and this whole experience of my heart started opening up in this crazy way. 

And at the same time, I was just buzzing with this sensation of relaxation and pure inner peace that I hadn't experienced before in my entire life. So I knew there was something to it there, and maybe I wasn't able to get my mom or my grandma to pop LSD, you're sitting in an ayahuasca ceremony.

But it was a much lower barrier to entry to get them into the float tank just to lay in this body of saltwater for a prolonged period of time. And as they started to doing that and as I started doing more too, my heart just started opening up more and started realizing more parts of myself and doing more shadow work and being able to integrate more aspects of myself as well. And it's been a really powerful piece of my journey.

Luke Storey: [00:48:11] All right, Life Stylists, I've got an insanely cool resource for you. It's a breathwork app called Othership, and I got to say, I am really into this thing. I've been doing Breathwork for ages, but to be honest, if I really want to do some deep work, it's muh more difficult to do without guidance. It's not called breathwork for nothing. It takes some discipline, but much less so with a killer soundscape and expert guide leading you.

With over 500 custom-guided breathwork sessions, the Othership breathwork app lets you access an on-demand library of sessions to help you regulate your nervous system and take your consciousness to the next level. The Othership's journeys are science-backed and very music-driven, so whether you have time to practice for one minute or 60, you're going to feel an emotional shift when you need it most. 

Another cool thing about Othership is that they have sessions for the beginner to the most advanced practitioner. And some of the longer sessions are downright psychedelic, only legal and safe. And to start 2023 off with a bang, they just launched a 31-day guided cold plunge challenge on the app. It's got 31 custom breathwork sessions for the cold plunge to empower people to build a cold practice to maximize the mental, physical, and emotional health benefits available from consistent cold exposure. 

So you can play it to cool down in an ice bath or your bathtub shower or your favorite cold body of water. To get you started with Othership, we've got you hooked up with a free trial for the whole month of January. Just visit othership.us/luke to activate your account. This is an incredible tool, you guys, and one that is long overdue. Again, to try it out this month for free, go to othership.us/luke. 

So you've had experiences where there's psychological healing. You mentioned shadow work, so you're able to go into the subconscious and work things out. What are some of those experiences been like? What have you realized about yourself or healed to whatever degree you feel like sharing, I know these are intimate experiences, but I think it could be useful for people that want to find natural means by which they can follow suit and heal themselves as well.

Max Casa: [00:50:27] For sure, yeah. Happy to, man. Yeah, it's interesting there's so many, even yesterday I know we were talking pre-camera too, some of the stuff that we've been working through. So yesterday my float session some of that was coming up which make it into down the road but one that is coming up that I feel called to share was when I was born I was diagnosed with a degenerative neuromuscular disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth or CMT for short. Really what it does is what we see over time, I know you talked about when I was joking about bringing the foot soaks over for life, I forget what you call them, the corn knuckle toes?

Luke Storey: [00:51:07] Corn nuts.

Max Casa: [00:51:09] Those hilarious.

Luke Storey: [00:51:10] Four legs, yellow thick toenails. Yes. Disgusting. I'm so glad no one on camera can see it, at least my toes. I don't know how yours are looking, but--

Max Casa: [00:51:17] Not much better, but we'll have to do something about it.

Luke Storey: [00:51:20] Oh, God.

Max Casa: [00:51:21] I'm a lifelong martial artist, at the root of it my nails are all beaten up and everything as well.

Luke Storey: [00:51:26] A lot of kicking stuff for a lot of years?

Max Casa: [00:51:28] Yeah, I do a lot of Muay Thai. Teaching Muay Thai for the better part of 15 years now as well. So my parents got me into martial arts when I was four and they were hoping that getting me involved in the martial arts, the reason they did was they were looking to relax my symptoms or help with my symptoms of CMT. So they're helping with my balance, my muscle strength, coordination, stuff like that. So martial arts seemed to be a good fit.
And then thankfully I stuck with it. But really what CMT does is attacks your peripheral nerves right at your extremities and then in the Western world, it's known to have no cure and there's no pharmaceuticals for it, and there's no possible way of reversing it. They'll tell you and things like this. It's a fairly common ailment. We're talking one in 2,500 people suffer from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. What happens is over time, so it runs in my family it's a 50/50 chance, they say genetically that offspring will get it. But over time, it just atrophies up your system until it begins to attack your respiratory system, which is a deep one and doesn't sound very enjoyable. 

So that was a big part of my healing journey as well, was working to heal myself and my family because I look at the older generations and they're in wheelchairs and stuff by 30, 35, sometimes sooner. So martial arts no doubt helped that, and I knew it was helping me. But in one of my float sessions a couple of years back, this is interesting. I was laying in the float tank and I was doing this meditation I do on occasion where I let my mind run rampant, like a dog off the leash for like 20, 25 minutes at the start of the session. 

And I'm just laying there and connecting with my inner witness and just witnessing these thoughts blow by the wind per se, aiming not to get too attached to them, although naturally some of them will grab you in and give you a whirl for a second or two and I was just noticing the ones that grabbed me and one of the ones that grabbed me was I noticed a thought of judgment go by inside the float take. 

And normally in everyday life, I wouldn't even have noticed, that's not a judgment likely go by. It's so subtle, but inside the float tank, the mind's amplified at times or receptive, and awareness amplified. But I notice this, and what I notice happened in my body the second that thought transpired changed my life forever. What I saw as this thought of self-judgment went by, it was over something I'd said in conversation earlier in the day like a subtle thought. 

But I noticed in my body this tension that I began to hold almost as tense up in my extremities, in my calves and my feet into my hands, and what I was doing now a term that resonates with me is pulling my consciousness away from my extremities or these external limbs as a result of the judgment. So what happens even if we look at the judge and what it is that inner critic, it's established to be just a little bit harsher than our harshest critic in the external world. 

So a little bit harsher than the harshest critic in the external world typically is developed at a young age. So typically this judge is being absorbed or a reflection of our parents. I guess parenting style. So if you take me, for example, I was a young boy, I had a super open heart, a lot of love to give to the world and as a result of these judges and they're doing the best they can, no shame on them. It's just something my inner critic absorbed. 

I began to judge myself extra hard and as this judge would happen, I would hold it in my extremities, stopping the flow of consciousness, an ATP, and these natural energy channels from flowing freely if it makes sense. So stopping and almost holding this energy in my hands and my feet. And really, once I noticed that, I was able to inside the float tank do more shadow work, as we say, work with this judge to send it more love and compassion and unconditional love to relax him and help integrate him while at the same time integrating more practices to help release some of that loving energy, whether it's breathwork or martial arts, is a great one for it. That's why it helped me so much. 

One of the reasons that I get to let those hands fly, let the energy out, the kicks get to let that energy out. I'm not storing it in my system, blocking and siphoning it off anymore. Whether it's breathwork, one, or maybe anyone listening to this knows someone with CMT or similar muscular dystrophy. One of the largest antidotes and one that's helped a lot is just giving more hugs, just letting that love flow, and sharing more of that love with the world has been really, really cool. 

But as I've been able to calm that judge, I've seen an incredible decrease in my symptoms of CMT as a result and that wouldn't have happened if I didn't flow regularly and wasn't as acutely aware of those unconscious thoughts.

