Adam Wenguer: [00:00:07] There's like a sacredness about drug use because it makes you feel so beautiful, whatever it is. The second you get in your hand, you do it and that feeling comes over you, but it's an artificial feeling. So when you do something outside of those drugs, and you taste like the divine, you sense the divinity inside of you, you're like, I need to continue down this course. This is Adam Wenguer, and you are listening to The Life Stylist Podcast.

Luke Storey: [00:00:42] Well, my friends, we are back with another doozy of an episode for you today. This is number 437. You can find show notes, links, and transcripts for this bad boy at lukestorey.com/adam.

Here's a little mini bio on our guest, Adam. Our guest, Adam grew up in Miami and attended the University of Florida. He studied martial arts at an exceedingly young age and continues an extensive jujitsu practice as a black belt, as well as training in boxing and Muay Thai kickboxing.

After suffering a spine and leg injury in college, Adam was treated with pharmaceutical opioids, which led to an intense but all too common addiction. On his path to recovery, he became immersed in Zen Buddhism, health and wellness and began his lifelong path into spirituality. 

This eventually led Adam to graduate with a degree in applied physiology and kinesiology as he sought to bring greater physical healing to others as he had done for himself. Then, in 2017, Adam founded Element Health, one of the leading suppliers of the highest quality full spectrum CBD products in the world.

Now, in this episode, we, of course, go deep into Adam's expertise in all things CBD. But there's also some very powerful medicine in his personal journey of healing and awakening. He's just an incredible guy. And I got to say, we just became instant homies from the moment he sat down on the mic as you will, I'm sure, hear during this conversation. 

And here's a quick blast of bullet points to give you a general idea of what we get up to in this meeting of minds and hearts.  We discuss being prepared for the proverbial shit to hit the fan, the ethics of hunting, and why Adam chooses to hunt wild hogs with his bare hands and a knife, his run with opioids and how he escaped a life of addiction, finding the divine inside yourself when you're convinced that drugs are the only way to get there, his life-changing experience with meditation and his path into Zen Buddhism and his numerous near-death experiences, what led Adam to formulate his first unique CBD products at home and then to eventually scale his operation to what it is today. 

He also shares with us the scoop on the language often used to market CBD and what to look out for, how CBD helps with anxiety, depression, and insomnia, various cannabis strains used to make CBD products, the pros and cons of indoor versus outdoor hemp growing, the various extraction methods from least to most toxic, my recent harrowing run in with CBD gummies laced with something called delta-8 THC, the risks of vaping, the truth about CBD topicals, CBD for pets, and the interesting tale of how a smokable ayahuasca led Adam to reverse his zero sperm count and conceive his son, and finally how Adam has used baby biohacking to set his adorable one-year-old son up for a long, healthy life and so much more. 

And I'll give you a heads up. By the end of this conversation, you will likely want to try some of Adam's incredible CBD products. So I'll tell now. You can do so by visiting lukestorey.com/elementhealth. He also generously provided a 15% discount code for you listeners, which is, of course, LUKE. He also provided the discount code, LUKE which will get you a 15% off at lukestorey.com/elementhealth. And as you'll hear in this conversation, I truly love his products and I'm sure that you will too, so I highly recommend checking them out. 

Okay. My fellow travelers, I now invite you to join me on the journey of getting to know the wisdom and compassion of Adam Wenguer on The Life Stylist Podcast. Adam, welcome to the show, man.

Adam Wenguer: [00:04:23] Thank you. Thank you.

Luke Storey: [00:04:24] I want to start out with your current life right now. And what I'm curious about, just from reading your bio and whatnot, is the fact that you live on a farm in Florida. And that's interesting to me because I think right now many of us are seeking to get out of cities and become more self-sufficient. But secondarily, because I had no idea there was even such thing as a farm in Florida because I've never been anywhere where there's anything except-- what do you call them? Are they swamps?

Adam Wenguer: [00:04:50] The Everglades?

Luke Storey: [00:04:52] The Everglades. Thank you. Yeah, everglades or city is kind of the only thing I've ever seen.

Adam Wenguer: [00:04:56] I mean, most of Florida is like farmland, actually, aside from Tampa, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando.

Luke Storey: [00:05:02] I guess that's why. I've only just flown into a city.

Adam Wenguer: [00:05:04] Most people. Yeah. Yes, we have 13 acres, which I thought was a lot. But when you're there and you meet a neighbor from 20 miles away or wherever it is, 20 acres away, and they tell you, "Yeah, I got 400 acres." And this I'm like, "Oh, I guess I'm still a city boy to an extent." But yeah, in 2020, we just knew we wanted to live on the land. And when we had a child in 2021, I wanted to be fully prepared for him to be grounded, to know nature, to know his birthright, to be part of nature, to be part of more than just the fast-paced city life.

And we have cattle there. We have a really neat home. It was built before we got there, but the architect wanted it to be like a bolly tree house type thing. So when you go and you look at it it doesn't look like it belongs in Florida, but the cows, the orange groves, you realize, oh, I am in Florida. 

And it's a little bit different from what most people picture in terms of mountainous, or plains, or living in nature. It's pretty rugged. We have huge spiders I tell people like the size of our hand that just might be on your wall in your living room.

Luke Storey: [00:06:20] Really?

Adam Wenguer: [00:06:20] Eventually they start sensing, "Oh, there's people here. Let me back off." And I like the idea that there's a lot of animal life there because I'm a hunter. I think it's important to know where your food comes from. A lot of people don't understand hunting. To me, it's a painful thing every time I do it. I enjoy going and I want to bring my son. But when it comes to the actual hunting part, I really feel it deep in my core for the animal. And I think that's an important thing because I eat meat. So I need to know what it feels like. And I wanted him to know this. 

Not only that, it was chaotic in 2020. So I thought, you know what? It'll be a little bit safer. Sure, there might be a tidal wave in Florida or who knows? But we won't be in Miami Beach. We won't be surrounded by tons of people. And it's just us. We can breathe fresh air. We have oak trees that are hundreds of years old, probably more that are just the most beautiful things you've ever seen. And I know that if something ever really went down, we are safe. It's like a fortress.

Luke Storey: [00:07:22] Wow, that's so cool. You live in my dream. This was my first step toward getting there. It is like, how to get out of Los Angeles. That was step one and then we actually tried to find something here with more land and kind of further out and just only had two weeks to look. And so we ended up here and we're happy. But man, I just love hearing about all of that. How did you figure out? Do you have farmhands to help you with the cows and stuff or are you having to learn all this?

Adam Wenguer: [00:07:49] Oh, it's funny because my wife's family is from Vermont and they said, "Okay, we're tired of Vermont, the cold." And they moved to a small fishing town called Inglewood, kind of like southwest Florida. We went to visit and we're like, we just fell in love. And it's not very rural. It's still like somewhat suburban, but has a laid-back vibe. And me and my wife were since we were on vacation, we were like, "You know what? Let's do a few packages for Elliman."

And I had some of my clients I really wanted to send stuff out to. And we went to the post office and I started a conversation randomly with the woman there and she told me, "Yeah, I live about an hour east of here in this farmland area called Sebring." And just something hit me right then and I said, "Give me your realtor's number. I need to know this." So she connected me with this realtor. And one day, a random day in Miami Beach, I woke up and I was like, "Kris, we got to go look." Kris is my wife. We got to go look for just our own off-grid type house. I did not know what to expect. I had no idea if we were going to get a small house, a big house, a lot of land. I just knew I wanted to be able to hunt and have fresh air. City life has a lot of noise.

Luke Storey: [00:09:00] Yeah, I just noticed that going back to the LA for the first time and coming on to years of most. People ask me how it was and it was great to see friends, but man, it was loud, literally physical noise. Dude, oh my God. But not just the noise, but the energetics of it. So what about the cows? This is what I'm curious about. How did you learn how to actually work with livestock?

Adam Wenguer: [00:09:24] So I don't personally do the work with livestock. We have neighbors that manage these because we go back and forth a lot with my business. We have to travel a good amount. They are in our massive pasture area and there pretty self-sufficient as long as they're getting food, they're eating all our grass, pooping everywhere, which is perfect for growing mushrooms. Not like I do that. But--

Luke Storey: [00:09:46] One could if they wanted to.

Adam Wenguer: [00:09:48] Exactly. And farm life is a lot more challenging than you anticipate. I mean, if you want to spend thousands of dollars a month on having other people come in, but there's something so rewarding about getting your hands dirty, which in the rainy season, grass grows very quickly. Every two weeks you get to mow, and imagine 13 acres.

Luke Storey: [00:10:09] Wow.

Adam Wenguer: [00:10:10] It's brutal. And vines come from all over the place. We have a pond in the back where we fish, and--

Luke Storey: [00:10:16] And you get the fish out of that?

Adam Wenguer: [00:10:17] Oh, yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:10:18] Oh, nice.

Adam Wenguer: [00:10:18] And I introduced a lot more.

Luke Storey: [00:10:19] Oh, cool.

Adam Wenguer: [00:10:20] Native species to Florida. Just in case of anything, I want to be prepared for everything and vines growing literally out of our little pond and in the general area and they crawl onto your house. And that's the perfect way for spiders to get into your house and huge insects and snakes and everything you can possibly imagine.

Luke Storey: [00:10:40] Wow. You got alligators and stuff around there?

Adam Wenguer: [00:10:42] Alligator in my backyard that came up when I was feeding the fish. Small, but very dangerous. We have a lot of wild boar.

Luke Storey: [00:10:51] Is that what you're hunting out there?

Adam Wenguer: [00:10:53] Deer and wild boar. But learned very quickly that when you own this type of property, I don't like hunting my property.

Luke Storey: [00:11:01] Oh, okay.

Adam Wenguer: [00:11:02] That was my dream, to be able to hunt my property, wake up 5 AM, do what I need to do, harvest the animal and that's it. But the first time that I saw a family of deer walking by, I grabbed my wife and I said, "Look at this. It's the most majestic thing." I don't even really like calling it my land. It's the land we're just inhabiting it right now.
And when I saw this family, I said, okay, I can't hunt here anymore. If you do that, they're not going to exist anymore in my particular area. So I travel a little bit throughout Florida, Texas, Tennessee, different places to hunt what we need to hunt.

Luke Storey: [00:11:39] Yeah, I know what you mean. We have a shit ton of deer around this neighborhood, and we love them. But I do think sometimes if the proverbial shit hit the fan, I would love them in a different way. I mean, I think about that sometimes like, what if there's no grocery stores and no one's bringing food from online orders or something like that? You're going to eat something.

Adam Wenguer: [00:12:04] The concept of hunting season goes out the window.

Luke Storey: [00:12:06] Yeah. Yeah. But then I thought about it. The type of rifle that you'd probably take a deer down with could go through quite a few houses on its way, so that's a whole other thing. You were mentioning something about-- before we go there, actually, I really appreciate your reverence for that. I know hunting in general is very triggering for people. And I grew up with a dad who was a lifelong hunter and dabbled as a kid in it.

But when I moved out here, I went hunting for boar and deer and I shot a boar. I did an episode about it. We'll link in the show notes. But it was a profoundly spiritual experience. And really my motivation for that was to try and regain my relationship with the natural world and also to reconcile the fact that I do eat meat. Yet I don't want to have prior-- I didn't want to have any part in how it's actually produced. It's like, I want a nice little clean package at the grocery store and I don't want to go to the slaughterhouse and I don't want to look at all of that.
And it was a very intimate, as you well know, very intimate and visceral, tangible experience. It wasn't something I necessarily thought, "Oh, I'm going to pick this up and start hunting all the time."

I mean, I would go again. It hasn't been available. So I've been busy with other stuff. But it did really help me understand the cycle of life in a way that no book or interview or anyone else could. There was something really magical about that moment, and I still have a part of that boar sitting in my freezer in the garage. And it's getting to the point where, like, I have to start eating more of it before it goes bad. And that was my contract with that animal. 

But it's challenging because I, a, suck at cooking, b, I have less than zero interest in learning how to cook. Although the other day a friend of mine sent me a recipe for the Tenderloin and I followed it to the T and it was actually quite delicious. I managed to do it right.

Adam Wenguer: [00:14:04] What did you do? I'm just curious.

Luke Storey: [00:14:06] I seared it for a couple-- however long in some butter in a frying pan and then set the oven for whatever the temperature was, left it in for the exact time, and then I took my first meat thermometer, which I ordered on Amazon. I didn't even know what they were.

Adam Wenguer: [00:14:22] That's a lifesaver, by the way. Did you enjoy meat?

Luke Storey: [00:14:23] Well, that's the thing, dude. I got so excited because my ten-- And then I buttered it up in the sear with all these herbs-- salt and pepper and all that stuff. And then I baked it and checked the temperature till it was just right, took it out and it was still a little bit pink and it was really tender and delicious. I got so excited that I cooked up a steak at the same time. 

I was like, "If I lose this skill, man, I'm screwed." So I did the same thing to the steak and it came out perfect also. So I'm like, holy crap, I finally learned how to cook meat.

Adam Wenguer: [00:14:54] I got tricks for you with a slow cooking and pressure cooking.

Luke Storey: [00:14:57] This is what I need to know, my friend.

Adam Wenguer: [00:14:59] That's the trick.

Luke Storey: [00:14:59] Because the rest of that boar is quite tough.

Adam Wenguer: [00:15:02] Oh, it won't matter.

Luke Storey: [00:15:03] Okay. I have all these big shoulders and bigger pieces of meat, and I was a little scared to. There's nothing to sear them in their massive. So, anyway, thank you for your reverence in terms of how you approach that. I think it's really important for people to understand that many people who hunt regularly are very conscious and also ecologically conscious. My friend Dan Vitale has a great podcast and he has people on all the time talking about that. It's called Wild Fed. He's a hunter-gatherer type and he talks always about the land conservation and the fact that many, if not most hunters are avid environmentalists.

And I think a lot of people don't see that side of it. They just picture rednecks with a gun rack who's just out shooting the shit out of everything. There's a lot of people who are doing it very conscientiously. So thank you for that, but what I wanted to get to--

Adam Wenguer: [00:15:56] Well, there's something else about that. You mentioned you wanted to have the experience itself instead of just picking up something from a grocery store. I don't want to go too deep into hunting per se. But that was a huge thing for me. And Terence McKenna talks about this a lot. He's one of my favorite philosophers of all time. You always have to do the experience because I can listen to 100 podcasts. I don't listen to too many, but when I do, I'm learning. I'm reading from books, but actually doing the experience is the most important thing. But it falls on deaf ears these days because of the internet. 

So one thing with wild boar, you mentioned wild boar, I don't like calling them a nuisance animal, but they are considered invasive because they destroy crops in Florida and Texas.

Luke Storey: [00:16:43] Yeah. I think the state of Texas will pay you to go hunt them here.

Adam Wenguer: [00:16:49] Yeah. They used to pay us when I was back in college. Now you generally pay for it because you're cooking the meat unless it's wild, or it's hard to find. They're hard. The thing is, the hunting we do for boar is we use dogs to track them. So I wanted to get like as primal as possible because I think there is a little bit of a disconnect when I have a rifle or a boar from 30 or 50 yards or even 300 yards. And you're just seeing something through a scope and then you walk over and the life is gone. I wanted to know exactly what it feels like.

So we found a type of hunting. It's pretty big in Florida. People won't mention this online too much, but we use dogs to track them and then we find the dog and we do it by hand. So I bring a knife with me like a 9-inch blade. And-- 

Luke Storey: [00:17:42] Holy shit. This is what I was going to ask you about. I thought you mentioned something about this earlier in passing.

Adam Wenguer: [00:17:47] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:17:48] Wow.

Adam Wenguer: [00:17:49] I wouldn't say I take pride in it, but I think it's important for people to know. We go and once the animal's been cornered, I grab it by hand and put it on its side. And it's a very dangerous thing.

Luke Storey: [00:18:02] Yeah. 

Adam Wenguer: [00:18:03] Oh, yeah. I have pictures I could show you which you don't even want to see. But most of the time they realize, like, something's happening and they want to get you. And I like the fact that it's even. A lot of people consider hunting like this cruel thing like an animal is tied to a tree or it's so far and if someone's a bad shot, whatever it might be. But with this, I know I'm in almost equal amount of danger as the animal is.

Luke Storey: [00:18:28] Oh, dude. In our hunting trip I did out here, not with the one that I shot, that was a clean shot, probably 50, 75 yards and everything went well. It was a quick and probably shocking, but relatively painless death. But on the second day, my friend shot one and just injured it and we were surrounded by a whole bunch of pigs. They all came running at us. And luckily, many of them were small. But yeah, I skedaddled the hell out of there, but they meant business.