Luke Storey: [00:56:47] Wow, that's powerful. Damn, that's crazy what you can do when you give your mind-body awareness space to work itself out. It's like sometimes just slowing down, stopping, looking inside, you find answers. That's very cool. You mentioned Breathwork. Do you ever or do you know if people who practice breathwork in a float? That's something that I've never done. I don't know why.

I feel like maybe if I passed out, I'd be afraid I was going to flip over my stomach and drown. I don't know. Sometimes breathwork can get pretty crazy too, on its own. Is that something that you ever mix or recommend people to explore?

Max Casa: [00:57:32] Totally, dude. I think again, it's one of the perfect environments for breathwork because those levels of introspective awareness skyrocket. So there's nothing to be aware of in the external world. My brain's infinitely looking for some stimulation stimuli in the external world and infinitely it cannot find one. So as a result it takes all that consciousness and brainpower and shines it inward. 

And now what we see, usually if anyone's looking to hear what to expect for their first fluid or anything like that, not to give any expectations or anything like that, but one thing we for sure can expect is an increased level of introspective awareness where now how this has helped me help me develop a more intimate connection with my heart and my heartbeat and my breathing and my lungs so you can hear it so loudly inside the tank and feel it so loudly. Even yesterday, I was exploring again, we actually had our little six year old to do her first float yesterday.

Luke Storey: [00:58:36] Really?

Max Casa: [00:58:37] Yeah, which is awesome, dude. She's been petrified of the dark for her whole life. But really something we've been working on, especially in Hawaii, which is conquering fears. So whether it's jumping off cliffs or snorkeling with sharks in the wild or whatever it was, we carried some good momentum towards that and the float tank was a natural next step.

Luke Storey: [00:58:59] How did she do?

Max Casa: [00:59:00] Dude, she loved it.

Luke Storey: [00:59:01] That's crazy that it took six years, you being like Mr. Float, how did you offer it to her before she was just not having it or?

Max Casa: [00:59:10] Yeah, it's interesting. So I've actually only been in her life for about two years. She's my stepdaughter. Not biological.

Luke Storey: [00:59:19] I got it.

Max Casa: [00:59:21] So even two years is impressively long, but I think it was because she had so much fear around the dark due to traumas at a younger age as well. So doing a lot of that on a nightly basis, we constantly flick the lights off in the room, just sit there for five minutes or so and hold hands and ohm and meditate and focus on the breath and things like that. But yeah, so now she had went in, she had actually floated with Milla, my girlfriend. And she had an awesome float, dude. It's really cool.

Luke Storey: [00:59:54] Wow. Oh, that's so awesome.

Max Casa: [00:59:57] Dude, I think she got out after like 20 minutes because she was starting to burn down herself. She was like, "Oh, my butt's burning."

Luke Storey: [01:00:07]  She's a cute, man. So adorable. That's wild. Something that really interests me is all these tools that folks like us have at our disposal now, thinking about how different a kid's life can be if you have a parent that's not like we are with this shit. In this house alone, if I had a kid, they would be having a very different childhood. They will hopefully. We're calling that in, but they're going to have a very different childhood than your average kid.

Max Casa: [01:00:38] Big time.

Luke Storey: [01:00:39] Jumping in the sauna and ice bath and the hyperbaric and the hypnagogic lights and PMF and float tanks and all this stuff. It's going to be really interesting to see this generation of kids who are around parents that are doing all this. Breathwork and meditation and turning the lights out and praying together and meditating as a family, this kind of thing, it's not the norm. But perhaps at some point, there will be enough parents that are into all of this stuff that there will be a little micro sub-generation of kids that grow up and are a bit more tapped in.

Max Casa: [01:01:17] Totally, dude. Yeah, I see it's fascinating. Whatever soul or energy decides to come through for you guys is going to have the experience to-- 

Luke Storey: [01:01:29] It's going to be a wild one. It's going to be a wild one. So breathwork is a yes. Is there any record of anyone having any difficulties with drowning or almost drowning, flipping over, passing out? I've always felt safe in there because you can't really flip over. The energy that it would take to get on your stomach where you could drown, you would have to be fully awake and cognizant of the fact that you're doing that.

Max Casa: [01:02:00] Through the air, definitely take a highly conscious effort to flip over in that thing. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Luke Storey: [01:02:07] And the way that I guess you calculate the buoyancy of the salt solution of the saturation there, it's always been interesting to me that it goes to just like around a circle around your face where you're just your eyes, mouth and nose are out of the water and then the back of your head from the ears back or in the water.

Max Casa: [01:02:29] Yeah. Totally.

Luke Storey: [01:02:29] Is that because the saturation is just right to have the buoyancy work like that?

Max Casa: [01:02:34] Totally. Yeah, it's fascinating. On the initial feel is really the only time you have to do it, but just making sure that the buoyancy is proper. So it's like 1.25, you want the buoyancy at.

Luke Storey: [01:02:47] And that's weird that it's the same for every person. You could take a 90-pound person and a 300-pound person and the same buoyancy is needed for their mouth and nose not to go underwater.

Max Casa: [01:02:58] Yeah. Similar enough, they won't go under. So if anyone at home is listening and they don't have familiar with floating, really the saltwater line will come up to ideally halfway in between their ears and their eyes. So it's really perfect in there. You float half your bodies in, half your body's up. And again, there's so many benefits to that, man. So many benefits and I'm sure we can dive into some of them, but--

Luke Storey: [01:03:24] Yeah, break down some of them. For me, I haven't even tracked the benefits. It's just I feel incredibly relaxed. I solve problems, I have creative ideas. It's like the deepest form of meditation possible by orders of magnitude. But I've not gone in and tried to work on anything specific necessarily. 

I just go in and every time I think maybe after the first two or three times when I was getting used to it, it's always awesome for me. But you probably have a lot of anecdotal stories of people having breakthroughs or healings. Like what does this do for people?

Max Casa: [01:04:02] Yeah, happy to share. So really the way I break it down is just three main pillars of benefits that are responsible for all the profound healings that we're seeing in all the clinical research. So for starters, we touched on some of them. 

One we hadn't really touched on though, is the fact that you're laying in a zero-gravity environment. And this is totally unlike laying on a bed or a mattress at the end of the night where there's thousands of springs and pain points that are cutting off your microcirculation because what happens when you enter true zero gravity environment is your blood vasculature can totally relax and at the same time your capillaries can totally vasodilate. So what we see as a result is this huge increase in surge in things like blood flow and oxygen flow and microcirculation to every part of the body, which is incredibly healing for literally thousands of ailments.

Second, we're getting all the benefits from sensory deprivation, which a lot of people don't recognize, and I feel it's not talked about enough in the health space, is the fact that two of the largest stressors to our nervous system are, one not even commonly looked at as stressors, but the gravitational stress, something that's called gravitational stress, which is literally the stress of gravity yanking on your system, omnipresently.

Luke Storey: [01:05:29] Even when you're lying down.

Max Casa: [01:05:31] Even when you're lying down.

Luke Storey: [01:05:32] Because anyone that's floated will know there's a huge difference between just lying on a cushy mattress or pads or rug or whatever than in a float tank.

Max Casa: [01:05:41] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:05:41] After you float, you realize how much work it is to actually just lay down on something. It's weird. It's hard to describe. You have to experience it.

Max Casa: [01:05:49] Dude, it's almost like yesterday my girlfriend, Milla, she was laying there and it's been a bit a few weeks since she's floated and while she was in there, she was like, wow. It was almost this work for my body to really decompress like that because I've been holding so much unconscious tension for her, it's her upper back and her scapula and things like that. But yeah, you can really decompress and let go of all that subconscious unconscious tension you're holding in your system. 

But again, these two stressors, gravitational stress, stacked with one of the other largest stresses to our nervous system. The fact that every single second of the day our brains are having to process over 10 million bits of sensory overstimulation every single second of the day, especially when you keep in mind that our conscious mind is only capable of processing between 30 and 50 bits a second. So you're getting hit with 10 million bits from the light, the sound, to the clothing and sensing where everything is. That's a huge stressor for our unconscious mind. 

And these two stresses alone occupy over 50% of our nervous systems energy and our metabolic energy every single day. Those two stressors combined, which is fascinating. So if we're not focusing giving ourselves a true respite from those two huge stressors to the system, we're taking a roundabout way to optimizing our health, in my opinion. But again, back to those three pillars, I digress.

Luke Storey: [01:07:24] It is okay. This is good stuff. I love it.

Max Casa: [01:07:28] The zero gravity environment. Again, blood vascular gets a totally relaxed microcirculation.

Luke Storey: [01:07:32] Sorry to interrupt, but I bet that has something to do with that issue that you were born with, where you're not getting circulation in your extremities, that makes perfect sense. It's so funny that you were led down this path. And that's such a rare and unique challenge to have physically. And you found the one thing that's probably the best for that. Maybe hyperbaric would be good, too, because it increases the blood flow and builds capillaries and stuff but that's interesting side note.

Max Casa: [01:08:01] Yeah, big time. And even to build on that, and when you're in the tank, which goes to the second pillar, is the sensory deprivation aspect. So you're getting all the benefits from, again, getting to step back from all these stressors we're constantly being bombarded with oftentimes for the first time in our entire life.  

So you're inside this tank, there's no light, there's no sound, none of this. All these parts of your brain can totally demote and decompress. Imagine your visual cortex is no longer having to process any photons of light. It usually does seem to get that in a dark room at night. There's some sort of light or moonlight shining in or something like that.

Luke Storey: [01:08:44] Totally. The smoke alarm with that fucking little green light. We have one of those in a room and every night I lay down, I'm like, I've got to put tape on that. And then I go to sleep and I forget. It's been six months of looking at it. It's not that bright, but still, it's not totally black in there. It's not totally dark.

Max Casa: [01:09:01] Yeah, dude.

Luke Storey: [01:09:02] And because it's a little LED, I bet if you took a video of it with a slow-mo, it's probably flickering.

Max Casa: [01:09:09] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:09:09] I'm perceptually flickering too.

Max Casa: [01:09:11] Yeah, that's a good note that those lights will get you. But inside the tank, dude, now really what happens is all of your brainpower and consciousness is no longer being ripped to the external world as a defense mechanism to map everything out, which is a naturally a state of stress. 

So when we can now pull our awareness back into us, now our brain has so much more brainpower and we as a being have so much more consciousness to put towards whatever it is we really, truly have to do, and usually that's relax, recover the stress better than ever before. This increase in consciousness and brainpower. 

But the third main pillar benefits we touched on earlier, really the pillar of benefits that's captured my heart these past many years is the fact that while you're soaking in this zero gravity sensory deprived environment, you're also soaking up magnesium transdermally through your skin, specifically the hair follicles of your skin during the entirety of every single float session. And I've heard you talk extensively on magnesium and its benefits, but--

Luke Storey: [01:10:18] I do talk about it a lot. And thankfully, one of our sponsors, I don't know if there a sponsor on this episode, Magnesium Breakthrough, which is like the best oral magnesium that I've found so far. But yeah, it's so annoying to me that people have all of these health problems and a lot of it probably has to do with just low minerals or dysregulated minerals in general, but specifically most commonly magnesium. So tell us why getting adequate magnesium is important. We talked about the ways to get it, but what does it do? What's the big deal?

Max Casa: [01:10:52] Yeah, so many things and Mag Breakthrough is great. They actually have, speaking in the co-factors, they mixed in one of the co-factors, which is vitamin B-6. So they have that in there to help yourself soak up more of it. So shout out to that too.

Luke Storey: [01:11:05] Oh, cool. Imagine if we could get a bulk Mag Breakthrough and put it in the float tank. Just not like the capsules, but a five gallon bucket of like the seven forms and the co-factors and all the things.

Max Casa: [01:11:18] Dude, I know. Maybe we'll tag your team to do something there.

Luke Storey: [01:11:22] Your salts already have the magnesium in adequate amounts.

Max Casa: [01:11:27] There's awesome for the oral but for transdermal the only for magnesium have dug into the research extensively even Epsom salts, all the float centers that are filled their tanks with Epsom salts Epsom salt has never been shown in on a single study to be absorbed transdermally at all.

Luke Storey: [01:11:46] Really?

Max Casa: [01:11:48] So that's what inspired me to go down this road because I was diving down this, imagine me and the float industry trying to optimize the whole environment, dude, because now we have the powerful underwater sound transducers that are transmitting frequencies into the saltwater solution, into every cell in the user's body. And now after one of our face times, suddenly, if you remember four years back, dude, about float tanks, you grilled me about--

Luke Storey: [01:12:16] About the EMF?

Max Casa: [01:12:17] EMF, dude, put me on the spot. I was like, "I don't know." I wasn't here to reverse at the time. Honestly, I hadn't taken a meter to the tank. Now we've taken a plenty of meters to the tank and we ended up after that call, my man inspired us to swap out the pump for a non-variable, extremely low EMF pump.

Luke Storey: [01:12:42] Oh, cool. Yeah, because the pumps make a magnetic field. That's the thing about anything that has a motor in it, it's going to make EMF, but then it's a matter of how far away it is. I have my Chilisleep Dock Pro and it has a fan in it and it has a cooling unit. So you'll get a magnetic field if one, two feet away, but you just don't put it right next to your bed. So it's easy. And then you just put the RF, the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, you just put that on airplane mode. 

So there's ways that you can hack this stuff. But I'm glad that you addressed it because a lot of people manufacture really cool products in the health space, biohacking space, but then it'll either have like tons of blue light coming out of it and you can't use it at night or it makes EMF. And it's always a matter for me of weighing, if I know the founder, I'll be like, Hey dude, this is cool but it'd be even better if you took care of this issue.

Max Casa: [01:13:35] Yeah, totally.

Luke Storey: [01:13:36] Then it comes down to the cost-to-benefit ratio. So let's say you made a float tank and my head is biomagnetic field because the pumps back there behind me or something, I'm still probably going to get more systemic benefit from doing a float and being exposed for a short period of time to that EMF than not doing it. So that's how, just for people listening, that's how I sort of gauge like what I'm willing to deal with because many of these things are going to have more benefits than they are detriments when you weigh them like that. 

And to that end, if you get in any car, not even an electric car, but any modern car, if you ride around in that car, you're getting exposed to more EMF than anything in your house could possibly produce, especially magnetic fields because of the engine. The magnetic field in my car blows the meter up, upto about my chest. It's such a big, powerful field. So it's like dude, do not drive a car, start riding a bike around? No, you got to deal with it. Just whatever.