Adam Wenguer: [00:18:58] Think about that if some injured your family.

Luke Storey: [00:19:01] Yeah. And my dad, he's never really been a boar hunter, but long-time elk and deer and all the things. He was telling me that the boars are really dangerous for your dogs because if they gouge your dogs their-- what are they called? Tusks or something?

Adam Wenguer: [00:19:15] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [00:19:16] They're all full of bacteria from them rooting around and stuff and they'll give your dog an infection that is often untreatable.

Adam Wenguer: [00:19:23] Yeah, I've seen guys that have cuts all the way through their arm, and apparently, you're not supposed to stitch it right then because the bacteria will just go inside. You have to drain it for a long time. So my wife has like a heart attack every time I'm going for hunting. I try to keep it very minimal, but the problem is--

Luke Storey: [00:19:40] I'm going to ask Kris about this. When are you going to put the kibosh on this? You've got a kid now.

Adam Wenguer: [00:19:44] Never. Never. He's going to come with me. The first time I went, the guy I went with brought his four-year-old walking. They grew up doing this. This is like Native Americans hunting buffalo. We have some of the original cowboys in the United States are buried literally a quarter mile down the road, famous cowboys. And this is what they do in this state. And this is Florida. It's crazy Florida, but I don't see it as that. And when I put it down by hand, I am there with the animal. And if you saw me, it's like a psychedelic experience. It's almost like up there with the birth of my child.

Luke Storey: [00:20:23] I totally get it.

Adam Wenguer: [00:20:25] I feel for that animal.

Luke Storey: [00:20:26] Yeah, I totally get that. One interesting thing about the stigma against hunting that I've observed is that no one who is vehemently anti-hunting seems to be-- and I may have just missed them, but they don't seem to be against it if indigenous peoples are doing it. You never hear people complaining about Native Americans or any other tribal peoples around the world. And it's like, how do you guys think we got here? You know what I mean?

It's almost like, well, if you're a European and your great, great, great, great grandparents come over here on a boat or wherever they came from, then you're out of bounds. But as long as you're where you're from, it's cool. It's just a funny thing the way people think I've observed that. But back to this boar hunting by hand, and I had no idea where even to go in this direction--

Adam Wenguer: [00:21:17] But this is not a hunting podcast by the way.

Luke Storey: [00:21:20] The title is going to say something about CBD and people are going to be like, "What?" But no, I just like to get to know you. Do you think that you're-- because I'm imagining myself even getting anywhere near boar and that's not happening. Do you think your martial arts training-- from what I understand, you're pretty accomplished martial artist in various practices, do you think that has something to do with why you have the confidence and the ability to do that by hand?

Adam Wenguer: [00:21:46] It's a great question. I never thought about it like that.

Luke Storey: [00:21:49] Because I'm picturing a jujitsu situation or some kind of-- I'm picturing you like an MMA fighter that your opponent is that boar when I try to visualize the scenario.

Adam Wenguer: [00:22:01] It's very intense. And that goes into something like the healing practices I do with a lot of my clients. And I think we need to push the boundaries of physical intensity and physical challenges. I think we need to be very scared sometimes while we're doing things, and I'm sure it helps. It has to help. I'm very physically fit. Yeah, I could do some damage if I really wanted to. I'm the most peaceful person. My wife's like, "You are so calm. I thank God people don't mess with you." 

But actually, the guy that taught me about this, he's about your height and much skinnier than you. He just grew up doing it. And everything is a practice, from whatever you do in life to art, music, making love, hunting. It's all a practice and you can do it so effectively that the animal is not releasing a ton of cortisol. It's happening so quick. And when I use the knife, I try to be like a surgeon. I put it right in the spot, right through the heart as quick as possible, and the animal's life as opposed to I know, like you said, people can shoot an animal and harm it very quickly. 

The thing she probably doesn't like is the smaller animals and the females, which generally tend to taste better. I don't hunt those. I always have to hunt like the biggest male there is. I don't know what it is. Something inside me, I couldn't do it. So I pick the biggest male when we're tracking them. And yeah, it's very dangerous. The last one I took was only like 200 pounds, but the one that I caught for our wedding, actually, we served it at our wedding, that was about 300 pounds.

Luke Storey: [00:23:38] Oh, my God.

Adam Wenguer: [00:23:39] I'm like 175.

Luke Storey: [00:23:40] Oh, my God.

Adam Wenguer: [00:23:41] So it's wild. You have to have very clean technique. And I think the intent is there. I call upon my ancestors of generations knowing that they had to do things like this. They didn't have the convenience of a grocery store. So it's all a very sacred and spiritual experience for me.

Luke Storey: [00:23:59] Yeah. Respect. Thank you for sharing that. I think another thing, I just think about things from all angles. It's the way my brain works because I find it healthier to not be polarized and get too attached to any rigid idea about anything. And I just always like to keep my mind flexible. So I listen to all sides of things when there's contention.

One thing I've observed too is that when it comes to man hunting animal, whether that be boar, how you're doing it-- knife or with a firearm, even in the worst-case scenario where an animal is injured and not killed, I think the worst is if they're badly injured and they get away and they're going to suffer is probably still less brutal for that animal than getting taken down by a predator. 

So you're taking down a boar with a knife and your bare hands. I'm imagining, in most cases it's actually causing less suffering in that boar than a mountain lion or a whole pack of mountain lions taking that boar when you watch things--

Adam Wenguer: [00:24:58] The thing's on its back or neck. 

Luke Storey: [00:24:59] Yeah. When you watch these shows in the Sahara, these nature shows. I've observed two myself, I'm always for the gazelle never the lion. But then I've thought about it and thought, well, that lion is really hungry and has a bunch of hungry cubs, so why am I always for the gazelle? But anyway, when you watch that, death by nature is freaking torturous and brutal and never quick and clean.

Adam Wenguer: [00:25:24] You watch that. It's said on Instagram nature is metal. I mean, everyone does. But yeah, death shouldn't be looked at as this horrible thing, maybe the excess suffering aspect. And they don't discriminate-- a lion, a jaguar, they don't discriminate what size the animal is. It's wild. As long as the mom, I think, can take care of the baby still and I've seen that before, like people hunt the females. I don't do it. I just think letting them procreate more and do what they need to do. 

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So take me back into your past a little bit. So I mentioned the martial arts. It seems like that's been a huge part of your journey. I also know that in your past you had some struggles with addiction. Maybe take us to the intersection of those two and how they meet or if they meet.

Adam Wenguer: [00:28:08] Yeah, I grew up in Miami and there were laws at the time for integrating every school. It was called 30, 30, 30, which meant every school had to be 30% White, 30% Hispanic, 30% bBlack. So you can grow up in a great neighborhood, a horrible neighborhood, and you would have a combination of all people, at least when I was growing up. 

So a lot of the schools that had a lot of bad kids, the principals, the teachers, I guess they decided let's send the worst kids to the nicer areas, which sounds pretty crazy. I guess they wanted to get rid of the troublemakers from their school. It's understandable. 

But I just remember growing up and having to hide money in my socks because I'd go to middle school and my pockets would get emptied all the time. I was a tiny little kid that just listen to heavy metal, just reading comic books, and there were literally gangs in middle school. And they would beat the crap out of me for being a little white boy, even though I'm not white. My dad was born in Cuba, but I look like when you're in Miami, and every day was a fight. I remember--

Luke Storey: [00:29:19] Where you ever scream like, "Yoh, yoh, I'm not white."

Adam Wenguer: [00:29:22] No, you couldn't scream. And you're getting kicked in the head.

Luke Storey: [00:29:24] Even with the Cuban flag t-shirt?

Adam Wenguer: [00:29:28] Yeah. It was wild. It was just like a different upbringing. And I told people this stuff and they would not believe me. There was like a day it was actually called Cracker Day in Florida. I thought everyone knew about this and it was like, if you were white, you just got beat up. I used to have my face, like in elementary school, actually, the water fountains. A friend of mine, even he went on to play professional football, big dude. He's like 300-something pounds playing ball, back then he was 2-something and it must have been like 80, grabbed my head and smashed into the water fountain and I was just on the ground bleeding. No teachers around, nothing. I just remember extreme violence all the time. And I thought, this is just like what happened.

And it wasn't like a purely race thing, people just loved fighting. It's wild because now I see way less racism because of the blend of music. Social media allows everyone to come together. It's created more peaceful society, not online. In schools, there's less gangs. At least from what I've experienced in Miami, they don't put up with stuff like that, but violence was like a huge thing. 

So my parents put me into martial arts at a young age. I guess they figured I needed some discipline. And I trained a good amount, but they coincided with drugs. I couldn't really tell you. Drugs is also a huge thing growing up in a big city. So I think just fighting and drugs was what I thought was interesting at the time. I just thought this was normal.

Luke Storey: [00:30:59] I would agree with half of that. Do you think you got into-- I mean, a lot of kids experiment with drugs and many of them get over it and they go off to college and live their life. And then others like myself got completely swallowed up in the culture and in the use of drugs. Mine was now, looking back, a very clear response to trauma that I experienced as a kid. Do you think all of this violence and stuff was part of your kind of trauma story that led you into problems with drugs later?

Adam Wenguer: [00:31:31] No, I actually don't think so. I think what happened was you're fed so much in Miami about like, dare, don't do drugs. Pod's horrible. This is horrible. I remember my parents telling me that and it's funny because my parents were in the 60s partying. Dad had a huge afro and was like a big pod dealer. I found out later on.

Luke Storey: [00:31:52] Oh, really? 

Adam Wenguer: [00:31:54] Yeah, and all this. And when they're telling you, don't do drugs, don't do drugs, don't do drugs, and the only group that took me in, back in those days, middle school, high school early on, they were smoking weed, but it was the worst weed ever. It was literally like, sticks and stems.

Luke Storey: [00:32:08] I remember that.

Adam Wenguer: [00:32:09] And I smoked and I'm like, "This is not what everyone told me. I'm not going to hell. I'm not going to die." And once you start doing that, you're like, "Oh, what's the next thing?" And they just happened to be like a great psychedelic renaissance at the time. So things like LSD and mushrooms and all this was so widely available. So I was like, oh, let's try the next thing. Let's try the next thing. I'm not dying. I'm not getting sick. 

So it was a lot about like mental exploration, just seeing if I'm being lied to about drug use, being this horrible thing because I didn't experience at this time opioids and heroin and crack and all that. It was more of just, I guess, what people consider like fun drugs.

Luke Storey: [00:32:50] Heroin's fun the first three or four times or maybe the first month, depending on how--

Adam Wenguer: [00:32:58] And not withdrawing. But I'm grateful for that too because it introduced me to psychedelics at a very young age. I didn't do it in a ritual way, but I did have a sacred connection to them. But no, I don't think there was a connection with the vines. I just wanted to explore. I always just wanted to push the boundaries of what was extreme and just discover new things.

Luke Storey: [00:33:24] Did you end up having problems with the harder street drugs and stuff later, or was it just kind of a phase and you naturally gravitated? Did you ever have to go to treatment or have a hard stop sobriety in there?

Adam Wenguer: [00:33:37] Oh, yeah. OxyContin got really big in South Florida. That was when OxyContin 180s and 80 or 160s and 80 milligrams came out.

Luke Storey: [00:33:48] That was after my time, but yeah, I've heard of it.

Adam Wenguer: [00:33:51] This is like the equivalent of 64 Percocets in a tiny pill, the tiniest pill. And they didn't warn anyone. And I had a martial arts injury. I remember my foot just swole up. I was sparring and whatever. I took a kick, my foot swole up to being a football. And I had a crack in my spine. I was the captain of the rowing team and rowing is very detrimental to your spine and your lower back. 

So I was a great athlete even though I partied and I was into fighting and martial arts. But I had these injuries that as I started getting into college, I was getting prescribed pills and getting these pills and I'm like, "Oh, my pain's gone."

That was such a weird thing for me because I would go to class and I wasn't high like, I'm on pod or mushrooms. I'm enjoying myself. I'm not in pain and I'm sitting there, I'm paying greater attention to the instructor or the teacher, the professor. I was sober, I was like, "This is great. I'm fine. Whenever I want, I'll just stop taking it." 

And I remember one day I didn't take as much and I went to class. I was at the University of Florida and I started just feeling that little itch. I'm like, "Oh, it feels like my back hurts a little." I'm like, "Oh, I got the sniffles now."

I'm tired and I'm on the phone with my mom when I get home. And I told her. She says, "Oh yeah, you probably have flu or something like that or maybe a cold." And I said, "I'll just hold on a minute. Let me take some of my medicine." And I'm on the phone with her. And it was like 30 minutes later, I'm like, voo symptom's on, no pain. Pure happy. I'm talking. 

I'm like, "Hey, how's it going?" You know how it is. And she says, "Oh, you sound much better. What happened?" I said, "Oh, I just took my medicine." She says, "Yeah, that's called addiction." I go, "No, no, no. These are pills from the doctor. I'm not snorting lines. I'm not shooting dope or anything crazy." And she goes, "No, you don't understand."

And it was like, wow, I remember this moment. And I just played on and off with oxycodone for a while. And then in college, people started discovering you could smoke it and it became like a communal thing, like a party thing. And then eventually people started injecting it. 

And it was so easy to get because in South Florida there were these pill mills. And it's a pretty famous story now because there would be a clinic that opens up and the pharmacy right next to it. So they would prescribe these 200 pills over 80 milligrams to an elderly lady who's on Medicare or Medicaid, I forget.
And she would fill it right next door, just walk over to somebody and they would pay like $10,000 for this little bottle of pills. And she had $10,000 and she didn't have to do anything. And it spread like wildfire.

Luke Storey: [00:36:29] Wow. Wow.

Adam Wenguer: [00:36:29] I remember there were teachers in schools, when in school they would want some of it. It was very popular at the time. You just didn't know how it did.

Luke Storey: [00:36:38] You just reminded me of one point in LA, I heard about a doctor who was shady, and it was some kind of, quote, "chiropractic clinic." He was like a pain manager.

Adam Wenguer: [00:36:52] Pain management. That's it.

Luke Storey: [00:36:54] Yeah. And a friend of mine told me about it. Man, you go there and just say your back hurts and they'll write you a script for whatever you want. And I remember going in and it was like fill out some fake-ass questionnaire. He's sitting there, totally not present. "Oh, yeah. What's wrong?" You're like, "Oh," And I actually did have back pain. But then he put you in the chiropractic adjustment chair and kind of cracked your back and they sent you off with you. I totally forgot about that.

Adam Wenguer: [00:36:54] Yeah, that was the start of it.

Luke Storey: [00:37:18] But there'd be all these suspect characters in the waiting room. There was no little old ladies or anyone actually needing the medication. It was like a bunch of junkies.

Adam Wenguer: [00:37:26] And they would have folders of all their injuries. It was so funny. It was such a scam. I never actually went to those. I would just get pills from people.

Luke Storey: [00:37:34] Did this hit a critical mass point where you're like, okay, I'm going to clean up my act or was it just something you phased out over or what?

Adam Wenguer: [00:37:43] No, there's no phasing out of hardcore OxyContin and heroin use. And then you start integrating cocaine to stay awake and it just becomes like this mess. And it was a long time that I was doing it. And you keep up a front for a while. I was still working out. I was in great shape because they are somewhat functional drugs at the beginning for the first year or two. 

And eventually, I just dealt with the withdrawal and it was horrible. And you read online and the internet wasn't what it is today. It was like 2003 ish. And they would say withdrawing last 72 hours, the sickness. I'm like, "All right, I can tough it out." The dope sickness will be over in 72 hours, then it's over. But they don't tell you about the depression.

Luke Storey: [00:38:26] Oh, man.

Adam Wenguer: [00:38:27] They don't tell you about the years and months that you're not evolving as a person, you're not understanding what your emotional capabilities are and how to deal with them. That is the worst part of alcoholism, everything. Any drug that's abused people don't understand, you're not maturing in that time. 

And I just had to figure something out. I was so tense all the time and I felt the stress in my chest. We always call it like junkies call a monkey on your back. It's always calling. There's this like little demon on your shoulder, "Oh, you're having a bad day. Just get one pill."

Luke Storey: [00:39:04] Or a big ass gorilla.

Adam Wenguer: [00:39:05] Yeah, yeah. A gorilla. And we romanticize it like hell movies, it's funny. They show someone at a bar taking shots and you're like, "Oh, that's so beautiful." Or some guy sitting with cognac in his den with a fireplace listening to classical music. I tell my wife that all the time like, "It looks so beautiful. It's so artistic." And I'm like, "I would never do it. I mean, it just sucks." Why would I sit there by myself drinking?