Max Casa: [01:14:42] You just teleport in the float tank.

Luke Storey: [01:14:44] Exactly. Anyway, I totally derailed your whole thing.

Max Casa: [01:14:48] I know you're good in that, but one of the things with after that, we actually ended up a lot loading, stuffing these things full of because like you said, naturally a small electromagnetic field, but with EMF mitigating devices like some magnetic and the blue shield we got in there.

Luke Storey: [01:15:05] Really? You built them into your tanks?

Max Casa: [01:15:06] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:15:06] Oh, that's rad.

Max Casa: [01:15:07] Right in under with all the other equipment that's in there.

Luke Storey: [01:15:11] Really? That's so interesting.

Max Casa: [01:15:12] That's cool, dude.

Luke Storey: [01:15:12] I didn't know that.

Max Casa: [01:15:14] You got that benefit, so it's at least harmonizing a good chunk of that for sure. But whenever we take the meters to it, it's either zero or just about zero.

Luke Storey: [01:15:24] Wow. That's super cool. That's the thing when it comes to if you can, when you're designing something, if you're trying to create a healing sanctuary, it would make sense to also get a bit of a break from the ambient EMF, even if it's not like the EMF being produced by the thing itself. Like I have the sauna space, sauna and the garage and the whole thing is a little Faraday cage. It's a Faraday tent. 

So it's like not only you not getting EMF from the bulbs because the way they design them, but it's also blocking all the other EMF, so you at least get a break for 20, 30 minutes of being in there, which is cool.

Max Casa: [01:15:59] Dude, big time. Yeah. It's funny. I'll give a little shout-out to our buddy Matt Blackburn. He has one of the sickest float tank setups that I've ever seen where we were installing it, dude, he's got to get a good chunk of tanks up there. He's invested in a few but one of the ones we just installed, it's a totally open float pool. So is the open float pool and he built out this room specifically for it where the room is totally EMF-shielded with the paint.

Luke Storey: [01:16:30] Yeah. Yeah, white shield.

Max Casa: [01:16:33] He's got the white shield paint over the tile and if you go into this room to just this quiescent environment of no sensory input at all while at the same time totally escaping the EMFs. So after that, that really inspired me. I was like, "Dude, I got to get these devices in the tank and really make sure because I felt the difference in there. You're up there, especially in Northern Idaho, and that was really good.

Luke Storey: [01:16:55] That's funny because his environment up there is probably really low EMF anyway in terms of cell towers and stuff like that around. I've noticed just as a rule of thumb, the fewer people there are anywhere, the lower the EMF is going to be.

Max Casa: [01:17:11] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:17:12] And it gets exponentially lower the further away from city centers and stuff you get, which is one of the many reasons I don't live in Austin. We live out of ways and we EMF-tested this neighborhood before we bought the house because I didn't want to live somewhere that was close to a cell tower. 

Max Casa: [01:17:27] I believe you.

Luke Storey: [01:17:28] There's one area, I think it's in West Virginia where there's a big telescope or something there and they have this area of land and people live within this area where there's no EMF. You can't have cell towers or anything in there because it interferes with the instruments of these whatever, I forget what it's called, but it's a real thing. There's a town or a couple of towns within this geographic area where there's no EMF, and I was like let's move there.

Max Casa: [01:17:58] You get that in the bucket list.

Luke Storey: [01:17:59] Yeah, totally. No more cell phones, none of this shit. I guess you could have Wi-Fi in your house, but yeah, at least no cell towers.

Max Casa: [01:18:05] Dude, that's great.

Luke Storey: [01:18:12] All right, you all, we thrived right on through 2022, perhaps the weirdest year to date. And after the end of year, work obligations and holiday family fun, it's easy to start the New Year stressed, worn out and lacking motivation, which is definitely not the way we want to start the new year. So if you're feeling like you need a holiday from the holidays, I have a perfect solution. 

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Max Casa: [01:19:51] Magnesium?

Luke Storey: [01:19:53] Yeah, the magnesium. Yeah.

Max Casa: [01:19:54] Yeah, totally. So for anyone that doesn't know if you ever heard Luke or myself or others rap about magnesium and its benefits, really again, so we have this whole philosophy at Max Vitality, the MVP protocol, which we launched at the beginning of this year, where it's really rooted in the optimization of our mineral levels. 

So we're teaching people and guiding people not just on the importance of minerals, because our minerals are literally the foundation of our physical health, not just our physical health, we got to keep in mind our enzymes are totally mineral dependent. Our biochemicals, our hormones, our metabolism, just about every single biological function is totally run dependent on our mineral levels. 

And magnesium is, in my opinion, the most important one for us to be focusing on because it's responsible for over 42% of our enzymes in our body. 42% of our electrical being is totally run and dependent on magnesium alone. And we stack that with the fact that it's also supposed to be the fourth most abundant mineral in the human body, the second most abundant mineral inside each of our cells. And the fact over 95% of Americans are extremely magnesium deficient, it's definitely an important one for us to be focusing on. 

And so often people end up running to hear that. They hear both the factory farming and the depleted soils because of NPK fertilizer and the tap water and acid rain and all this stuff and they want to run to oral forms. We talked about it's important to have magnesium from all sides and oral is an important tool here, but a lot of the studies on oral supplementation are showing 9 to 12 months to have any impact on our RBC levels, which we had touched on earlier. Anyone that wants to get the RBC tested, should we get through a link in the show notes for RBC MAG test at requestatest.com.

Luke Storey: [01:21:55] Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, requestthetest.com is where I did my Full Monty panel recently. 

Max Casa: [01:22:01] Yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful. Yes. So the Full Monty, you get that--

Luke Storey: [01:22:04] I loved that. It is so much cheaper too. I was just at a clinic and they ordered some labs for me like just hormone panel and stuff like that and I added a couple of things on to it, different levels that I wanted to see. For some reason, my insurance, deductibles, some bullshit. I got a bill for $2,500 from LabCo. I actually was on the phone with them yesterday going, "You guys are high. I'm not paying you $2,500 for a test that cost anywhere else in the world $300. 

But it was a good lesson and just bypassing a doctor in a prescription and your insurance and all that stuff all together and just go to Request The Test, go to a local lab with that rec form, get the blood draw, send it in, and then have your practitioner, whoever that might be, actually go over the results and consult you, but man, the lab test and you can really get burned.

Max Casa: [01:22:51] Big time.

Luke Storey: [01:22:52] If you try and go through the medical system and insurance system, it's such a scam.

Max Casa: [01:22:57] Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up. I was talking to Dr. Mercola, he's crystal clear about this, that he wasn't able to really move the dial on his red blood cell, magnesium markers in the body until he started introducing transdermal forms. And for him, that's via the fluid tank at his house.

Luke Storey: [01:23:17] Oh, does he have one of your tanks?

Max Casa: [01:23:18] Not currently. Coming soon, man.

Luke Storey: [01:23:21] Come on, Joe.

Max Casa: [01:23:23] I know, men.

Luke Storey: [01:23:23] Because they have one of those little metal sematic coffins or something?

Max Casa: [01:23:26] It's got some truffle in that.