But yeah, I was like, I need to find something. And I found a course called taming the anxious mind at the University of Florida. And it was based on-- I believe he was Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. He wrote a famous book Wherever You Go, There You Are. 

And I was like, I remember taking psychedelics. There was some kind of connection, the feeling, the sensation I had, the connection to what that book told me. And there was quotes in it from thorough famous artists, American authors, sorry. And I'm reading it and it's just having such a profound effect on me, everything. I felt this sacredness about it. There's a sacredness about drug use because it makes you feel so beautiful-- heroin, whatever it is. The second you get in your hand, you do it, and that feeling comes over you, but it's an artificial feeling. 

So when you do something outside of those drugs and you taste the divine, where you sense the divinity inside of you, like, "I need to continue down this course." So it was a meditation class. It was very basic. It was mindfulness meditation. We did little 20-minute bouts and we read from a book and it just blew me away. It cleared my mind. When I was so stressed out, I would use the meditative techniques. And it wasn't just sitting on a cushion, that was great. 

But there was walking meditation which blew me away. Now I'm seeing people like Dr. John Spencer talks about walking meditation. Famous spiritual gurus talk about these things, how important it is to walk into your neighborhood and create your day. I didn't know about this 20-something, 20 years ago. And I would just do this, walking through my neighborhood, everything became a meditation to me. I remember one time I was driving back home to Miami and I said, "I'm going to breathe and I'm going to count every single breath." It's a six-hour drive, and I counted every breath and it was 1,206. 

And when I got home, I saw my parents and I was like, "Hey." And they are like, "Hey, are you okay? Are you on drugs again?" "No, I was just counting my breath." And they're like, "From where?" I said, "From Gainesville." They're like, "Huh. You're on drugs, aren't you?" I was like, "No, no, no." And they realized how important meditation was to me. They would see me and they're like, "This guy doesn't crave drugs anymore."

And the funny thing was, the course ran out. It was a three-month course. So I went to the instructor and I said, "Yeah, what's the next one?" He goes, "There is no next one. You're done." "Well, please let me come back. Please" And he let me come back. And after the first week he says, "Do you want to help teach the course? Because I can see it really resonates with you." And then I said, "Sure." I was like 20 years old. I can't even remember how old I was. That was a past life. 

And we did the course. I taught and I said, "Now what?" And he goes, "Keep going with your practice. Figure something out." And I just searched and searched. And like I said, the internet was not an easy place to navigate back then. Now you Google and all this. Back then, I forget what it was, AltaVista, who knows? And I came across a Zen Buddhist meditation center. I'm like, "That sounds cool." Zen Buddhism. I had no idea what it was. 

And I walked in and I'm greeted by the abbot of the meditation center, a guy in these traditional robes. And he has a country accent because Gainesville was country. He's like, "Hey, you want to meditate?" "Hell yeah, bro." I'm playing the part. And he brings me inside. I just sense a serenity to the place.

And there was a bunch of people there, all walks of life. And I'm like, "Where are we going to do this?" It's a cool little house and there's like a stair that comes down so you can go into the attic. And I walk up into the attic and it was like a Buddhist monastery. I don't understand how this is in here. 

It's like a small building, but it felt like what you see in movies. And it overtook me. I felt so just amazing. We would meditate with them an hour every night, and I would do it an hour on my own in the morning. And I don't think everyone needs to do this, but at the time when I was getting sober, I think it was very important.

And I just continued that path. The Zen Buddhist meditation was really cool. There's a lot of books and it just made me realize meditation doesn't have boundaries. It doesn't have to have a label like Zen Buddhism. There's a million types, Kundalini meditation, every type of meditation. Everything you do is a meditation.

Luke Storey: [00:43:50] I think that's a really important distinction there, is with something like meditation or even prayer, the point of it, at least as I've uncovered it, is how do we actually make that our day-to-day life. Like you said, I love that, how you're driving a car, you're walking around the neighborhood, having this conversation. Here is a meditation. 

If I allow myself enough presence to be aware of my body and my breathing, and of you, and your words, and my words, and just slowing everything down, but I found it to be really difficult without first learning how to do it by just sitting in a chair. 

But then say you have moments where you connect with your higher power, God, the Divine, and you're asking for something you want or you need help. There's like a petitionary relationship there. And then at a certain point, as you start to get better, there's more gratitude and hopefully, thanks being offered. But I started to see how in my early journey I was compartmentalizing those things, like, "Oh, I'm going to go do my meditation now." Then I have this prayer time. It's a set assigned time at a specific place in the house, an altar or something like that. 

And then I started hearing teachers talking about making your life a prayer, making your entire day one meditation. And that got really interesting to me. That, to me, is a lot more fun and effective because it's you mentioned a practice earlier. It's like, well, any time that I start to feel anxiety or dis ease of any kind, it's usually just because I've stopped doing that. I've lost my presence of mind and body and I stopped the prayer. 

So it's like a game for me, how long during my day can actually keep that contemplative, meditative, still place, especially when I'm doing something and I'm very busy like, can I be working out or run around the house or doing a podcast or whatever it is, and still be in a meditation, still be in a communion of prayer.

Adam Wenguer: [00:45:59] I'm also interested in people. And someone like you that has a following and a social media presence, how you keep that up, actually. For me, I don't go online very much. I will post once in a while.

Luke Storey: [00:46:09] You're lucky.

Adam Wenguer: [00:46:09] And I say, okay, that's great.

Luke Storey: [00:46:12] Does someone run your element social for you?

Adam Wenguer: [00:46:15] Yeah, it's actually a client I became great friends with, an instructor, it's a little bit of a mentor. I don't like calling myself a mentor, but he'll read my page once. But sometimes I post. I try to make it as authentic as possible. I found that when I did hire people, it didn't speak for me. And sure, your social media, you're trying to build a business, but that's what I think differentiates my company from so many other companies, the intent behind it.

And it's funny you were mentioning prayer-- just a little side note. They told me one thing, meditation is listening to God and prayer is speaking to God. I'm sure you've heard this many times. And those boundaries dissolve a bit when you really get deep into meditation. Almost all goes hand-in-hand because there's no more labels any more, especially with psychedelics. That's something I would love to eventually get into.

Luke Storey: [00:47:11] Yeah, we will. Yeah.

Adam Wenguer: [00:47:13] Yeah, labeling things just creates more structure. And The world is chaos sometimes, and we have to embrace everything.

Luke Storey: [00:47:23] I also find that when there's-- not that there's anything wrong with the set-aside time to meditate a prayer obviously, but I find that my interest in it continues to grow because then it's a self-challenge, like how can I actually integrate this into my life, and rather than just taking a moment aside and thanking God for the abundance that I have in my life and all the lovely people and success and all the things, whatever. I just can actually carry that feeling of gratitude in my heart all the time and in every interaction. 

And I find that the more I do that, surprise, my life gets better and better because then my perception of my experience of reality starts to shift. And then it shifts quicker and quicker and quicker, especially in a moment of conflict or doubt. Life is fucking hard, especially if you're in a committed spiritual path. I don't know if there's anything harder than that because you're then given all these ample opportunities to uplevel. It's like if you don't pay any attention to that, you just get caught in the 3D and life has its own struggles. 

But when at least for me, when I see everything as an opportunity for my own evolution, then consciousness itself goes, "Oh, you want more?" Okay, boom. Here, let's see what we can handle. So I just find I would be insane if I wasn't making a continuous, consistent effort to bring that into my day-to-day experience.

Adam Wenguer: [00:48:52] And I think that daily meditation is a requirement. I sit on the coaching every morning. I have a very distinct routine with Grad. I have to do that because you do need a basis. It sets the tone. If I wake up, it's so easy. I don't turn on the phone. I'm in airplane mode as much as possible. But when I wake up, I don't check the phone for as long as possible, unless something really important is going on with my son or family or business. But I think the cushion is so important for everyone.

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So at what point in your journey did you discover CBD? You have this great company element now. For those watching the video, we have some of it here. I have this stuff all over the house. And by the way, shout out to my friend Khalil, who texted me one day and he said, "Oh, my buddy, Adam, has this great CBD." 

And to be honest, I trust Khalil's judgment on these things. He's very discerning when it comes to products as I am, but I'm kind of like, "Dude, I got my Ned CBD." I got a couple of great brands already in the house and I was like, "I appreciate it, but like CBD. It's-- people send me CBD products all the time, for which I'm very grateful. But I'm like, "Dude, I got cabinets full of this stuff."

And he goes, "No, no, no. It's really special. It's different. It's really strong. Try the gummies." They're the best. I've tried." Anyway, he went on and on. So thanks to Khalil from SunLife Organics.

Adam Wenguer: [00:51:38] Let me tell you about Khalil. Let me tell you some synchronicity about Khalil because he holds this place in my heart. That's amazing. It's so funny because he was featured on the cover of the New York Times. I forget when it was, 2007, 2008, or maybe it was one section of The New York Times, how there was a guy that was an ex-junkie living under a bridge showing pictures of being on meth and crack and all these different things and now he bought a-- what is it? It was a treatment center.

Luke Storey: [00:52:11] Oh, yeah, like sober living.

Adam Wenguer: [00:52:13] Yeah. And then he created SunLife Organics, this amazingly popular company. And at the time, I was sober for just a few years, I believe. And I was a strength and conditioning coach. I studied applied physiology. I was not a wellness coach yet. I was very focused on the physical aspect because I was always an athlete and I was personal training. And I come from a household where my parents always expected more. "You got to be a doctor, a lawyer, an account" and something like in their mind, what was more respectable than just being a personal trainer. 

And I always listen to them, though. I had a great place in my heart for my father, who had such a deep connection, such a loving person. And he brings me a newspaper one day, and it was the New York Times with Khalil. And I was like, "Oh, this is an interesting story, but this is not my path. My path is fitness. I appreciate you sending it to me." I don't even think I read the whole article. 

So fast forward to when Element's growing, I believe it was 2020, actually, because my father had just passed, and I get an email and I look at the email address and it says Khalil Rafati. And I'm like, I know this name. Somehow I know this. So I look in my Google account and I typed Khalil Rafati and boom, it's an email from my dad and my dad had just passed recently. 

So it was an intense moment for me. It's always intense when something from a loved one comes up that has passed on to the next stage. And it says, "Read this article from Khalil." And he was just talking about clues, trying to motivate me that he thought I could do grander things in life. 

And I just broke down in tears. Some guys contacted me that my dad told me about and it was such a synchronicity there. So I wrote Khalil right away. And I'm not a guy that holds his tongue in any way, shape, or form. And I said, "You have no idea, bro." If he was in person, I would have grabbed him and thrown him in the air. It was just the coolest experience. And this was after I had done a good amount of ayahuasca, a good amount of psychedelics, and I know everything is interconnected. 

And I had a deep meditation practice at that point, and I just knew that-- I don't know if I created it or the universe was conspiring to bring him into my life. And we just connected at that point. Being an ex-junkie, he was an ex-junkie and he was like, "I love your products. They are just mind-blowing. I have so much CBD. I'm just throwing it all out. I want to buy yours." 

And we ended up carrying it in his stores and it was just such a cool story for me. And then he told me about you. Actually, someone told me about you at Paleo f(x) and I mentioned it to Khalil." And he's like, "That's one of my closer friends in Austin." I'm like, "Oh, the world is just great" It was beautiful.

Luke Storey: [00:55:05] That's great. Yeah, I didn't know the backstory there. Thanks for sharing that. So at what point in your journey did you find the CBD out there and what motivated you to actually build a company around it?

Adam Wenguer: [00:55:17] 2016, I believe. CBD was still illegal federally, but there was a lot of big companies. The big companies in CBD get away with whatever they want. I don't know how it works. I guess they make enough money and they're paying the right people. So there was like three or four large companies at that time. And I was using the products from one company, I won't name it, and I found it was tremendous. I would work 10-hour shifts teaching fitness and I was just loving it. I was just a pure athlete, training 10 times a day.

And towards the end of the day, there's this-- like we talked about noise, just talking to people, conversing with people all day long. You feel that noise. It's like a pressure on your body and it's not a negative thing. It's just like a tension it puts on your body, your mind. You don't think as clearly, you start doing things a little bit quicker. I think social media contributes to that a lot. And I started using CBD and noticed, "Wow, I am calm."

There was days where I was only working until 6 PM and I get a call from Kris and I look at my phone and it's 7:00. I'm like, "What the hell am I doing?" She goes, "Where are you? Work got out at 6:00." I'm like, "I'm just talking to clients. I'm training people." Yeah, I got to get home. I was just so at peace. I felt balanced. I was already feeling great. But it took that edge off when I was burning the candle at both ends.

So I'm using these products and it was great. And then I remember ordering this bottle and trying it in like, "Oh, I didn't sleep as well. Oh, I still feel that it's just not working, all compounds." They stop working over time. And I started doing research and there wasn't that much research on CBD. There was a few studies at that time, but there wasn't a lot of anecdotal evidence because not that many people were using it. They were, but it was under the radar and people told me, no, the more you use it, the more effective it becomes because it has to do more with your endocannabinoid system. 

It does affect serotonin. It affects so many different aspects of our human existence and our bodily systems. But in terms of the endocannabinoid system, it keeps it optimized. You should be continuing to feel these effects in the sense that CBD isn't a compound that's like a drug or a Band-Aid. It's a nutrient to me. It's like taking fish oil. This is something that comes from the earth and we're supposed to take it. And the way we produce it, and a lot of good companies produce it, there's no binders and fillers. There's no excess crap thrown in.

So I'm doing research and I call the company and I'm like, "Yeah, it's not working very well." And they said, "Oh, maybe you're not taking as much." And I said, "Well, anything changed? Oh, well, we did move to Colorado. Oh, that's interesting."

Luke Storey: [00:57:59] I'm going to have some right now.

Adam Wenguer: [00:58:00] I'll take some too.

Luke Storey: [00:58:02] You caught me thinking and I was like, "Yeah, that was a few hours ago I had some. I need to keep my endocannabinoid system fortified."

Adam Wenguer: [00:58:08] Once a day for me, I think as long as you're taking it five days a week, you're keeping it going. And it really spoke to me. He said, "Oh, yeah, we moved our farms to Colorado." I didn't know their operation, but I ended up finding out that they were growing so fast. They were hiring a lot of cheap labor. And as companies grow, they just become a little bit disingenuous with the way they're doing things. This is just how things work. When people grow, they try to cut corners. So anyhow, I started realizing, wow, they're not taking care of the soil the same way. When you're mass producing it, how much intent is in each plant? 

There's a big, energetic world beyond what we see, and someone like you understands this, and I realized that the quality of their product was going down. So looking in some other companies and everyone was moving to Colorado and California, and I just couldn't keep up with the standards. And I just realized it's not working as effectively. 

I could keep taking higher doses, but ex-junkies, we know we don't want to do that. We want to take the minimal amount. I have customers that I tell them-- on the bottle, it says, take three drops, the minimal amount. You might respond incredibly. I have people that take one drop because two is too much. So people are just more in tune with their body. Other people have a higher tolerance. 

So anyhow, I told Kris, and I said, "We need to start like getting into this." We know a lot of farmers and different states. She comes from a family that was surrounded by farmers in Vermont. I knew a lot of family members of mine in Kentucky, in Nebraska. And they were growing a lot of crops. Some were even growing hemp. And I said, "Do you guys do CBD?" And they're like, "Well, no, not yet. But we do have hemp plants." And I said, "I think we may have something here." And I started doing a lot of research into hemp. 

What's happening now is, most people are producing cannabis, high THC cannabis. And everything is becoming genetically modified now for CBD to have lower THC, higher CBD. And I'm like, man, there is a lot of science in here, which is great, don't get me wrong, but I feel like we have to get back to our roots. So with a lot of research, I discovered this old strain. It's an old industrial strain of hemp that was brought here-- I can't even remember the year, 200, 300 years. It was like in the 1800s, actually, so 200 years. 

And they started growing it and we got good extraction teams involved. And this was very early on. It was hard to get this stuff because it wasn't federally legal at this point. Certain states like Kentucky, they had been doing research with the US Department of Agriculture for a long time. Cannabis finally is becoming legal in Vermont. So we finally had a gateway to open up this realm of CBD. And it was a lot of R&D. There was a lot of extracting with ethanol at first and then no solvents. And then we would test and see that there's nothing no residual solvents. 

And we just started making this really dark, dark CBD. It's called crude. And we would do testing and it showed all the numbers were perfect. It's all within the federal guidelines of being under 0.3%. But we were able to push the dosage of milligrams of CBD really high. We were able to get like 100 milligrams in some of our groves with less than 0.3% THC, which is mind-blowing. 

Most companies, just to give you an example, 25 milligrams, 50 milligrams per milliliter, that's a full droppers milliliter. Ours, the maximum strength is at 80. It'll never go below 80. That's the minimum. When I test, it needs to be at 80. Sometimes it might be a tiny bit more. That's how it works with natural compounds. I'm not going to be able to take out one milligram. But when we were using it, we're like, "This is next-level shit."

We're producing very small batches. We were a little liter at a time because it was just for me, it was for Kristen. My dad, when he finally came out like, "Yeah, I love pod" and he was retired. I would give him the CBD. He got my mom. I got everyone, all our friends and family, people in their 70s with knee pain. And they're like, "I just take a little bit of your CBD. I have no knee pain. I don't need surgery." People with massive anxiety just like our little group of friends. And then they would tell people and I'm getting like phone calls, like, "Hey, I want some of your CBD." We didn't have labels. 

I'm a personal trainer at the time. I'm like, "Oh, let me find a label store. Let me order some bottles on Amazon." I mean, this is like real grassroots shit. It's not like I'm buying a company or having a meeting with someone on how to build a company. I had never done this before. I sold plenty of drugs. 

I was an expert in selling people the drugs they needed, and I was, I guess, a biohacker a long time ago. I was super fascinated with the human body, went to school for it. I took everything under the sun. That, to me, was the coolest thing. Everything's available in Florida, a lot of recreational drugs, but sometimes they're sold by doctors or NGNC, everything from GHB to everything you could possibly imagine.

And I was very well-versed in these things. So once we got to CBD and I started seeing the legality was going in the way where it was going to become legal on a federal level, I said, "All right, let's start making labels." And I started hiring people. And I didn't have much money at the time. I was spending my paychecks from my personal training gigs, sending them to designers. And she just trusted, my wife at the time, we were both working together in the same holistic resort, and she just always had faith in me. She said, like, whatever you do, I don't know what it is. Your meditation, it always becomes successful. You train someone because they have pain, they're no longer in pain.

We're around in big cities, a lot of shysters. A lot of people just want to make a quick dollar. And that wasn't the biggest thing to me. I just always wanted to heal people. I knew what true suffering was when you go through the depths of withdrawal. When you experience death of friends, of family from drugs and violence, you understand the pain people have. And now these people have so much anxiety and so much depression. And it'd be so easy to be like, "Oh, well, I have a great life, let me walk away."

But instead, I talk to them and I feel what they're telling me. And they feel that and say, "I don't want to talk to you about this anymore." I said, "No, no, no. Talk to me. Tell me. I can take it. I have broad shoulders and I know we'll get you through this." And CBD just became like a vessel for me to tone down the noise for people and help people achieve balance so we could do way deeper healing. 

So yeah, I started with basic labels, two products, a more mild one, and then a stronger one. And I noticed that people don't always like taking drops. Drops are great. To me, it's the best thing because you can put it under your tongue, you leave it there for a minute. It's more absorption that way, sublingual. 

But I realized that the older population didn't like that. It's a little harder to measure your dose, even though the good thing about CBD is there's no overdosing. You might take two droppers and you can still go about your day. You might be really relaxed, but it's not going to be like you took Xanax and you're on the floor drooling.

Luke Storey: [01:05:32] I tested your threshold a couple of nights ago because I wanted to see, can you overdose on it? But I had flown back from a trip and I just was like, I need catch up sleep. I need a good, solid night's sleep. I'm not screwing around. And I've probably before with your stuff taken maybe three droppers full or something, which is probably 10 times the normal dose or something, but it's definitely not three drops. But I think I did maybe six or eight, and I slept for-- I got to check my aura. And I think it was like 12 and a half hours and then it was like nine and a half of that was actual sleep just as an experiment. 

And I felt a little groggy in the morning. I'll be honest, that was a lot, but I slept great. And I felt like all of the inflammation and just the bugs-- not bugs, like a virus or something, but just the bugs from flying, man, just the bugs in my system energetically were just reset and I felt amazing. Now, I wouldn't recommend that people do that much. It was just kind of let's see what happens thing. And now I know it happens. You sleep hella long and very deep and the next morning you're not going to be full of energy, but that is--

Adam Wenguer: [01:06:44] With an Aura ring or a device to track.

Luke Storey: [01:06:45] The Aura ring, yeah, yeah, because I was so curious because I slept into noon and I usually wake up and watch the sunrise. Right now, this time of year it's 7 AM. And my wife kept coming in and I'd see her and it's like, I'm still tired. And I just kept doing that and next thing I know, I think it was like 12:30 when I finally got up out of bed, which is totally bizarre for me, super rare.

Adam Wenguer: [01:07:05] Maybe you needed it, right?

Luke Storey: [01:07:06] Well, I did, and I knew I needed it. That's why I planned that. I'm like, "I want to go hard tonight and just sleep a ridiculous amount of hours and get caught up."

Adam Wenguer: [01:07:15] It's amazing you mentioned bugs, though, because the new studies show how it inhibits viral replication.

Luke Storey: [01:07:20] Really?

Adam Wenguer: [01:07:22] Oh, my gosh. I wish I knew all the new studies, I mean, boosting your immune system. I didn't ever got COVID. My wife got it back in December of 2019 before we knew it was COVID. We were at an Asian massage parlor in Miami, which is a family Asian massage parlor. It's not what most people think, and her massage therapist-- we always get couples massage and she is hawking up her lung. 

She's from China and she had to leave and go to the bathroom, coughing up a lung. She's like, "I'm so sorry." We're like, "No, no, no, it's fine. It's fine." And a few days later, my wife is in bed hawking up a lung, coughing. She couldn't taste anything. It was definitely COVID, probably before delta Strain.

Luke Storey: [01:08:03] The OG strain.

Adam Wenguer: [01:08:04] OG. She's like, we met patient zero in the US. But I just sat next to her. I just don't believe anything's going to affect me. I think I can drink gasoline and I'm going to be stronger in the morning. I really believe like you're in 10 and maybe not gasoline, but I would do it. Anyhow, I'm laying down next to her. I never got sick. She was coughing on me. We kissed plenty and she recovered much quicker. It was a few weeks, but she was functioning the whole time. 

A lot of people I know at that time that started getting it, were down for the count. She was still working out with me. We still had a very healthy routine. But it's amazing for what it does for your immune system.

Luke Storey: [01:08:44] Wow, I didn't know that.

Adam Wenguer: [01:08:45] Yeah, I'm going to send the studies. We were hesitant a while ago to talk about it. We knew this was true, but when the actual studies came out, now we talk about it.

Luke Storey: [01:08:51] That's cool. So when it comes to this strain that came over in the 1800s, is that still the one you're using?

Adam Wenguer: [01:08:57] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:08:58] And this is just because it's so high in CBD and so low and THC or there are other things about that that you like because this has a very unique flavor profile. I personally like it, but it's quite strong. It's very earthy. You know you're getting a lot of plant material in a dropper.

Adam Wenguer: [01:09:15] Yeah. 

Luke Storey: [01:09:16] A lot of these isolates, they're just clear like MCT oil. When I look at that I was like, "You're not getting shit in there." I don't know but it doesn't seem to have the same noticeable effect.

Adam Wenguer: [01:09:26] What's amazing to me is the main brand. It's not a brand, but it's a pharmaceutical company. They make Epidiolex, which is a CBD isolate and they use it to treat epilepsy, I'm sorry. And they use it in all the studies and it works fairly well in the studies. 

So imagine if you have a full spectrum product, how much more efficient it's actually going to be. That's why, to me, full spectrum is the way to go. Unless you get drug tested because there's THC and if you took one or two servings, I'm sure you'd be fine. But as you take it all the time, which is what you want to do, you want to take it on a daily basis or five times a week, a little THC may show up in a drug test.

And I just don't believe in carrying CBD easily. We used to have a vape formula, but we don't do that anymore. For me, it's all full spectrum. And that particular strain, to me it's more about the profile, the profile of cannabinoids, the terpenes, the energy of the plant, not to sound like hippy-dippy.

Luke Storey: [01:10:27] Hey, look where we're sitting, man.

Adam Wenguer: [01:10:28] Yeah, I don't care. There's something about it. When I first tasted it, I said, "This is coming from the earth. This is where we go back to. This is where we come from." There's something right about it. I've tried. I get companies sending me so much CBD. They must not know I'm a company and they want me to promote it or I'm an influencer. I don't know what they think. I just get this stuff in the mail all the time and I feel bad throwing it out, but I don't want to put it in my body. 

We perfected this product for me, my family. I take it all the time and I'm here for the long run. I want to live as long as possible because especially now with my son, I don't have a fear of death now that I have a family, I want to have the longest lifespan with him. I stay home with him all the time. We'll get into that later. 

But I'm just saying the quality, the health benefits, the cleanliness of this product, if it goes in me, I know it's okay for my customers and I call them my only family because I respond to their emails. I try to respond to almost everyone, me or Kristen or someone from my team that's very close to me will respond.

Luke Storey: [01:11:34] The thing I always find curious about CBD and I want to learn more about this is when I first found out about it, I was referring back to my former long-time, very long-time love affair with cannabis. And I was a massive weed smoker my whole childhood until I was 27 years old. I mean, all day, every day, couldn't get enough. Sold it, attempted to grow it a couple of times.

Adam Wenguer: [01:11:57] How old were you?

Luke Storey: [01:11:58] I was probably eight or nine when I started smoking.

Adam Wenguer: [01:12:00] Oh, I thought you were growing it and selling it at eight or nine.

Luke Storey: [01:12:03] No, no.

Adam Wenguer: [01:12:04] I know what you mean.

Luke Storey: [01:12:05] Yeah and then I got into all the other stuff too. But weed was always there. So I was very apprehensive about ever trying it because I didn't want to trigger something in my sobriety and start smoking weed again, which for me-- and I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but it was an absolute gateway drug and I proved that over and over again.

Adam Wenguer: [01:12:21] Cannabis?

Luke Storey: [01:12:22] Yeah, every time I try to get off hard drugs, I'd be like, "I'm just going to smoke weed." That was always my dream because I loved weed and it definitely interfered with my development on all levels of my ability to do anything meaningful with my life. Again, that was just me. I know a lot of people use cannabis in a more productive way, in a safe way. For me, it can never do that. 

So I found out about CBD. I was a little nervous. Then when I started doing it, I always had this idea that it was industrial hemp that I'd see growing in the fields like what used to be the male plants. They wouldn't bud, they'd be full of seeds. Your female plants would get pollinated.

Adam Wenguer: [01:13:00] That's what you thought hemp was?

Luke Storey: [01:13:01] Yeah. So I thought hemp wasn't the buds. This is what I'm getting to. I thought it was taken out of the stocks in the leaves. It wasn't until actually probably a couple of years ago that I learned that, and correct me if I'm wrong, but when you're growing the CBD, you guys make it element, I mean, you have big old buds. It looks just like a normal cannabis plant. Smells that way. Looks that way. Sticky buds like--

Adam Wenguer: [01:13:24] It's cannabis.

Luke Storey: [01:13:24] Like dank weed, but it just doesn't have the THC or at least very little of it.

Adam Wenguer: [01:13:29] Right. I try to simplify it and I say it's not traditional cannabis, but it is cannabis. It's just a different subspecies that doesn't have high THC. And it was used for ropes, for clothing. It should be used for everything. We wouldn't have to cut down as many trees because it grows so fast. And I work with a lot of farmers that are doing this type of work. I'm so overwhelmed and I can't grow hemp on my farm in Florida. They have very strict laws, but it's an amazing plant in general. I mean--

Luke Storey: [01:13:57] So this strain you're using, though, it's like full-on buds, right?

Adam Wenguer: [01:14:00] Oh, yeah. Of course.

Luke Storey: [01:14:00] That's where you're getting it.

Adam Wenguer: [01:14:01] We don't use stalk and stem or seed. It has to be bud.

Luke Storey: [01:14:05] Okay. And then--

Adam Wenguer: [01:14:08] I said like, "You don't know this. This is crazy.

Luke Storey: [01:14:11] I figured that, but yeah, it's just something I discovered later on in my journey because like I said, I just thought what you make rope out of is what CBD it was not until I think I started seeing the smokable CBD where I was like, that's a joint. My friend was like, "No, it won't get you high."
And so I was reluctantly smoking one of those and I was like, "Oh, this is amazing." If they would have come out-- I called it decaf weed. I was like, "Man, if they would have had this back in my 20s, I was always like, God, I want to keep smoking weed." But then I end up on all this other stuff. I wish they just had a weed that I could enjoy that didn't get you high. And here all these years later, they finally did.

Adam Wenguer: [01:14:46] Trademarking, Luke Storey Decaf Weed, is like my new pre-roll. We have pre-rolls. Did I send you my pre-rolls for sure?

Luke Storey: [01:14:51] I don't think so.

Adam Wenguer: [01:14:53] Oh, that's like when we used to do all the hardcore stuff. Smoking it is obviously the quickest way of ingesting a compound. Well, intravenous. We're not doing that with CBD, but with smoking, you feel the effects like quickly. If you're really stressed after a long day-- I used to go and train martial arts in the evening. I stopped. I'm doing that in the morning now for circadian rhythm and my everything. It just feels so much better to train in the morning versus in the later afternoon. 

But I would get home at 8:00 after fighting jujitsu. I would have round after round and sit there in the car. I cannot calm my nerves down. It's intense. And then I want to try to go to bed and I just couldn't. So when I would train tonight, I'd get home and go in my backyard and smoke a joint. It was almost the romantic version of sitting there drinking your cognac by the fire. And I would just come back inside and be like, "Oh, I'm back to like a leveled state."

And CBD and the endocannabinoid system, that's like one really powerful thing about it. I always bring up balance because it's a balancing compound. So for example, let's say you're faced with-- we talked about a lion or a tiger is in front of you, you're going to be hit with massive amounts of cortisol, all the stress hormones, noradrenaline, norepinephrine, adrenaline. 

Well, your endocannabinoid system, assuming it's functioning optimally, this prevents all the detrimental effects of stress. It's starting to send out all the endocannabinoids and there's a bunch of them. There's so many that bring you back to that state of balance, more center state, more ground state.

Luke Storey: [01:16:32] Homeostasis.

Adam Wenguer: [01:16:32] Homeostasis. If we didn't have that, you might be sitting there with spiked cortisol for an extended period of time, which is dangerous.

Luke Storey: [01:16:40] What does full spectrum mean? I know as you're aware and many people listening, there's air quotes, "CBD" in everything. It's like dog trees. I mean just any time I go to any health food store, there's a CBD section. There's all this stuff.

Adam Wenguer: [01:16:58] I love this question.

Luke Storey: [01:17:01] But after trying various products, like I said, I've never really had much of an effect from most of those, with the exception of yours and a couple of others that always say full spectrum. And I don't know exactly what that means. So maybe share that with us.

Adam Wenguer: [01:17:13] Sure. So begins with a whole plant extract. So the end product is not a powder. That's pure CBD. Full spectrum contains naturally occurring cannabinoids straight from the plant. We try to not have as many processes in between. The more processed it is, the more stuff they're taking out of it essentially. So full spectrum-- and it's this word that's thrown around because it's a great selling tool. Be like full spectrum. It sounds great. I mean, there's like full spectrum health companies. It just sounds like you're getting everything. 

Well, there's no real rules to that. So some companies make CBD isolate and they throw a few other cannabinoids in and a couple of other things, all synthetic and then they call it full spectrum. The truth of it is, is there's three basic forms of CBD. The first one is full spectrum. That's what we do, and it contains all naturally occurring cannabinoids, terpenes, which are plant scents and flavoring, chlorophyll, everything from the plant fatty acids, omega-3s.

The next step down is full spectrum, but they take THC out. I've never really messed with it. It's great for people that are drug tested. I just didn't trust it to sell to people because what if they do test positive and they're on an Olympic team? That's my fault. I have to take responsibility for that. So broad spectrum is this in between CBD isolate, which is just CBD on its own and full spectrum.

Now there's a lot of companies that make CBD full spectrum. They call it full spectrum, but they've taken out a lot of other natural components and they say, "Oh, we have five cannabinoids in there-- full spectrum." Authenticity is the most important thing for me as a person. Every word I say, every thought I have, it needs to be sacred and have meaning to the people I care about, to everyone around me. And I can't just in my own conscious, sell some kind of crap and call it full spectrum. Does that explain it a little bit?

Luke Storey: [01:19:15] Yeah, it does. And before I forget, for those listening, if you want to try some of this stuff, I obviously highly recommend it or I wouldn't be interviewing you. If you sent me one of those clear little bottles of CBD, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You can go to lukestorey.com/elementhealth, lukestorey.com/elementhealth. And Adam's been kind enough to give us 15% off. Thank you. And the code there is LUKE. lukestorey.com/elementhealth. I'm sure way back in the conversation someone's probably like, "Oh, I want to try this because I've tried it and it didn't do anything."