Luke Storey: [01:23:30] Yeah. Out of all the ones I've seen, I've not used one of yours yet, but just geeking out on your website and stuff like you guys took it to the next level. Definitely, there's no other tank I would get at this point. I know there's a few online and people have reached out to me over the years with, I don't know, they're just like those shell, but they're like, I don't know, made in the Philippines. They just look cheesy. I don't feel like they would hold the temperature, the filtration system looks wonky. It's not thoughtful enough for me if I was going to spend that money, you're talking like $10,000 to $30,000 or something. Is that a general range of your tanks?

Max Casa: [01:24:10] Yeah, roughly.

Luke Storey: [01:24:11] If you're going to spend that kind of money, you want it right.

Max Casa: [01:24:15] Big time, dude.

Luke Storey: [01:24:16] I want to go back to something. So it's really interesting to learn about the EMF stuff you did, which good on you for that. But you mentioned the transducers in the sound, and this is something I've thought about but never done, maybe because just the tanks have been and didn't have it, but it would be a really unique experience, I think, to introduce sound and even some light element. Do you guys have any light show going on in there in addition to the sound?

Max Casa: [01:24:43] We got the blue light just for you, brother. We'll make sure it comes back. 

Luke Storey: [01:24:50] Extra flickering blue light like fluorescent bulbs over your face.

Max Casa: [01:24:53] That's it.

Luke Storey: [01:24:54] But is there a potential for a different experience, maybe for people that just want variety or people that aren't yet comfortable with that complete deprivation experience?

Max Casa: [01:25:04] Big time. Yeah, dude. So even my six-year-old yesterday in her session-- sometimes people is like that barrier to entry. A lot of people, I'm sure you when you brought peeps down or talk about floating or even people listening to this episode and they comments, "I could never get in one of those things." 

And honestly, I feel empathetic for those people because if you can't sit with yourself in meditation or with your own mind for even an hour, and there's been many studies on this where they put people in a silent, dark room and they ask them for 15 minutes to stay in that silent, dark room. And the majority of the people, within 15 minutes, they opted to administer electric shocks to themselves just for some sort of pleasure and stimulation versus just sitting there with their mind in the silent darkness for 15 minutes.

Luke Storey: [01:25:59] Wow.

Max Casa: [01:26:00] Which tells you enough men. But yeah, so I'm glad you brought that up because there's this whole fascinating realm emerging, this concept in the flow world of passive floats versus active floats. Really a passive float will be-- what I did yesterday is I went into the float tank and I really just set my intention to go into the tank and surrender to the silent darkness and use them.

And tension's a little bit more complex or deep than that, whether it's to go into the surrender to the medicine of the silent darkness and just open up my heart as fully as I possibly can, or surrender to the silent darkness as deeply as I possibly can, or deal with any fears or thoughts they come up or anything like that, any shadow work there. But there's also this whole emerging world of active floats, which is interesting, dude. 

So now maybe people are going into the tank and they're leveraging those powerful underwater sound transducers on the back of the tank and the ox-cord to the back of the tank. They're just plugging their phone into the ox-cord and selecting either their favorite songs, they can bump in there if they want. 

But typically more conscious people are either playing either powerful frequencies inside the tank where they're soaking up those frequencies through the saltwater solution directly into their body, which is powerful, guided breathwork tracks, guided meditations inside the tank and we talked about breathwork and meditation and all that. An interesting one, man, the one I want to touch on is the power of hypnosis inside sensory deprivation.

Luke Storey: [01:27:35] Oh, shit. Son.

Max Casa: [01:27:37] Yeah, dude. So listen to this. There's been studies on this over five times more effective hypnosis when it's done in the float tank versus when it's done outside the float tank, which is why floating is being positioned as a powerful tool for overcoming all limiting beliefs and even addictions of all kinds, because people can now go in and their brain isn't being distracted. So it can put all of its consciousness and brain power on the subliminal messages as they're coming in, which is really cool.

Luke Storey: [01:28:10] That makes perfect sense because you're bypassing the conscious mind. And once you surrender into the float experience, you definitely have access to the subconscious, so it makes sense, anything you want to positive that you wanted to imprint in there makes me think of I recently did a remote hypnosis session to deal with nicotine addiction. So far it's working, but it's--

Max Casa: [01:28:37] Going strong?

Luke Storey: [01:28:37] Bitantsy. Not real comfortable yet, it's been three weeks. I'm still like, how long is this shit going to last? But anyway, I did the hypnosis and then she sent me the recording and I keep forgetting to listen to it. Maybe that's why I'm having a harder time with it. 

But yeah, when he says, "Oh, that's badass," you could pipe even one of your own hypnotherapy sessions, where you really want to get stuff to stick in your subconscious mind when you're in that really hyper receptive state.

Max Casa: [01:29:04] Big time, bro. Yeah, I know even a lot of addiction recovery centers are working for that reason. One for that, I'll do one deeper before I do a little sidetrack, one thing you might find interesting is even the Navy SEALs have been leveraging floating. So the government's been leveraging floating for a long period of time, ever since the days of Lilly and honestly before that, a lot of my research shows, but MKUltra and all stuff in there too. But one of the largest, I'm sure they've been doing all sorts of brainwashing and things like that inside the tank as well.

But one that they've come out and admitted and talked about more in depth is the fact that they've been leveraging floating sensory deprivation as an accelerated learning environment, which is interesting.

Luke Storey: [01:29:53] Oh wow.

Max Casa: [01:29:54] They be able to help these SEALs speed learn languages instead of it taking six months to learn a language, it's taken seals less than six weeks just by doing it inside sensory deprivation, so, bro, that's a 78% increase in speed of their learning just by doing it inside sensory deprivation, which is profound.

Luke Storey: [01:30:13] That's madness.

Max Casa: [01:30:15] Yeah, dude.

Luke Storey: [01:30:15] Holy crap. Oh, man. See, I talked to people like you, and I'm like, I got to do this every day. My last float, when I went to Takuya, I think I was telling you I bought a pack of three because living out here for a year and a half. I just got so busy, and it's probably exactly what I needed because there was a really stressful phase of moving here and all that. 

But when I did that and it was like, I need to be doing this at least once a week and that's been a couple of months and I haven't been back. But I think there's so much value if someone is situated financially in a way where they could get a tank themselves, what a freaking dope investment because of all of these other ways you can play with it, the sound, piping in, things you want to learn. There's just a lot of potential. 

All the different physical healing, creativity. I think that's one of the big things for me about any really super deep subconscious state is the creative ideas and solutions to problems that I have that just don't arrive when I'm in that waking beta brainwave state and just busy doing things running around. There's no space or bandwidth for the mind to start to come up with creative, elegant and artistic solutions to problems or just new ideas that need to come to fruition and whatnot.

Max Casa: [01:31:36] Big time. I feel a lot of us, myself included, so go, go, go. We got so much going on in life and in so many different areas. So for me, I wasn't able to really realize the impact that these other stressors like gravity or sensory overload from this post-modernist world or even just EMFs were having on my system until I went into an environment and laid back and decompressed and surrendered to the silent darkness. And I felt this buzz of relaxation and peace that I had never experienced in the everyday world where everything is constantly banging me and hitting me and stimulating me and distracting me more so than than not.