Adam Wenguer: [01:19:48] And we have for people that didn't want to put the oil under their tongue because you count drops, eventually you eyeball, you know exactly how much you're taking or you just throw some back, whatever you feel like. We do have soft gels. A lot of my older population, they love it because they can just go boom, done. But now actually the older population is starting to like gummies.

Luke Storey: [01:20:10] I like the gummies. Well, that was the first thing Khalil mentioned to me. He's like, I've taken the gummies, I just never notice anything.

Adam Wenguer: [01:20:16] Gummies are different.

Luke Storey: [01:20:17] And they especially don't have any kind of flavor reminiscent of the plant, which to me is always like, I don't know. I don't trust there's anything in there. But he's like, "You got to try these gummies." I was like, "Dude, I've had gummies." And he's like, "Not these, not these." And then he sent me something. I was like, "Oh, it is legit." I mean, they actually taste like the plant and they're quite strong. 

My nana, as we used to call her, used to constantly tell me how important it was to get proper sleep. She knew, of course, that I was burning the candle on all four sides in my early years. But what did she know? She only lived to be 99 years old. Now, it wasn't until many years after her passing that I began to take her advice and really put a lot of study and discipline into my sleep hygiene. So if it helps you sleep better, I've probably tried it, but nothing, and I mean nothing has improved my sleep more than regulating temperature. 

And science tells us that the best way to achieve and maintain consistent deep sleep is by lowering core body temperature. Our homies over at ChiliSleep make the coldest and most comfortable sleep systems available. They make the OOLER, the Cube, and the Dock Pro sleep systems, which are water-based temperature-controlled mattress toppers that fit over your existing mattress to provide your ideal sleep temperature.

Now, I've used all three of their devices over the years and they all work incredibly. But I've been using specifically their Dock Pro for the past few months and it is awesome, especially in this insane Texas heat. The Dock Pro even has an app that lets you set a sleep schedule so you can change the temperature from cold and even to warm on demand. Plus, thankfully it has airplane mode to stop the EMF once you get it set up with the app. 

So to get your sleep on track, here's what you do. Head over to sleep.me/lukestorey to learn more and save 25% off the purchase of any new Cube, OOLER, or the new Dock Pro sleep systems. Now heads up. This offer is available exclusively for you Life Stylist Podcast listeners and only for a limited time. So again, get over to sleep.me/lukestorey and get your sleep dialed in.

Adam Wenguer: [01:22:21] Yeah. I mean, so you were mentioning earlier that there's CBD drinks, CBD salad dressing, CBD, all this stuff. If you're buying a product like that, not a pure product, it's not full spectrum. Bottom line, imagine trying to make a drink with that. I think people are like, "Oh, I like my morning coffee and my tea and they put my stuff in." And they go, "It's a little rough if I do it."

Luke Storey: [01:22:46] I put it in my coffee sometimes--

Adam Wenguer: [01:22:48] They do it.

Luke Storey: [01:22:48] It goes really well with coffee actually. I mean, not so much--

Adam Wenguer: [01:22:51] Hence black coffee.

Luke Storey: [01:22:53] Not so much the taste, but it takes the edge off the caffeine.

Adam Wenguer: [01:22:56] Oh, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:22:57] I just find that your CBD just pairs well with it, but admittedly it does not taste great in the actual coffee. But I don't care. Sometimes I'm just like, oh, I want to mix it up with all those other fats with the butter and MCT and just make like a potent balanced drink out of it.

Adam Wenguer: [01:23:15] There's actually a lot of science behind the caffeine aspect of coffee with CBD, whatever an undermine, which is natural occurring. It's an endocannabinoid produced inside of you. I believe it's degraded to an extent. There's a deeper science behind it. And I haven't been in the science for a year or two now, but it gets degraded with coffee. 

So when you're taking coffee, a lot of times people get tired. They get a little burst, but then they're tired the rest of the day it's because of this. Well, CBD helps upregulate that. So it goes together really well in the morning. So if you don't want to be tired after drinking your coffee like the little spike, you can do CBD with it or tea is even better than coffee with CBD just because you get a longer acting effect.

Luke Storey: [01:23:58] Noted.

Adam Wenguer: [01:23:58] I don't take it in the morning because when I wake up I'm like, "Let's fucking go."

Luke Storey: [01:24:02] Yeah, I can tell.

Adam Wenguer: [01:24:03] Oh my God. I'm like that all day actually.

Luke Storey: [01:24:06] You have to jujitsu. You're not trying to relax in the morning.

Adam Wenguer: [01:24:09] Even on the non jujitsu days. My wife's like, "You are so intense in a great way, though." It's like, when you've been in the shitter so long with that, I don't want to waste anything. I'm ready to move on to the next realm whenever my time is. And I think every moment here I always use the word sacred. Maybe it's played out, but I don't waste a second. I just can't. I don't know what it is. 

When I see my son, especially even before him, though, sitting there and meditation and just like I guess when you lose someone too that was a big thing with my father. We were so close and I remember training and I get a call from my mom and she's crying, my step mom, and she's like, "You need to get to the hospital now."

And I always try to calm everyone down. I'm like, "No, no, breathe, relax. I'll get the chills." "No, no, no. Now it's really bad." I'm like, "Okay." He's going to surgery. I have no idea what's going on. I just dropped everything and told all the bosses at the resort I'm leaving. And I drove there like 120 miles an hour like a crazy person and got there. And I remember he just went in for surgery.

And my whole family got there. They flew in from everywhere. He was obviously the patriarch of our family, but he had this energy about him. Everyone loved him. There was a guy that would come and clean his pool. When I told him that my father passed, he cried to me on the phone, a pool guy. There was a guy at the bagel store, he went to my dad like was the most giving person. People say like, oh, someone will give their shirt off your back. He would do that. He's done that. I've never met someone like him, maybe saints.

And I was the one who had to calm everyone down. We were at the hospital, and hospital is a horrible place, especially the hospital we went to. These doctors were just rough around the edges. They had no bedside manner. They were just to the point which I can appreciate. But at the same time, there's people around me that are not okay with death. And he was just like, "He's not going to make it. So just get ready." I'm like, "What the fuck are you talking about? He'll make it."

And I go to the room and I see the extent of it. He had an aortic aneurysm and it was crazy because he had just retired. And I had just had dinner with him three days before. I had called him. I said, "I got a surprise to tell you." So me and Kris and Rolling said, because I was quitting my personal training job because Element was really growing. It was becoming this big thing. And I just felt in my heart it was time. So I sit them down at the table and I said, yeah. So they're like, "What's the big news?" I beat around the bush for a while. And they said, "What's the big news?"

I said, "I'm quitting my job." And they're like, "Oh," They thought I was going to say, "Oh, we're having a child." They're like something magnificent. They're like a typical like maybe a Jewish parent would expect or like, I'm going to go try to become a doctor or something like that. He understood I wanted to follow my passion, but that was the last time I really got to talk to him. 

And I didn't get to say anything. I saw him once. He was unconscious and open everywhere. And the doctors told me and thankfully I-- I don't like to use the word shamanism, but I have studied a lot of shamanic techniques for many years. And when you study spirituality, you have to realize that when people are ready to move on, it's their time. And this is a very important moment. 

So I just remember being there and trying to get all the people to say they're okay with what's happening, to let go because no one wanted to let go. He was a little too young. He was 64 and I got everyone out of the room and I was able to do what I know was right for him so he could go off and not hold any karmic attachments to this life. 

And I don't even know where we're going with that. But I love bringing up my dad because it's just like a special moment. And he was so proud of this. And he used to take it all the time and like, "Oh, as I was saying, all of our family members would take it." He was like the biggest proponent. He brought bottles with him everywhere. Try this, try this, try this. It was the cool thing. He was like my marketing guy, even though he wasn't. It was like he was part of the growth. I posted about him once when he passed, and I just got really motivated at that point to push it to the next level. And I don't even know where we were going sometimes just--. 

Luke Storey: [01:28:27] Where do you want to go, man?

Adam Wenguer: [01:28:28] But yeah, I think I should have gotten him on it a little sooner. He was taking pharmaceutical drugs like prednisone for autoimmune disorders, and it really helped his IBS and other issues of inflammation. So I think we were going into the aspect of how it can prevent viral replication and boost your immune system.

Luke Storey: [01:28:51] Thank you for sharing that and on this podcast, you can go any direction. We'll find our way back to the path eventually. That's why I don't put a timer on these things because I want everything you got for the audience and for myself. What about growing practices? You said you found this one strain. 

And from what I understand about this industry is that it's still relatively Wild West and a lot of people that are growing these plants to make CBD aren't growing it organically. They're sprayed with pesticides. They're doing God knows what to it. What are some of the growing practices and maybe even the dirty little secrets people should be aware of whether they buy your Element product or elsewhere? I mean, is organic really important? What about the soil, the water, plastics, pesticides? I mean, what's the deal with the large-scale growing of this plant for this purpose?

Adam Wenguer: [01:29:43] Yeah, it's a big thing that I've talked about. I mean, we don't do large scale. We're always family farms, small. To me, that's what's important. And I like to fly out there and see the crops myself because I'm not growing it. People that grow, they need to grow. I have a contract with them. They're family, friends. We're in contact with everything. 

But growing is like you have to be married to it. And a lot of companies might say that they grow their own. I can't speak for them. A majority of companies are just getting some wholesale stuff and then charging more. I don't even know what they're doing these days. I try not to keep up with it. I mean, I keep up with the science of CBD. I know we have to keep what we're doing on point, so we test everything.

One big thing is a lot of companies aren't putting pesticides on their plants, but you always hear about genetically modified plants that are transferring seeds or going into other fields or pesticides or going into other plants from other farms. And this is a big thing. So we do third-party testing on our stuff all the time for pesticides, mycotoxins everything you can imagine, residual solvents. And it's funny, we were counterfeited by companies because taking it, I need to know what's going on. 

I eat all organic. I'm the health freak times 10 which in good company because I used to think I was alone, and then when I spoke to you, Ben Greenfield, cool guys that understand organic, not just organic, but organic living, mitigating EMF every chance you can, your mindset, your spiritual journey. This is super important, maybe the most important. So we test and we had companies in Brazil that were just printing our labels on bottles. They were putting grain alcohol in there and some flavoring from olive oil and selling it on the eBay of Brazil.

Luke Storey: [01:31:33] Really?

Adam Wenguer: [01:31:34] Yeah. Other companies were taking our third-party tests because we paid for very extensive. We can do the basics because we know what we're getting. But I try to test for everything and they'll just take ours off of our website or now I try to just send it via email to the right people and they'll take it and they'll change their name.

Luke Storey: [01:31:51] Oh damn.

Adam Wenguer: [01:31:53] It's crazy. It's still the Wild West because--

Luke Storey: [01:31:55] That is ratchet. And you're paying a lot for these. I know from testing my--

Adam Wenguer: [01:31:59] Thousands of dollars.

Luke Storey: [01:32:00] My water is like $350 to get it tested every time. And that's a much more simple process, I'm sure.

Adam Wenguer: [01:32:08] And testing companies like I can send it to three companies and get slightly different results.

Luke Storey: [01:32:12] Wow. Interesting.

Adam Wenguer: [01:32:14] I mean, it's not the Wild West. This is what happens when you're working with natural compounds. It might be the same with water, actually.

Luke Storey: [01:32:20] Do you guys make a pet product?

Adam Wenguer: [01:32:22] Oh, yeah.

Luke Storey: [01:32:23] You do? What's been the reaction of pets? Because I've had it periodically and I give it to our dog Cookie. In fact, I gave her some of your stuff a couple of nights ago because she was--

Adam Wenguer: [01:32:32] She under the chill like?

Luke Storey: [01:32:33] She's really chill. If we fly, I'll give it to her. But mainly if she's sick or if we take her to a ceremony when we're allowed to, and I want her to be real calm and not get in anybody's space. But she adds a lot to the experience typically. So I'll give her a pretty hefty dose pre-ceremony. She's just going to be laid out and just super gooey and happy. But mostly I don't have the pet stuff from your company or any.

Adam Wenguer: [01:33:00] Give them the max.

Luke Storey: [01:33:01] Okay, that's what I've been doing. Is the pet formula different? Are there any counter-indications or something that people should be aware of giving it to animals?

Adam Wenguer: [01:33:10] I'm not technically allowed to make a recommendation for dosing. I just say what I take. I'm not allowed to tell people to take pet CBD or give their pets. So there's no proven science behind it. What I've come to experience, we have three dogs, crazy dogs like little Tasmanian devils, and as they get older I'm like, "Oh, they'll calm down," they just get more intense. I don't know what it is. And they don't come down from our CBD. One of them does. She gets a little bit calm. The other ones don't.

Thunderstorms traveling, they don't care. They need a Benadryl or something really strong if they're really losing it because their stress levels get so high. And other people, like when I talk to customers, some of them say I'd say 25 to 30% say, wow, it's really calming my dog down. I believe they should take it for general health that they live longer because the dog food is just horrible these days. All dry dog food should not be consumed. We've had pets our entire life and I really only think dogs should be eating raw food.

Luke Storey: [01:34:08] Yeah.

Adam Wenguer: [01:34:08] And you change the formulas. We have a great place in Florida that sells us these huge logs, and it's expensive. But he breeds mastiffs. That should live like 6 to 10 years max. And all his lived like 14 years using his food. And it's not organic. I always bust his balls. I'm like, "Is this grass-fed beef?" Is this organic? He's like, "No country, dude." But his dogs live long and they don't have a bunch of tumors. And most dogs, you'll notice that that's how they go. They get these tumors from the food or they're drinking tap water. I tell people, "Do not give your dogs tap water."

Luke Storey: [01:34:39] Oh my God.

Adam Wenguer: [01:34:40] They drink our water and we give them the right amount of minerals. They get everything.

Luke Storey: [01:34:44] Plus all of the medications. We're always here in Texas, well, not always. We've had two summers and if it rains, there's a lot of fleas, especially around here because there's so many deer. And we always like, try everything, the natural shampoos, the flea. And twice last summer and once this year we had to do the medication and I'm thinking about--

Adam Wenguer: [01:35:05] The drops on our back.

Luke Storey: [01:35:07] Mh-hmm. And I'm like, "Oh, that can't be good."

Adam Wenguer: [01:35:08] Then rubs off on you.

Luke Storey: [01:35:10] Yeah. We also don't want our house infested with fleas. I'm natural guy up to a point. For me too I'll take pharmaceuticals if nothing else is working.

Adam Wenguer: [01:35:18] We're just care is great.

Luke Storey: [01:35:19] It's not going to be my first line of defense. But finding to take antibiotics, I'll take one for the team. I just want to get better. But anyway, I'm thinking about how many people are feeding their dogs this GMO kibble, and also all the vaccines they want to give the pets. It's crazy. And I haven't fully researched this, but from what I understand, pets are way over-vaccinated, as are obviously many of our children and now, unfortunately, adults. But there's a reason why dogs are getting tumors. 

None of the deer in the neighborhood seem to be getting tumors. Maybe if they eat enough of the atrazine-sprayed round-up lawns in the neighborhood. You know what I mean? I mean, it's just been like, "Why does everyone's pets fall apart after a few years, even before their time?"

Adam Wenguer: [01:36:05] So what we do actually is initial vaccines are sometimes required by the state. We try to avoid it as much as possible, the initial ones. But if they get rabies or what you can do is get a tighter test. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Luke Storey: [01:36:17] I have heard of that.

Adam Wenguer: [01:36:17] What they do is they draw blood from them, and they send it to a lab. It's a lot more expensive. Let's say your shots are $50 to $100. You get a tighter test and it might cost up to $400, but it tests to see if it still has the vaccine, like the antibodies. So, for example, you're supposed to give your dog a rabies vaccine every other year.

Luke Storey: [01:36:36] Wow.

Adam Wenguer: [01:36:36] Or every year, at least in Florida, because we have some crazy animals. But you take your dog to a vet, they're like, oh, ready for this? Ready for this shot? Every year or two, there's more shots. We don't do that. We do the titer test. And I've had my dogs with active antibodies for six years. We just had to give a little bit of a rabies shot because now we're in the country. There's some crazy animals because she was at zero.

Luke Storey: [01:36:57] Especially if you're out hunting boars.

Adam Wenguer: [01:36:58] Yeah. We don't hunt them with them.

Luke Storey: [01:37:00] Yeah, those are Chihuahuas. 