But so many people are almost unconsciously, subconsciously, today seeking some distraction in the external world as a reflection of this discomfort within themselves that they feel or this stress they feel within themselves. So people are constantly running to the phone, you see people in the bathroom or at dinner or all these things.

Luke Storey: [01:32:43] Yeah, like the guy you're sitting across. I know this stuff and I still find myself, I'm making slow progress with the phone addiction, but it's still a thing.

Max Casa: [01:32:54] Yeah, big time.

Luke Storey: [01:32:55] And then that sensation when you're on your phone and then time just disappears and next thing, you look up and you're like, "It's been 30 minutes. What? What have I been doing?" It's like, "Oh, I just fell in a Telegram or something and had no idea that I was wasting my life on some bullshit."

Max Casa: [01:33:14] Scary, bro.

Luke Storey: [01:33:15] So it's pretty universal. You can be a pretty functional-conscious person and still fall into that trap. 

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So is there anything currently that you guys do with the lighting that is assisting this, or do you foresee in the future utilizing a hypnagogic light like have this thing over there called the Lucia light and have this other thing called the neuro visor and they both do the same thing in different ways where you're bringing about this pretty psychedelic state, frankly, just with these different frequencies of light sets? Have you played around with that or have any plans to?

Max Casa: [01:35:30] Totally, yes, we have. Currently, it's equipped with powerful chroma therapy lights inside the tank. There's a button on the inside of the tank, you can feel it pops out, push it in, and you can start basking in different frequencies of light, whether it's red light therapy we got in there, we got your favorite blue light.

Luke Storey: [01:35:50] Hey, it has its place.

Max Casa: [01:35:51] Exactly. We got all the benefits, you could flip the room and kind of get the benefits of these different frequencies of light while you're in there too. But dude, we would love to at some point, definitely partner up with some company. And as of right now, we love stacking the Lucio light sessions, the pre float, even like Dr. Joe Dispenser he has a powerful mind map course or mind movie course where they do a lot of the kaleidoscope meditations.

Luke Storey: [01:36:18] Yeah, dude.

Max Casa: [01:36:20] So if I'm working on something which I constantly am stacking like the kaleidoscope with my mind movie, with the float tank, doing that before, and really allowing everything to really percolate in there on a really deep, unconscious, subconscious level, the implications for floating and how you want to optimize it consciously for specific intention is really, really cool. It's not just silent, it's meant.

Luke Storey: [01:36:46] Wow, that's a great idea. I'm getting all kinds of ideas. The last float that I did, I hadn't done it in a while, and I feel like it might have been better to go back in and get used to floating again and then start to get creative, but I just had the idea to do a microdose of ketamine when I went in there and it was great. 

But also I realized that the timing of that is really, really important because this was a stroke and it was not very large dose, but it started to kick in before I was in there. And I was like, no, it wasn't the plan. I didn't realize I'm going to take them so long to put me in there. And then once I was in there, it was great because I immediately went to that deep space and it was totally checked out. 

Often times when I float, there's an adjustment period of get my body right, the position right. Making sure I'm not touching my face and getting salt in my eyes and all that. Just acclimating to it, getting used to the water going in your ears and all that and I just whizzed past all of that. But then when it came time to get out and have to take a pee, it was a little challenging to get back in my body and work my muscles to climb out of there. 

I was like, okay, definitely be mindful when you're introducing other substances and things like that. But it was a really deeply and profound, just a huge rest for my system. But I really like the idea of working with Breathwork and these meditation sounds, hypnosis, lights. I think there's just a lot of potential to do some really cool work.

Max Casa: [01:38:18] Big time. Yeah. So you're the guy that leaves the tank yellow, huh?

Luke Storey: [01:38:22] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:38:24] Actually, when I got out, I think I texted a friend of mine, I was like, "Hey, I just had a kloat." K-L-O-A-T, like a K float. I want to patent that idea.

Max Casa: [01:38:35] Yeah, dude, for sure.

Luke Storey: [01:38:36] K-float, however you like.

Max Casa: [01:38:38] I'm in on it.

Luke Storey: [01:38:39] But it was cool. I think there was something to that. I wouldn't advise like, be mindful if it's not something I'm recommending. I felt like I understood the threshold of risk involved and felt very able to be responsible for myself in that situation.

Max Casa: [01:38:54] Totally. Yeah, dude, there's so many people, again, people always ask about mixing psychedelics in the float tank and much like yourself, I'm an avid self-experimenter.

Luke Storey: [01:39:06] I can tell.

Max Casa: [01:39:07] Especially the float tank. So for me I just always recommend starting slow and for me, the silent darkness is already an extremely powerful medicine. It's a super powerful medicine and for me, I always recommend people trying to sober float first and connecting with the silent darkness and learning that medicine first. 

And then after you learn that medicine, you feel called to stack something unconsciously, maybe a commonly like cannabis or edibles or something like that, but maybe not dive in right into 300 Mg of THC or whatever it is.

Luke Storey: [01:39:07] Sound advice.

Max Casa: [01:39:47] But consciously using the minimum effective dose because keep in mind inside that float tank, it's going to be quite expanded and accelerated inside of that tank because all of your awareness is going to be in that space. It can leave you extra ungrounded potentially, dive into these things just consciously using potentially a microdose of some of these substances.

But I think a lot of the people, especially listening to this episode would be shocked that if they floated three times in a short period of time, usually three times in that first month or so, because sometimes the first session you go in and there is an acclimation to it and it's like it's such a new environment. My daughter yesterday was poking around in there and she was just so jazzed up to be in the saltwater, dude, bounced around. 

And I was like, yeah, I bet Milla didn't even get a second to relax but splashing and stuff. But yeah, giving yourself because maybe it takes that person 45 of those first 60 minute float, which is pretty standard, to really drop into that space and connect with their heart and establish that new baseline of relaxation and peace inside the float tank. 

But then when they go in for float number two and maybe a week later, maybe a day later, a couple of weeks or whatever it is, maybe they're able to drop into that and just 20, 30 minutes. Float three, five or 10 minutes, and then eventually they're able to snap right there. And eventually with that biofeedback, the idea would be they're able to tap into those new baselines of peace and stillness throughout the day on cue almost and cultivate that because they've already experienced that and developed a relationship with that baseline inside the float tank. It's just really really a cool thing.

Luke Storey: [01:41:34] So true. Yeah. So back in LA you should take a lot of newbies to go float because I was super into it and I'd always say don't judge the first one. You got to go three times and then you'll know whether you like it or not. And usually, homies would go once and they either like it enough to try the three. Every once someone's like, "No, hell no, this isn't for me. I hate it because I just can't be with myself that long." And then I would stop being friends with them because they were so unconscious. 

But yeah, some people they're not into it. They're like, "This sucks, I'm wet, it's dark. Fuck this, I'm out." But I found that most people, if they go for three and they get the feel of it, it's like riding a bike, you got to learn it to get your balance and just find your way with it, most people tend to take to it where they want to do it semi periodically.

Max Casa: [01:42:22] Big time. Yeah, dude, for me it's like one thing that's really helped me with, I'm sure a lot of people can relate is when I'm working with dude clients versus female clients, I work with a bunch of both of them and the female hormone cycle is working off that moon cycle towards the month long where the dude's hormone cycle is running off that 24-hour cycle. So especially, for me when I work with these dude clients myself included--

Luke Storey: [01:42:48] These dude clients.