Adam Wenguer: [01:37:03] Yeah. Can you imagine, you should see the dogs that hunt, though. If you see them, they're like 30 pounds. They look skinny, almost like greyhound skinny. They're not that skinny, but you can't keep meat on them. And they just want to hunt. They're called cur dogs, and they're the most intense working dogs. But yeah, you just want to do these tighter tests if you can afford it.

Luke Storey: [01:37:24] That's a good tip. I didn't know that. I just know any time we find a new vet, they want her records and I'm like, "I'm doing the minimum that is safe." You know what I mean? In terms of--

Adam Wenguer: [01:37:35] No new vets.

Luke Storey: [01:37:36] I guess I don't want them to get rabies. I don't even know how that works. Anyway, I don't want to get too in that rabbit hole. But the consensus is definitely that CBD is good for pets. I've heard all of these reports of people, "Oh, my dog couldn't get off the couch because of arthritis." And then they give it CBD for two weeks. It's jumping around like a puppy. 

I mean, this isn't marketing people or people like to either own a company. This is like customer reviews and that kind of stuff. And this is just non-stop. I've always seen this kind of stuff related to pets. So I thought, well, all these people can't be, imagine it. It's got to be doing something.

Adam Wenguer: [01:38:08] I've had customers tell me that their dog was on their deathbed, not moving, not eating. Then they ordered my CBD, took it, and within a few hours they like perked up a little eight, two days later, getting up off the couch, acting like a puppy again.

Luke Storey: [01:38:21] Yeah.

Adam Wenguer: [01:38:21] You were going to put to sleep? This is crazy.

Luke Storey: [01:38:23] I hear that a lot.

Adam Wenguer: [01:38:25] This is your loved one.

Luke Storey: [01:38:26] Yeah, man. Is there any difference in outdoor or indoor grown? As a former committed weed smoker as I said, for so long, I always preferred outdoor.

Adam Wenguer: [01:38:37] Me too.

Luke Storey: [01:38:37] Is there any difference? Is it cost prohibitive or anything to have big fields outdoors of CBD plants or does it even matter?

Adam Wenguer: [01:38:47] Well, indoors you can manage things a lot better with pests. You can take care of the nutrients more effectively. We do outdoor. I just believe in the sun, not just artificial lights and I like rainwater. Obviously, we have to water more and I keep up with it, but I think that's just more important than growing it indoors. Even though you can grow it in soil and you can perfect the plant indoors.

But I mean the cost is cheap enough that it's pretty expensive to grow indoors. Now the prices are starting to drop. Actually, it's going up a little bit because a lot people are growing less. There's been more flooding. The market's funky with CBD, but I'm just more of a fan of outdoor.

Luke Storey: [01:39:25] Yeah, I've had a feeling you'd say that.

Adam Wenguer: [01:39:27] I've grown cannabis indoors, very successfully and it's very easy. But outdoor, why not?

Luke Storey: [01:39:33] Yeah, when I was a kid and I used to try to grow weed, it would always get stolen before it ever flowered. And then one time someone gave me a cutting.

Adam Wenguer: [01:39:41] Like a clone?

Luke Storey: [01:39:42] Yeah, a clone. And I was so fascinated. It was just like a bud about four inches high that just grew out of the dirt. And I was like, "Oh, now I get it"

Adam Wenguer: [01:39:51] So cool, right?

Luke Storey: [01:39:51] If you grew 500 of those, you wouldn't have to wait around months for the kid down the street to come steal it out of your backyard. What is CBG? I've been hearing more about this particular compound lately. A friend of mine made a formula of it and gave it to me, and it seemed nice. In your stuff does it have CBG or is that a whole other thing?

Adam Wenguer: [01:40:11] Yeah. So CBG and CBN are two of the cannabinoids that are getting hype right now. I believe CBG is really good on the immune system and CBN, which I mentioned is really great with sleep. I could be getting them a little bit confused or it's being full spectrum. It contains both of those. In the proper compounds, we say, as nature intended, in the proper ratios that's how you want it. 

In my opinion, I find it to just be more effective that way. I'm getting the benefits of CBG, of CBN, CBD, CBD A, THC. We're getting all of those. You can't isolate. It's cool, don't get me wrong, and there's a lot of new research on it. But I'm just seeing companies saying, "Oh, we have a sleep formula now," which is not even legal. You can't right that. And they're doing it under the radar and they're saying we're full spectrum with added CBG, with added CBN, and these things are harder to produce. They're pretty expensive. I don't think it's better. I want it in the ratios that comes as nature intended like I said.

Luke Storey: [01:41:10] Got it. Okay, cool. Something that has popped up here in Texas, I think because the weed laws here are probably still pretty strict. They don't have weed stores. When I was back in LA recently, I was pointing them out to Bailey. I was like, "Look, that's a weed store." He's like, "Yeah, so what?" I'm like--

Adam Wenguer: [01:41:27] In Texas, you mean?

Luke Storey: [01:41:28] Yeah, in LA, they had them. I went in one once and I'm like, "Holy shit, where was this when I was like 25?" You walk in and you're like, "Hindu Kush, Purple Haze just buds" and you just buy it. I was like, "What?"

Adam Wenguer: [01:41:41] But you're from Cali though?

Luke Storey: [01:41:42] Yes, I'm from there. But in Texas, you don't have that. I think it's like old school American law here. We're under federal law or whatever. So the state has not legalized. Anyway, the point I'm getting to, a friend of mine that helps us a lot with the house. He works for a company, I think they're called Smokebuds. And they put delta-9, something called delta-9--

Adam Wenguer: [01:42:02] delta-8.

Luke Storey: [01:42:02] I think it's delta-- is it delta-8?

Adam Wenguer: [01:42:04] Yeah, delta-8. It is under your question.

Luke Storey: [01:42:05] Okay. They put delta-8 in there. And I just figured THC is illegal here, so it's not going to get you high. And he gave me a gummy one day. This is quite recently and much to the chagrin of my loving wife, who knows how crazy I can be with shit. But he's like, "You should just take a half." And I was like, "I'm taking the Element gummies. I might take two or three of those. I'm good." And he goes, "Yeah, just take a half." It's like it was like 10:00 in the morning. I just ate the whole thing and went about my day.

Adam Wenguer: [01:42:32] 25 milligrams per hour.

Luke Storey: [01:42:34] I have them downstairs. I have much respect for them now, but I'm on my computer, dude. And I'm doing emails and then maybe a half an hour later I'm like, I don't feel like doing emails anymore. In fact, I can't do anything.

Adam Wenguer: [01:42:47] Because it feels like I'm crappy, right?

Luke Storey: [01:42:48] Yeah, dude, I went on a whole journey. I mean, I'm walking around the house kind of like, I don't know, maybe I'll play guitar because I've a guitar, I'm like, nah. I'll read a book. Nah. Sit by the pool. Nah. Could not feel comfortable in my skin.

Adam Wenguer: [01:43:03] When you don't expect it. That's rough.

Luke Storey: [01:43:05] Yeah, it was brutal. It's the classic meme. These edibles ain't shit. And I go outside and talk to Alyson. I'm like, man, I'm really sorry, I'm journeying here and not in a good way. I think I have to go lay down. So please just be understanding. And of course she was. 

The only thing I could do was just go lay in my room, put on an eye mask, put on some great shamanic ceremony playlist, and just lay there. And it was probably a good three or four hours. And I'm just laying there going, "What is up with this delta-8 shit?" Totally caught me off guard because I didn't listen. I was given instructions and my bad, I didn't listen because I just felt--

Adam Wenguer: [01:43:41]  Still alive. Taking half of one would be a lot still.

Luke Storey: [01:43:44] Man, so word to the wise, anyone living in Texas or elsewhere, that is real shit. And it was not for me, it was not pleasurable. I mean, I breathed into it and just surrendered and it was fine, but it was very strange and that I was having realizations and ideas and solving riddles and doing my best version of healing work like I would in a plant medicine ceremony because I didn't know what else to do with myself. But it was so frustrating because I would get an epiphany and then it was gone and it would never come back. 

And after it was all over and I came back to my senses, I had no idea what had happened. I had no takeaways. There was nothing to integrate. I just felt like my brain was freaking scrambled. Whereas normally if I do something intentionally with some ritual around it, there's huge sometimes transformations or revelations that I have that I can then write down afterward and work on in my waking life. 

So anyway, that was a huge learning experience for me. So it's a long story to maybe get a short answer. But what is this delta-8 thing and the legality of it and the psychoactive nature of it specifically as it pertains to regular old THC, which I typically avoid in large doses because of my past?

Adam Wenguer: [01:45:02] I forget that most people don't understand this, but being in the cannabis field, this is like I have to keep up with all the news and very similar to how people isolate CBD. So like we do a full spectrum and we call it CBD because that's the primary cannabinoid, but people can extract CBN, CBG. It's the same idea. Well, there's a cannabinoid called delta-8. Delta-9 is the one that everyone knows. Delta9 is the THC that gets you high when they make edibles.

Luke Storey: [01:45:29] Oh, okay. That's like when you smoke weed, that's very high.

Adam Wenguer: [01:45:32] However, it's illegal. Federally and in a lot of states they're very strict with it. Well, delta-8 is a cannabinoid, just like delta-9, but much lower occurring, like much lower milligram in the same amount, if that makes any sense. Very small amounts will be pulled from a plant. 

Anyways, they just realized, hey, you know what? This is not on the schedule list and it gets you just as high. But it kind of hits you. It takes a little longer to work, I believe, and then it lasts a little longer. It's slightly different from delta-9. I'm not a huge fan. I'm not a fan of any isolates. I don't like when someone gives me an edible and it's like, "Hey, this is delta-9. I want like a full spectrum. 

Even if delta-9 is very high, I like all the stuff to go with it because CBD, CBG, CBN, they reduce the anxiety. So a lot of people, the anxiety component of THC. That's actually a big thing people did and there was a lot of studies that people that high dosed THC and then they started using CBD and they're like, "Oh, this is manageable now. I'm not tripping out of my mind and and my heart rate's lower, my blood pressure is lower and I feel okay now." Well, delta-8 is just a legal version of a cannabinoid that you don't get as much of in a cannabis plant. Delta-9, you get a lot of it.

Luke Storey: [01:46:50] Got it. Okay.

Adam Wenguer: [01:46:51] So now there's delta-10. The delta-8 is becoming illegal.

Luke Storey: [01:46:54] I'm telling you with these delta stuff, I learned my lesson that day.

Adam Wenguer: [01:46:57] Yeah. I mean, it's just--

Luke Storey: [01:46:58] I had to call the whole day quits. I had work to do and deadlines and things. It was just like I'm incapacitated.

Adam Wenguer: [01:47:04] I don't really like cannabis that much anymore, to be honest. Tiny amount. I measure every dose. I tell people this, if you're taking mushrooms, whatever you're doing, know your dose. This is the most important thing. If I take THC, it's like two milligrams of THC or I'll just take two or three of my gummies. And I'm like, "Oh, I feel like growth." Usually one is enough, two if I want to be hony. 

But yeah, people find a way around everything. Now they're selling delta-9 from hemp, delta-8 from like all these weird varieties in smoke shops, at least in Florida. And they're going to start doing it in Texas. So the law catches up and makes it illegal or federally it becomes legal.

Luke Storey: [01:47:42] So do you see that happening? To me, it's always whether I use any cannabis plant material or not and no matter how I use it, I've always felt and will always feel that it is such a fundamental violation and overreach of the regulating bodies of our government that they tell you you can't go pull that plant out of the ground and put it in your body. But to me, that's just fundamentally so wrong and so ludicrous. But we've just gone along with it. 

The reefer madness hanging over like, "Oh, it's dangerous. I need the government to protect me," which is maybe the other day I could have used the government's protection like, "No, you're not allowed to do that. Thank you." But--

Adam Wenguer: [01:48:22] It was a learning experience, right?

Luke Storey: [01:48:23] Yeah. Hey.

Adam Wenguer: [01:48:24] Don't fuck with delta-8.

Luke Storey: [01:48:25] Respect Much respect. Yeah, absolutely. It was worth the experience. But do you see, at least in this country a federal legalization of just all things cannabis at any time soon?

Adam Wenguer: [01:48:37] Eventually, I wouldn't say people expected it years ago. They expected it this year, the next year. I don't think it's like people are as concerned in politics about it right now. They concern themselves with everything under the Sun. Who knows? But I'm sure within the next 10 years, especially if things start calming down, they'll be able to do it. I know psychedelics. It might at least happen on a state level everywhere. 

You're seeing psychedelics are becoming legal now, like at least in California and Washington, different types decriminalized. I try not to worry about it. I used to follow every bit of news as long as it doesn't directly affect hemp because hemp is harmless. We know this. It's so beneficial for your health. Cannabis, I don't think they should be regulating it at all.

Like you said, it's a plant. They shouldn't regulate anything. It's even weird that alcohol is regulated, that you can't make moonshine for yourself or you can't sell it. You have to have licenses. And this is all pretty crazy.

Luke Storey: [01:49:37] I think with the cannabis plant, it just strikes me as the most weird because it requires no processing. To make cocaine, to make heroin, to make alcohol, humans have to take the raw materials, do a bunch of stuff with it, and then you get a psychoactive and potentially beneficial or detrimental product.

Adam Wenguer: [01:49:59] Why does it matter? Well, I put it through a little process, right?

Luke Storey: [01:50:02] I'm not for it. The audacity and the ludicrous nature of cannabis laws to me are like, you literally don't do anything except maybe burn it to get smoke in your lungs. But yeah, it's just completely ridiculous to me. It always has been, like I said, whether I use it or not, but that's a whole other personal issue I perhaps have with authority.

Adam Wenguer: [01:50:25] It is somehow misguided.

Luke Storey: [01:50:27] Yeah.

Adam Wenguer: [01:50:27] I have all these problems with authority as well. When I'm on camera, I'm like, government's great. They do everything we need.

Luke Storey: [01:50:36] We love the laws.

Adam Wenguer: [01:50:36] I like just being under the radar. I think that's the most important thing. Don't fuck with me. I don't fuck with you. That's how it should be.

Luke Storey: [01:50:43] Like let live.

Adam Wenguer: [01:50:44] Exactly.

Luke Storey: [01:50:45] What's up at the topical CBD products? I probably have as many different products in my bathroom cabinet of all of these pain salves and things like that. And I've tried them all. I don't really track whether or not they're working, if my back hurts. I still use them, but I don't really know. Is there any efficacy to topically using CBD for pain? Is that a real thing?

Adam Wenguer: [01:51:06] Oh, for sure. It's funny, you were talking about turning bad situations and the good ones. I had a post that was pretty successful talking about topical. And people were chiming in all across social media. And I had one guy go on there and just troll me. I think there was a guy trolling your page when you were talking about Element products, not even like trying to sell it. You were just saying, "Oh, this works for me." "No, you need this." Everyone, there's always these trolls.

Luke Storey: [01:51:30] Everyone has an opinion.

Adam Wenguer: [01:51:31] So this guy-- everyone has an opinion, right?

Luke Storey: [01:51:34] Yeah.

Adam Wenguer: [01:51:35] Well, he was pushing his transdermal stuff and saying, "Mine is not going to work. He doesn't have this." And he really wanted to get into an argument online because there's eyes on it. I didn't even want to be online, to tell you the truth, but I just had to clarify that transdermal, so if it says transdermal CBD or THC, it's being put on topically to get into your bloodstream to affect you like an edible or any type of oral or a smoking product. There is something in it that lets it penetrate through the dermis, really far into the bloodstream.

Something topical like what we carry, I don't think you have it here, but it's good for an acute pain, strictly that. If there's inflammation or pain in a specific area, a lot of times it's elbows, knees, back as well. I've just found with a population that always has knee pain, it's like a weird thing, knee pain, knee pain. I guess people are walking all the time.

Luke Storey: [01:52:26] Walking in puffy sneakers for 40 or whatever years.

Adam Wenguer: [01:52:30] Yeah, they don't go backwards at all. They don't take care of their knees in any way. Bad posture. Well, they put a little bit of cream on there, like I'm skipping surgery, I can just put this on every day. And that's usually a nice entrance into taking the oral stuff. But yeah, it works on an acute level. And if you see transdermal, that's just a way of getting it in your bloodstream.

Luke Storey: [01:52:47] Cool. Cool. Yeah. Okay. Noted. I've been pretty damn obsessed with mitochondria for the past couple of years. From blue light hacks to saunas and cold plunges, I'm always after more ATP, our body's main fuel source. And up until now, there haven't been very many supplements on the market to support mitophagy or the flushing out of old damaged mitochondria.

So when I discovered this unique compound called Urolithin A I was super intrigued. It's found in pomegranate, but it's very hard, well, impossible really, to eat or drink enough of it to get the scientifically proven clinical dose. This is where a product called Mitopure from Timeline Nutrition comes in. 

They've created three ways to get your daily dose of 500 milligrams of Urolithin A in their product Mitopure. They've got a delicious vanilla protein powder that combines muscle building protein with the cellular energy of Mitopure and a berry powder that easily mixes into smoothies or just about any drink, and finally, soft gels for travel. 

Personally, I love the new starter pack, which lets you try all three forms of Mitopure. This is the first product to offer a precise dose of this compound to upgrade mitochondrial function, increase cellular energy and improve muscle strength. It actually took 10 years of research to bring this potent product to market, and I'm personally glad it did because it works. 

Right now there's a special offer for my audience, that means you. Use the promo code LUKE10 to get 10% off any two, four or 12 month Mitopure plan at timelinenutrition.com. That's timelinenutrition.com. And to learn more about this fascinating discovery, go back and check out episode 389 with Dr. Kris Rinsch. It's incredible stuff.
There's a whole other side of your story, and maybe we can get the elevator pitch version of it. But you found yourself recently or not that recently, but some time ago, struggling with fertility on the male side. And you went through this whole process of undoing that limitation. And you have a beautiful baby that I just met a couple of hours ago, and I found this story to be really inspiring and also interesting because you don't hear a lot about fertility on the dads side. 

I don't know if there's a stigma there, or if it just doesn't happen. But when a couple says, oh, we're having fertility issues, I'm always looking at the mom, like it's their thing. So maybe just give us your experience there. I think it's a pretty beautiful story.

Adam Wenguer: [01:55:23] I love this because like you said, there is a stigma for men. And the problem is fertility levels are dropping extensively now because of the micro-plastics, because of hormones, because of so many different things. I know for me I considered myself a biohacker. I'm like, I'm going to try everything. When I was 20 something years ago, I did a ton of steroids because I was into bodybuilding and fighting and all this. And to get off of that or to at least get back to normal, I would have to take testosterone. It was a very extensive process.

When you're young, you just want to be muscular and feel alpha and all this other stuff and have great performance, especially as a fighter. Well, they don't tell you that it's going to leave you with serious reproductive issues. So decided we finally want to get pregnant. It's very easy to say, oh, the world's ending. Maybe we don't need kids. The world gets crazier and crazier, but you do it.

We reproduce to make a better world and to bring more love to everyone around us. He's like a beacon of light to me everywhere we go. This is our first flight with him. We got to make sure he doesn't cry. I'm like, he's going to be perfect. He's on the plane making everyone laugh, just everyone. He was just like it was the most beautiful thing. 

And afterwards, we're like, "You're the most amazing thing." We see him and we realize how parents feel. People would tell us about kids, and then we just look at our dogs and we're like, "No, no, no. This is what's up." Then you have a kid. We tried having kids and it was like two or three years of me trying and it just wasn't working. Thankfully, my wife is so understanding and she's like, "I'm just so in love with you. We have a journey. If we don't have kids, we can adopt if we want. We don't have to worry about this at all. No stress." 

But it really hit me that I really wanted kids, especially when my father passed, because I knew, I always wanted a son because my father was such a good father. It just brought something out of me that I wanted to give that. I wanted to continue the bloodline and he know what that love is and make the world better and know that he could do it. Who knows what he could do? I'm open.

We had all these issues and I said, "What do I do?" I tried all the natural fertility stuff, more like supplements and things like that for like a month. And then I said, "You know what? How am I going to mess with supplements right now? There's too much research. Let me go to a doctor. There's professionals for this, the medical professionals. So I go to the number one guy in Florida, in Miami. I felt like cows, like just being herded through a waiting room. There was like 50 people there. 

I'm like, this is not what I anticipated. And he says a few things to me, ask me questions, leaves the room, and then I get like a few interns or a few other guys studying under him. I'm like, "Oh, what's going on?" They're like, "You're going to go in a cup right now. We're going to test your semen and all this other stuff." It's pretty invasive and it just feels so cold. So anyhow, they said, "Yeah, your sperm count is at zero. You're not going to be able to have kids. We can try a few things. We'll see how it goes from there."

I tried a few things they gave me and it made me feel like death. I tried like this one nasal spray. I tried all these injectable things. I don't mind injecting, but what it did to my hormones, it made me feel horrible. It gave me puffy nips. It gave me all sorts of stuff because my estrogen was spiking very high and temporarily that's fine. But it got harder and I fell out of my body.

And for a guy that meditates, I want to be inside myself and understand the world around me. I felt like out of my body that was what it was. And I noticed I'd be happy one second, then angry, then sad, then joyful. I'm like, this is nuts. And I looked at my wife and she's like, "I don't want you feeling like this. Do we want to have a kid when you're feeling like this?"

I got my levels checked, zero, zero. I'm like, "I'm done with this." And I decided I'm just going to meditate. I'm going to do what I know. I'm going to go deep down into what I believe. I know anything is possible. It's just when you have infertility, you get hit with that. It makes you question certain things like, did I make choices that affected me for the rest of my life? And I had to sit down and really tell myself, no, this is not the case. You can achieve anything you want physically, your thoughts create your reality. We all know this, but on what level?

Can you change your biology with your thoughts? So my father passed and I had a meditative practice. And I said, "I've seen ayahuasca, I've seen psilocybin treat people near the end of life." I've seen people with cancer that went into remission. I've seen miraculous things with work, with psychedelics, except I had done a lot of ayahuasca. I've learned a lot, but I didn't have time to go to ceremonies, very extensive. 

Ceremonies require dieting and requires, who knows, up to 10 hours. It could be 2 hours. You might have to travel days to get somewhere. It's exhausting. So I said, "All right, I'm going to try my own version of ayahuasca that I created." I don't really talk about it that much, but it's a compound based off of the ayahuasca vine and extracting DMT from chakra, basically the exact same mixture they get, cooking it in the Amazon in an oral version, and I created a system where I'm able to do it in a smokable form. 

And because it's smokable, it lasts a fraction of the time period. But I can go exceptionally deep and I really believe your intent with using psychedelics, your mindset, not even so much your setting sometimes because I would just do it in my house. I believe my house is a great place, but we all think we need to fly to the Amazon to do the right ayahuasca or whatever it might be. 

So I sat down and I created a gratitude practice, gratitude journal, basic thing that I ordered on Amazon. And every morning I said, "All right, I'm going to wake up, pee, meditate." That was what an old meditation instructor told me. Wake up, pee, meditate sometimes. 

Well, hopefully it's not pee, wake, meditate, but maybe poop. Who knows? But I would write in the gratitude journal everything I was grateful for, and then just write about, wow, my life with my son or my daughter or whatever it would be. And I just knew I was going to have a son. I just knew it, but anyhow, I just talked about my life with him. I wrote about it and I felt that feeling those emotions is exceptionally important. That's a harder thing to do for most people, but a little meditation, a little practice. Everything's a practice, like I said. 

And I started really feeling like, wow, he's going to come into my life soon. And I started creating my own ceremony, my own ritual in my backyard, where I go in the backyard and I learned a lot from my particular mentor. He wrote a book called Ayahuasca Wisdom. Jules Rivers is the author, and he taught me a lot about Ayahuasca itself and about the spiritual journey. 

He just seems like a slightly older version than me, and we've had our paths crossed and past lives and this life, and he ended up marrying my wife and I. So we have a very deep connection. And I created this formula and I would go in my backyard and I would perform my own nicro, or I would listen to ones that he sent me, or some from the Shapiro in the Amazon and different other masters that had-- and nicro is just a program. I'm putting the program in my subconscious just so I could learn a little more. It's not changing my reality 100%. That's my responsibility. 

And I would just meditate deeply and I'd see what would come up. And I would ask a question every time about whatever it might be. And I really believe that I had to overcome a few things to eventually boost my fertility. The first one was confronting my past, and this is a big thing. We all have to address our deeper scars and our trauma. And I would do that meditating without any of my products or anything else. But I also do it three times a week with this smokable ayahuasca. 

A lot of people don't want to call it that, and they'll just call it some version of DMT, whatever you call it, whatever you call it. The process to me doesn't matter. The result is what's important. And I would sit there and smoke it and realize, wow, I just go deep into like I did this or this was a choice I made that affected someone else deeply. And I was like, do I need to call them and apologize? You do. This is all we're all interconnected. They had to have known. What trauma did I experience? How far back do I need to go? There it goes. So I always thought, I have to do this heavy shadow work. 

A lot of people are afraid of that. They want an ayahuasca experience. They want everything to be very pleasurable these days. But the training or the practice I do with my clients that are going through severe suffering is about both boundaries. It's knowing comfort, treating your body very well, but also experiencing intensity. It might be unpleasant, it might be painful, it could be an exercise, it could be something mental, it could be a psychedelic voyage. I think it's very important to go that far and then also treat it with a certain type of recovery and bring us back. Those two extremes can help me get into the centered, balanced, align point with my source with God, whatever you want to call it. 

So I just had released so much like when you purge on ayahuasca. I don't need to go into details, but I would just spit it into this fire or spit it into the floor, back into the earth, and be very thankful for it. Sometimes it was throwing up, sometimes it was crying. I would grab the tree in my backyard and tears poured down. Sometimes my wife would come out see if I was okay. And like, if you're tripping, someone comes and watches you. I'm crying naked, holding a tree. She's like, "Oh, shit."

I remember one time I was like a Jaguar, ripping through some of my past traumas and I was just in the dirt. I don't know why I was just rubbing it all over me. It's a little fucking crazy on my hands and knees in our back yard, and she came out and saw me. She's like, oh, okay. I get it. Let me go back inside. 

They never questioned me about it, which is a funny thing. Sometimes you share, sometimes you don't. There's no judgment. And once you conquer these demons, you have to also be okay with your death and your mortality, because I think death is the one thing that hangs on everyone. A lot of people say, "Oh, I'm not afraid of death," but maybe they're jumping out of planes every week to help conquer their fear.

Everyone has this shadow that just hangs on them and it affects every single thing in their life. And that's people. I was hypochondriac when I was young. I remember seeing My Girl, that movie. It affected me. I was like, oh, shit, bees can sting you and you can die. You can die from anything. And even if you're not a hypochondriac, there's this fear of death that everyone has, even if they don't want to admit it.

And I think the spiritual journey, one huge aspect of it is conquering this death. And there's so many levels to it and then conquering it in a loving way. It's not saying, "Oh, I beat you," it's surrendering to it, understanding it, knowing where we're going next, maybe not knowing where we're going next and being okay with it. I had my first ayahuasca experience. I was telling you it was like 10, maybe a little bit longer, and I experienced so many deaths. It's like a story that I've told before on other podcast and people are like just jaw dropped because it was so profound. 

One aspect of it I won't get into like so much of it, was during one of these voyages, I went into my coffin and I was like, whoa, I'm dead now. And I could feel my whole body. And I was not part of this reality anymore, this 3D, 4D reality. I was in a different place. I was literally in my body in a coffin, and I started watching the coffin go down and it was like dead skin hanging off my bones. I'm like, "Oh, that's all it is interesting." And my spear was going through. It's funny because I once grabbed my groin and then my friend who was there said, "Yeah, you stood up and just pulled your dick out of your pants."

So I got back to this reality for a second and I looked and I was like, Oh, when I put it right back ahead. It was just a funny little thing that happened. And then I collapsed and went back into this astral projection. That's just a little funny aside, but I'm falling into the earth and I hear a eulogy and I'm just following the eulogy. Where is it? 

And it was like a combination of a shaman or a rabbi or a priest. And he was talking about me and I saw my family crying. And I was like, "Oh, wow, they really cared about me. And well, look and there's just more people and more people." And I'm looking at I'm like, wow, these are people I know. But that's like a guy I met on the bus once. This was like an Uber driver. I'm like, "What is this? How do all these people end up at my funeral?" 

So a second later I go into their heads like, first my dad, my mom, Kristen's head, my brother and sister, and I feel their pain. They're like, "Oh my God, he was too young, but he had such an impact on my life." And I could feel like their history of what kind of impact I had and how they were so happy that I was part of their family. And I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting."

And then it start spreading and going to every single person. And I was, in their minds, hundreds of people, maybe thousands. I don't know how many I met. It was so many over the course of what honestly felt like 10,000 years. And you're okay with this concept because beyond space and time. 

We are interdimensional spiritual beings. So I paid no thought to it. It was infinite. If I'd even know what that word means. And I could just see me in all these people's minds. And they all said, "Oh, he shouldn't have done this, or he could have done this, or he treated me this way."

And I was crying as them, as male, as female, as dogs. It was so profound. And I was like, 'Wow, I left this world a beautiful place. This is good. This is a good death." And I'm like, "Oh, cool, let's go into the ground now. Let's see what happens." And it just shot me into the sky, pass the clouds past the infinite unknown into the depth of what this reality is all about beyond the simulation, beyond everything. 

And it was every sound and every smell and taste, every color that you can experience as a spirit, as a person. I don't know what realm this was, but it showed me what we go to and how infinite we are. And I can go into this body and become one with this, and we are one with this. And it just showed me how I could conquer death by I guess you become death. And it's not something you do just once. It's something you'll lose that sensation as a human. We forget things. We listen to music and then we get it back and we're like, "Oh, that was a great song."

So it's something we have to continue doing. This is part of the shamanic healing process. We don't put our faith in someone else. We put in our self in belief that we're part of this big picture and we have to do work. No one else is going to save me. I have to save myself. And then eventually I started connecting with my parents, like my dad who passed obviously, and my grandparents, and seeing their lives and seeing my past lives. And it was accessible to me with psychedelics, of course, but also a profound meditative practice.

There's a lot of people that don't need any of this stuff. They're just intuitive, maybe crystal children or indigo children. I hear these terms thrown around. I haven't studied it too much, but the world is changing very fast. And we all have this capability. We all have DMT. We all have these chemicals in our brain. So these things are accessible to us. I know they are. 

And I'm connecting with my father. And I could just see like, he's like, "I'm going to give you a son. We're going to make this happen. I'm going to guide you on this path and do everything I can because I love you and I want to be a part of it." 

These kind of things left me in tears so many mornings, so profound that when you go about your day, you're just like, I'm looking at this tree behind you, this little plant. And I'm like, "Oh, it's so beautiful." Sound like a hippie, I'm a fighting hippie that's done heroin. There's just no labels for this. It's hard to even put into words. I always tell people don't conceptualize, don't put into words. You don't have to write it down. This is for you. If you want to share it with me, this is great. And we see like this profound healing in people, whether they talk about it or not. 

And then eventually I felt that element. It led me to this path where I needed to spread healing to as many people as possible, going off on a tangent from fertility. Let me just go back to the fertility for a moment. Six months after starting this process, my wife was like, "Go get checked." 

And it's a funny story where you go in and you have to go in a cup and I can tell the details of it later, not too many details. But I didn't think much of it. I told her we just had a great time when I came home and I remember getting a call, or maybe it was a letter. I don't even remember. It's a past life. I think we always have to die to our past lives. 

But I try to remember this story to share with people and they said, "Wow, your sperm is above normal. You have high levels." So I was like, "All right, let's get to work. Let's get to work." And it was like the most beautiful thing. And at that point, I was like, "You know what? Let me freeze a little bit of my sperm because we have technology. I'm not opposed to technology and modern science. It saves people. It's great for emergency and trauma care." 

So that was basically my fertility journey. We froze a bunch of my sperm. We decided to do IVF because we wanted to have a baby like now. And it was a great experience. I mean, it's challenging for women because they have to go through a lot of blood draws injections. They have to get pumped full of hormones. I'm just offering part of my DNA, which is a beautiful thing. But they do the work. It takes a strong woman to do IVF and a lot of men don't talk about this. So I love talking about it because a lot of times men, if they can't conceive, they don't get checked. 

They just go, "Oh, you need to do something different." They drop it off on the woman. I don't want to judge them, everyone has their path. But I just don't think that's the right way to go about it. Taking responsibility, go and get checked. There's ways to do it. I took a little bit of HCG, which a lot of people use like post steroid cycle with FSH, which are follicle stimulating hormone. And I said, "I like the energy of these." I sat with them for a while and I said, man, these  resonate with me, but I know I don't want to take high doses.

Doctors are like, "You need to take-- I forget the number-- 5,000 IUs or something like that." I was like, "Maybe I'll take 200 or 150." And people are like, "That's not going to do anything." That's fine. I just want to see what it does. I tried many different things. I took like animal organs. I just listen to my intuition and I think that's a huge thing. So now we have this awesome dude.

Luke Storey: [02:14:03] So cool. I love that. I love when the impossible becomes possible and the unseen become seeing that phenomenon. It's just so fascinating.

Adam Wenguer: [02:14:13] It's here all the time. We you have to be receptive to it.