Max Casa: [01:42:49] These dudes, young studs.

Luke Storey: [01:42:51] You're funny, dude.

Max Casa: [01:42:53] But we're in this tank, making a practice to establish that baseline at the beginning of every day, to really balance the hormones and set that baseline and get on this consistent schedule with it, because for me, after I'm able to drop into that baseline of peace and stillness and experience that and pinpoint my heart center at the beginning of every day and operate from there, bring my consciousness to that and through that, then as I go throughout the day and maybe someone cuts me off in traffic. 

Or maybe someone flips me the bird, whatever it is or a nasty comment on this live video. Whatever it is. It's not that I won't be as reactive, which I typically won't, but I'm a much more acutely able to recognize this fluctuation away from that baseline of inner peace and stillness, where typically, if I didn't connect with this, I wouldn't have been able to notice or map this out and notice where I was at consciously. 

But yeah, I'm much more able to notice any fluctuation away from that baseline and then as a result, if I notice a fluctuation, a little stress, whatever, going back to the breath, going on a quick walk, a quick meditation, whatever it is, really going in and dropping into that baseline again and then I can operate from there for the rest of the day without being as reactive to operating from that fluctuation.

Luke Storey: [01:44:16] Absolutely. Sound advice, my friend. I wanted to let listeners know that if they want to check out some of the Vitality Salts here, which we're soaking or feeding, which is hilarious, we've been sitting here the whole time, my feet are like prunes now at this point. But it feels healthy good. If you guys want to check out the salts or get your float tank for your home, or if someone has a center, they want to open a biohacking center, I think I mentioned your tanks on a recent episode where I talked about building a wellness center or something like that, but you've been kind enough to give us some discount. 

So if you guys go to lukestorey.com/maxvitality and use the code LUKESTOREY, my name, you get 10% off your salts or 2,500 bucks off your float tank purchase, which is pretty cool. So thank you for that, lukestorey.com/maxvitality. Last question I have for you is what's up with the info-ceuticals? Explain what info-ceuticals are and are you using them to infuse that in your salts or into the water of the float tanks that your clients use.

Max Casa: [01:45:22] Good question. I appreciate that, bro, and I appreciate you letting people know on one of the previous casts as well. I appreciate it too.

Luke Storey: [01:45:29] Oh, for sure. When someone's doing something right, I am more than happy and overjoyed to promote them and support them because I want more conscious companies that do shit right to exist and help more people. There's a lot of crappy tanks out there. I've been in them. They suck. So if you're not doing it right, get out of the way. Maybe if someone makes a cheap tank and that's the best someone can afford, that does serve a purpose. But if somebody wants to get the best of the best and really make it worth their time and energy, then people like you have to exist.

Max Casa: [01:46:02] I appreciate you, man. Yeah. So the infoceuticals do, the salt's got a lot going into it. I know we talked about a decent amount at the beginning of the episode, then we'll miss that. But we got again, in summary, the purest magnesium chloride. Hands down. I've tested every single mine on earth, it's by far the purest. 

With magnesium cofactors, we got the bicarbonate to get more magnesium into the cell and into the mitochondria to accelerate ATP production and the boron, which we know is so great for so many things. But especially to help keep the magnesium in the cell longer, it's a really good hit there. 

So we got that, but it's not just the mag chloride with the co-factors. The way it came about was I was working with a bunch of our friends as well in the biohacking space and I talk with many awesome people like yourself to try to optimize the whole tank, and then my attention went to the float tank solution. So it's like, how can I optimize a solution that we're laying in? That's where we made the switch to this. We can start soaking up mag through the body with the mag chloride, with the cofactors to get more mag in during a float session. 

Then we even started taking that salt and blasting it with powerful infoceutical frequencies, these powerful energetic infoceutical frequencies to infuse information into the salt. So now, while we're soaking in the salt, man, what we've infused in this in particular is magnesium frequencies, is powerful heart opening frequencies, is grounding frequencies. 

So while you're soaking in this stuff, you're soaking your energetic body is also being fed because it's basking in these frequencies and in this information, which is very high vibrational. And then it's not just the infoceuticals, man, I don't know if you saw, but it's also all chemically alive which is cool too. 

Luke Storey: [01:47:56] Yeah. What's up with that? I did notice that actually.

Max Casa: [01:47:58] Yeah. You've delved into, I guess, European alchemy?

Luke Storey: [01:48:03] No, I haven't. It's a subject that I've not yet really explored.

Max Casa: [01:48:08] Dude, it's a whole rabbit hole, let me tell you. It's a really, really interesting approach to healing the root cause of the energetic cause and it's something that we intertwine with our protocol because I have a solid foundation on that as well.

Luke Storey: [01:48:21] Oh, cool.

Max Casa: [01:48:22] But so, for example, an analogy would be like, imagine I'm coming from the farm in Hawaii, if I go outside on Hawaii in that volcanic soil and pluck an apple off of the tree, so when that apple is on the tree and it's connected to its source through the tree, into the earth in its element. We would all agree that that apple on the tree or freshly picked has much more healing potential and life force energy than an apple that's been sprayed and plucked and trucked across the country for weeks on end and stored and preserved and all these things. 

So the apple that's on the tree connected to its source has much more life force energy. So an alchemist would call the second apple, the later apple, the one that's been trucked across the country, is an alchemically dead apple. It has much lower levels of life force and as a result, healing potential if you were to consume the two apples. Make sense?

Luke Storey: [01:49:29] Yeah, with you.

Max Casa: [01:49:31] The same is true, I know it's not commonly looked at it this way with minerals as well. When the minerals are in the mine, deep underground, we're talking miles beneath their surface, in the mine, in the cave, with the humidity, with the other minerals in its elements, those minerals are also alchemically alive. They have much more, again, life force energy and as a result, healing potential than the alternative, which would be salts or minerals that are mined and unconsciously trucked and stored across the globe for years on end, oftentimes in plastic. Yeah, and it's totally taken out of its element and has much less healing potential. 

So through an ancient ceremonial and alchemical process which the alchemists have been using for quite some time, it's a really fascinating story of European alchemy and how it's been this art that's constantly goes through this renaissance of reemerging and then being suppressed, reemerging and being suppressed, but back in the day, the powers that be in Europe and Northern Africa were really afraid of the alchemist. 

And interesting enough, the alchemists back then were the blacksmiths of the day because these blacksmiths were so well versed on the chemistry of these different minerals, and they also had the means to these different furnaces to actually melt and combine these different minerals and elements as well. It's really fascinating. 

So the powers that be kept shunting it down because they're like, hey, if these blacksmiths can brew up some piece of glass that looks and test like a crystal or diamond, they can literally combine chemically these different lesser metals like lead and combine them so that their chemistry is the exact same and what they ended up doing is linking the spiritual aspect to making sure the energy of the gold is the exact same, so that it's identical to that of the actual gold. 

So no one was able to tell the difference. So like, "Hey, these blacksmiths are the only people that could actually potentially amass enough wealth to totally overthrow us, so we get to shut this thing down."

Luke Storey: [01:51:44] Wow. It's like a war between the Masons and the blacksmith?

Max Casa: [01:51:48] I know, it's quite--

Luke Storey: [01:51:51] We're probably still in that war right now.

Max Casa: [01:51:53] Dude, I think we are. Yeah, dude. It's funny. But after working with so many of the world's top alchemists, seeing what they can do with these minerals, in turning these lesser metals into higher metals like gold and even beyond is really, really profound.

Luke Storey: [01:52:11] And so you've worked with one of these wizards to optimize the minerals in the salts, which also go in your tanks?

Max Casa: [01:52:19] Totally, yeah. All the salts been brought through this ancient ceremonial alchemical process with Bunsen burners and it's really, really ceremonial to actually extract the spirit out of the magnesium chloride. And then once you isolated the spirit of the magnesium chloride, you can actually take that and infuse it back into another batch of magnesium chloride salts.

Luke Storey: [01:52:45] Interesting.

Max Casa: [01:52:47] So the only people that I know of that we've actually extracted the oil of magnesium, which is a spirit of magnesium, and then re-infused it back into the salts, which has been such a fun journey. That's a passion of mine. It's a spiritual duty to be able to learn that and then do it and bring it all together in this super power healing salt that we can then fill our float tanks with, or people that can't afford a float tank, they can go in and soak in it like we're doing right now, dude, I don't know about you, but I'm about to fly around the room.

Luke Storey: [01:53:21] I got to say, I feel great. I feel great. I keep talking. We could talk and I'm like, oh, yeah, we're supposed to end. But yeah, that's awesome, man. And thank you so much for your devotion to all the weird things in life that help people and are awesome and relatively unknown in the greater scheme of things. So I appreciate you coming on. Before we close, I got one more question. You've waked up a bunch of water into your jeans.

Max Casa: [01:53:46] Oh, dude, I'm in on it. I'll tell you, the more hair follicles, the better dude.

Luke Storey: [01:53:50] That's funny.

Max Casa: [01:53:51] That was actually totally on purpose.

Luke Storey: [01:53:52] Really? That's great.

Max Casa: [01:53:54] I was about to hop in.

Luke Storey: [01:53:54] I think I'm going to start doing the Vitality Salt foot soak in every episode. What if every guest comes in, and I'm like, oh, take off your shoes?

Max Casa: [01:54:03] Yeah, bro, I'm in on that.

Luke Storey: [01:54:04] But I got one last quick question for you, and that is, who have been three teachers that have influenced your life and your work that you'd like to share with us?

Max Casa: [01:54:12] Beautiful. I appriciate you opening up the floor to that. Yeah, as I reflect, dude, I will say in this way, I've been in the whole journey for a while, but really yourself, in particular because I had originally  gotten into--I was big on following Ben Greenfield and shortly after introduced to you, but your journey, man, and what you've been sharing with the people and your presence and your ability to communicate authentically and honestly has been really, really cool.

Luke Storey: [01:54:51] Wow.

Max Casa: [01:54:52] It's inspired a lot, and not just me, but so many other people, like other people that I have worked with that have also been great teachers of mine and now good friends like Matt Blackburn that we talked about. I know he says that the reason he even started his podcast and did his thing was because of you as well. So the ripple of one man has been profound.

Luke Storey: [01:55:12] Wow. I'm honored. Thank you. Yeah, that's the best answer any guest has ever given. You forgot to talk about how humble I am. I appreciate that, man. I feel that and thank you for the acknowledgment. 

Max Casa: [01:55:28] And on that line, we got to give some credit to people that have been spearheading the Mineral Movement because the mineral is such a big piece of my philosophy and how I've helped heal myself and how we're helping heal so many people. 

So the mineral aspect, people like Matt Blackburn, are a big one. Other than those two, you too. Even my original martial arts instructor has been one of the most profound impacts of my life because I was a young dude, I was probably four years old and a wild man because imagine I had all this energy that I was holding in and suppressing it, it was coming out in all ways, like ADHD and many different things off the wall, like anger and suppressed emotions that I was holding in there. 

So when my parents introduced me to him and he took me under his wing. I couldn't really even walk at the time until like six or seven, he was there with the patience to really sit with me and hold space as he was teaching me martial arts, which has been a skill that's allowed me to not just have that outlet to be able to release that energy, but it's been a way that I've been able to touch a lot of lives and help a lot of people too, you're teaching them a passion of mine, which is martial arts and self defense and everything that comes with that. So I've got to give some love to Sensei Rick.

Luke Storey: [01:56:58] Awesome. Awesome. Sensei Rick, man, I appreciate it. A lot of guests will cite someone earlier in their life. I never mentioned mine, but I did maybe out of all the teachers that I experienced, there was only one and I don't remember her name, but I know that she was an art teacher in this high school that I went to for five minutes, but she was the only teacher that was cool and like you said, just held space for me and I think tried to encourage the things that I had some aptitude in rather than just beating me up for the things that I was not good at, like math and things like that. 

She was like, "Cool, fuck my ass here, paint something." Oh, wow, that's great. Look, sometimes a kid just needs some encouragement of where their talent lies. It's probably one of the issues with our education system in general is this universal misfit of a system onto all these unique kids. 

But anyway, I don't want to get into another rabbit hole. We got to get out of here. Thank you so much for joining me on the show, bro. And thank you for doing good work. Thank you for doing things right, building an awesome company. As a solid entrepreneur, you're doing a great service to our listeners in the world. So thank you.

Max Casa: [01:58:10] I appreciate you, bro. Thank you, man. It's been an honor to be out here in ATX, tearing it up with you guys, and looking forward to another one at some point. Don't you think?

Luke Storey: [01:58:20] Yeah, we got to do that soon. It's on my vision board. It's going to happen ASAP.

Max Casa: [01:58:25] Let's do it. All right. Lots of love, my brother. Thank you, man.

Luke Storey: [01:58:27] Thank you. All right, ladies and gents, we just crushed another episode of The Life Stylist Podcast. And remember that listeners like you can get 10% off your order of Vitality Salts and or 2,500 bucks off a float tank purchase using the code LUKESTOREY at checkout at lukestorey.com/maxvitality. And that link is also in the show notes on your podcast app. 

All right, before we float on out of here, I have one humble request. Check it out. If you found this information to be of value, please take just a quick moment and text it to a couple of friends or even throw a post up on your Instagram stories. Incredibly, this show has managed to hit 10 million downloads with zero advertising over the past six years, and that has happened because generous, thoughtful people like you chose to share it to their networks. 

It might not seem like it helps for you to pass the episodes along the old content chain, but trust me when I say every share matters. I know that I deeply appreciate you listening and of course sharing the shows with which you find resonance. So thank you so much in advance for doing so, and a huge hug for those of you that already did. 

This is a very special week of guys as we'll be dropping another full episode this Friday. Yeah, you get a little bonus this week, two episodes from your old pal Luke. It's Episode 455, Field Tripping: psychedelic entrepreneurship and the journey of waking up with Ron and Levy. 

Now, I did a ton of recording at the end of 2022 and have so many great episodes in the can that I just couldn't wait until next Tuesday to drop another one. So hit follow, subscribe so you don't miss this Friday's fiesta because it is a good one. All right, that's it. We're out. I wish you and yours the best year ever and I can't wait to share with you another 72 great episodes this year. Yes, 72, I counted them and that's about the number. And so then I'll be back at you this Friday with Ronan Levy of Field Trip.

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