Luke Storey: [02:14:15] Yeah, well, congratulations on turning that around. It's crazy. If you ask me, I don't know that much about fertility, but if you said, "Hey, I'm not producing any sperm," I would think, well, I guess you're not having any kids. I had no idea that even by traditional or medical methods, that that was something that could be dealt with. I thought once you're tapped out, you're done.

Adam Wenguer: [02:14:38] I went through a ton of studies, actually, and most of the studies were like, if you've done testosterone recently, it's not going to happen. Zero, zero. Every study was like zero. And I found an obscure study in China with guys that stayed on testosterone and got their sperm count up a little bit. 

And I was like, "Oh, this is going to be me." But I mean, it was so obscurantist from so many years ago. I think it was like from 1970 or 1980. I just knew if it was possible, whether I thought it, saw it, it was going to happen. And then this, I started studying CBD for fertility, and it actually can help with fertility.

Luke Storey: [02:15:12] Oh, what?

Adam Wenguer: [02:15:13] THC does the opposite. THC is phenomenal, at least pure THC, phenomenal for fun recreation. I think it's a great spiritual compound. We can use it. You can go really deep. You can take edibles and have a psychedelic experience. But when we do testing with THC and people that use WHOOP devices, their REM sleep, their deep sleep goes down, CBD goes up, as long as you don't take too much and you have to find your dose. That's what I tell everyone. Start low, go up slow. That's the key.

Luke Storey: [02:15:41] Before we wrap up here, give me some of the maybe your top five or 10 things that you've done to ensure your baby's health, because I know when you came in, I was like, "Oh, look at his cute little sneakers," because they're like two inches long and tiny little shoes. And then your wife, Kristen, was like, "Oh, yeah, they're grounded."

And you're like, "Yeah, they're flat and they have a toe box." You found like the biohacker kids shoes, which I'm sure was a difficult. But what's been your approach in terms of I mean, not just the emotional and spiritual element of being a parent, but in terms of the birth process. And now at the age, what's your kid eating? I'm assuming they're out barefoot on your farm a lot. What's your initial approach to being a parent in that regard?

Adam Wenguer: [02:16:29] This is like the coolest part to me of everything, because now this is the future aspect and that's part of the whole journey of confront your past, understanding your death and working with your reality, your ancestors, your family, and now what do we have as a future? It's so funny. I read so many books. We plan to have a homebirth in our home. We want no medical intervention whatsoever. So we had a doula who's a Reiki practitioner, a great friend of ours and a midwife. 

So we're going to every weekly meeting and Kristen is like no side effects during her breaks. There are no ill effects, I should say, or let's say effects women don't want. Nothing ill, but she would get a little swelling. That was it. The baby was growing perfectly. Everything was going according to plan. She ate a diet that I provided for her nose to tail. We studied like all the greens that she should be eating. We went so deep. 

And one book that resonated really deeply with me is called Natural Infant Hygiene and also the Continuum Concept. These are ways of raising your baby in the idea that kids have been around for tens of thousands of years successfully, and only in recent times do we have this, like fast paced society. Let's make everything very convenient. So I read most of the books in the studying, and when Kristen would wake up, we'd meditate together, we'd read the books together and we'd read it to him. We wanted to tell him about the ways we were going to raise him. 

One of the things that was really cool was they now call it elimination communication. They say that this concept of diapering your baby is purely western. And I believe it was in India and China and a lot of older civilizations they never used it. Native Americans never used it. It's such a new thing. Now it's getting pushed on the east and many different countries, but I think about it. We tell our babies, pee, poop in this thing. Let it sit there, let it simmer for a while. First of all, hygiene wise, it's pretty disgusting.
I mean, I was diapered. That's pretty horrible. And a lot of babies are peeing. They don't even know it because they're so much like cotton. it's all these chemicals to absorb it so they don't feel it. So they sleep through the whole night. Parents never changed them. And we said, "Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to teach him to tell us when he has to pee, tell us when he has to poop."

So basically they say you can start it in like three months. We just started at like two months, so I'll go back in the story. We were planning a home birth and we got to 40 weeks. And that's like the due date. And then we start getting further and passed that and the baby's growing, but he does not want to come out. I'm like, "Man, you're such a comfy womb. You have the greatest nutrition." Our home was just like the den of serenity. And this was in Miami before we got the place in the countryside. We had that place, but it was a work in progress. 

And we had the beach. We would go to the beach all the time. We're grounding Earth and drinking the best water, meditating together. It was perfect and he just did not want to come out. And at 42 weeks, Florida's midwife is required to pass you on to the doctor. And I'm like, "There's no way this is going to happen." We're not going to a hospital. And it's all right. We'll go to bed tonight. It's down the 42 week mark. Our midwife called us, said, "I'm sorry I have to terminate care." And we were in a very stressful state, super stressful. 

I started calling other midwives. I knew renegade midwives, and they were like, "All right, we'll come. You can't tell anyone. And no one can come or ever hear about this." So we're prepared to keep doing it at home. Anyhow, she had to take an ultrasound. We didn't do any ultrasounds. We had the midwife do the testing. Everything was perfect. But right before the birth, they had to do an ultrasound. And they said the baby was 10 pounds, which is huge. I think now they say 6 to 7 is like the average size.

So 10 pounds-- and my wife's not a big girl. She's small. So we were a little concerned, but we just thought, you know what? We're going to get through it. Anyhow that night, it's funny, I took a THC edible to relax a little bit. I took my CBD and I said, "I want to get knocked out tonight." An hour later, she's like, "Man, I have the worst headache migraine." The worst migraine you can-- she couldn't open her eyes, so I'm giving her water. And I said, "Let me just check your blood pressure."

It was so high. It was almost like 200 over whatever it was, 120. I said, "Okay, I'm pretty stoned right now, but we're going to the hospital." And she's like, "No, no, no, no." I had to convince her. I just listen to intuition. I said, "We got to do it. Obviously we don't want this. We'll figure it out later. Your health, his health is the most important thing." 

So we get to the hospital. The hospital is known for being more like natural. They try to push natural childbirth. They don't force vaccines. So we get there. And the worst part, COVID test. You imagine you have a migraine and they're just shoving a COVID test in her nose. We didn't get COVID tests. We've never taken a test. So she's like grabbing me. My wife's a martial artist. She's a bad ass.

Luke Storey: [02:21:39] She just walked in by the way.

Adam Wenguer: [02:21:41] She's a high level. I've seen her beat the crap out of guys, so it just tells you she's perfect woman, the most amazing at everything she does, she's a goddess to me. And she's tough as nails. And she grabbed this woman almost like, "You need to let go of me now, or I will call security." She's like, I breathe it through. And then the doctor comes in and says, "Yep, C-section."

And this dude came in and he had earrings dangling. Not like I'm judging him by it, but we never even spoke to a doctor. And like, his tone, he was like, "Yeah, we're just going to do a C-section. We're going to do this." He was in street clothes. I'm like, "Oh, this is not happening." Kristen's like, "Second opinion. We need a second opinion." He goes, "You're going to die if you need a second opinion."

And we called everyone and this is like at 4:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, no one's answering the phone. And we just knew that she needed to do an emergency C-section, which is everything we did not want to do. So I'm going to have to go into the details of the C-section. But it happens and she refused all pain meds. I mean, what you need to do for the surgery. But afterwards, women take pain meds for a week. She just refused everything. She took it like a champ. I've never seen someone just deal with things that much pain because you know what the end goal is. 

And then he comes out. He was like, almost 9 pounds, big dude. So who knows if it was-- but either way, I tell people that the whole experience of this kind of childbirth and every childbirth is psychedelic in nature. Now, a lot of my clients are asking me for guidance on childbirth, on breastfeeding, and Kristen helps with this because I had to study all this. What you should use, what products, what glass instead of plastic. It's really fascinating. But so we do natural infant hygiene, keep pees and poops. He tells us when. He has like a specific cry and he'll hold it for hours. 

He's 11 months now, but he's been doing that for like four or five months. So we just take him to a bathroom and we put him on a little makeshift toilet and he looks and he grunts a little and goes to the bathroom or I used to hold him over a sink and he would just pee in the sink. And we do sign language, so we teach him sign language. So now he's actually starting to sign to us instead of having to grunt like potty, dad and little things. And this is a very young, under a year.

Luke Storey: [02:23:55] That's so cool.

Adam Wenguer: [02:23:57] Potty training. These's kids that are five and four that are not potty trained. And that leads to bedwetting later. It leads to sexual dysfunction. If you're holding your feces down there, it makes people not want to have sex later on, a host of issues that can become deep seated trauma. So we're like, "We need this kid to be part of the earth." He never wear shoes. He just did because of the airport. He's crawling around, the hotel room. We're like, "Let's put them on. He look  cool." The first time he's ever worn shoes, though.

Luke Storey: [02:24:25] Wow.

Adam Wenguer: [02:24:26] But food wise, she does baby led weaning, which is basically we gave him food. We put it in front of him real food, pick it up. And he wasn't swallowing. He would just chew it, spit it out. He was learning how to eat food, chewing, learning the sensations. We'd pull curry flavor, every flavor you can imagine. 

And you could just see that he was just loving it all. We would give him weird, crazy stuff. Most people feed their babies purees because they're so afraid of them choking. But actually that's going to cause choking later on. They say after a year is when most babies actually choke, God forbid, and pass or who knows? Need some type of intervention. It's because they never get practice eating foods. And think about it for tens of thousands of years, did a mom in wherever she lived, whatever country was she putting stuff in a blender or buying mashed foods? 

She might soften it a little, but she wants them to learn how to eat. So now he eats everything and we eat fully organic. He eats steak, potatoes, avocado greens, everything you could possibly imagine, fruits and vegetables, the most delicious stuff. And then when we go out to dinner, it's like the funniest thing because we're a little foodie. So he'll like eat pho gua with jellyfish, wasabi dressing like it's wild. We wanted a page for him. It's like--

Luke Storey: [02:25:44] Have you ever put any organ meat, like organ meats in front of him?

Adam Wenguer: [02:25:47] Oh, yeah, he eats it all.

Luke Storey: [02:25:48] He eats all. I find it really interesting how depending on our cultural upbringing and the types of foods that are around, we get very sensitive to strong tasting food. And I hear about people where their kids will eat beef, liver or heart or something like that, which is, of course, so nutritionally dense. But I think for me, I don't know what I was eating, granola bars. 

So it's just like now I really have a very difficult time eating my liver. I cube it up raw and I just throw it back more like a vitamin. But had I been fed liver by choice, if you put it in front of me when I was one year old and I was like, "Yummy, this is good." I would probably love liver.
But everyone has those early experiences where we're just not exposed to different foods and much less like you're saying. Actually, given the choice, hand me a platter as a one year old and oh, today I want some grapes. You know what I mean?

Adam Wenguer: [02:26:45] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:26:46] Or tomorrow I might want an oyster. You know what I mean?

Adam Wenguer: [02:26:49] He can eat sardines out of a can.

Luke Storey: [02:26:51] That's right.

Adam Wenguer: [02:26:52] Where's it? Kristen would speak on this stuff a little bit better than me, but we want to give him whole foods fiber. The nutritional content is so important. And obviously, breastfeeding, that was the main thing. The three things that we thought were the most important, like from day one, we're keeping the baby on the boob. It's funny, my terminology has changed. Breastfeeding, breastfeeding. And now it's like, oh, he needs the boob, the boob. And then when you start talking to the community that knows about this type of stuff, it's like, "Yeah, on the boob."

So breastfeeding for two years minimum is the ideal. Now a lot of women won't produce that much or dry up. You do whatever you can. That's part of this whole psychedelic journey. It's surrender. When you're on a psychedelic, it's about letting go of control. That's what a lot of this whole experience taught me. 

But we wanted to put him like, make sure we are skin to skin a lot. Most people know that at least when they're very young. We wanted him to sleep with us because in times where we slept in tribes, you wouldn't put him in another room, close the door and let him cry it out because a wolf, a dog, a boar, whatever, is going to come there and eat your baby.

So think about that, and it's so detrimental to kids. If you just say, I want you to cry, cry it out, and then you'll stop crying. And then parents get peace. To me, it's a very selfish thing. What's happening to a baby in that time? They're yearning for you. They're yearning for security. They're completely helpless-- the most helpless thing that comes out of a womb in the world. 

Reptiles crawl away, snakes crawl away. Deer know how to walk. Babies, you can't leave them unattended. And people are always concerned, "Oh, if you're always going to your baby when they cry, they're going to become these non self sufficient things." It's the total opposite. One of your guests spoke about this. Gabor Mate is his name?

Luke Storey: [02:28:43] Yeah. 

Adam Wenguer: [02:28:43] I had never heard of him ever. And I was looking at one of your podcasts and I see him and he's talking about this type of stuff. It's so important. This is the basis of the continuum concept. So we made sure that he slept with us. Then he transitioned into a little floor bed right by us. He's with us. He's part of our tribe. That's why I brought him to the podcast.

Luke Storey: [02:29:02] I'm glad you did.

Adam Wenguer: [02:29:03] Most people I got to fly on.

Luke Storey: [02:29:04] I love to see Alyson light up when babies are around. She's very ready to have a baby.

Adam Wenguer: [02:29:09] Yeah.

Luke Storey: [02:29:10] I was happy you were bringing your--

Adam Wenguer: [02:29:13] You can go either way.

Luke Storey: [02:29:14] I love it. It's great. But anyway, man, thank you so much for bringing yourself your wisdom, your energy. I really enjoy speaking to you.

Adam Wenguer: [02:29:22] Thank you so much for having me. I was so excited to come out to Austin. I've never been, bring the family to you.

Luke Storey: [02:29:28] You can probably stop by and see Khalil while you're here, hopefully if you have time. My last question for you, my friend, is this who have been three teachers or teachings in your life that you'd like to share with us?

Adam Wenguer: [02:29:39] I can't say teachers. Teachings I can get into, teachers they are just so many. Maybe my father is the one that resonates the most. But bringing intent of kindness to everyone around you. It sounds so basic, but Kristen sees me talking to everyone everywhere we go. And it's funny. The perfect example was the guy next to us on the plane. He happened to be this amazing doctor. We had no idea. And he was going through tremendous anxiety and stress when it comes to end of life stuff, dying, his own mortality. 

And he was a young dude, younger than me. And we were concerned, "Oh, Max might bug him." Turns out he has kids going through all the same stuff that we were going through. And we had almost this exact conversation on the plane with him, and I could almost sense, like, what it was. I thought I was just talking his ear off. 

And afterwards he's like, "Man, we were meant to sit next to each other. What you're telling me right now, it's just hitting me so deep." And he took some of my CBD and said I got the best sleep in my entire life, and you've changed my life, my whole experience coming to Austin.

He was traveling on business. So Kristen was starting to tell me, like, you talk to everyone so you make a connection with these people. Then no one makes a connection to with every waiter, with every guy in our hotel, like holding a door or every valet person to obviously you and Bailey and all the people that I meet. 

We can spread so much love on such a basic level by spreading kindness like everyone's talking about, "Oh, save the rainforest, save these things." and they don't like to start with themselves. They don't like to look internally, they don't want to look in the mirror. And that's the most important part. That's part of this whole voyage. 

But just being kind is a very simple thing. I think the second lesson is hold everything very sacred. It's so easy just to throw on like, oh, Instagram over this. I mean, I don't use that stuff, but most of the people I talk to, they do. And that's the basis of their problem is being disconnected, not realizing that walking to your car is a sacred act. Hearing the dog barking, I'm like listening to it for a minute. I don't want to be like, this is an annoyance. When my baby cries and I have to get up at 3:00 in the morning, he likes me to beat, we will rock you on it. 

He's not a normal baby. He doesn't like lullabies. He wants me to, like, slam on and scream like a friggin mosh pit to get him to go to sleep. And I cherish every single moment of that. And I see it rubs off on Kristen. I see it rubs off on everyone, like every single moment is sacred. And then when it comes to end of life things you know you've done it right. 

The third thing is, I think just finding balance kind of what I do with people. I think you need to push the extremes. When I'm talking to people that do Peloton and they're doing I get a good cardio a couple of minutes a day. I said once in a while, push it beyond your boundaries as far as you possibly can to where you're in pain and maybe you're limping for two days or maybe take up a martial art like jujitsu where someone wants to murder me and then I have to tap out, push the physical as far as possible, and then treat your body very well. You'll get to center. Do it mentally with meditation. 

You don't want to meditate. Does anyone want to meditate? You sit there and you're like, "Oh, I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to do this." There's a calling to everything. I'm coming back. I'm coming back. Or choose something that stimulates you intellectually, but not in a fun way. I don't mean go online and listen to every podcast imaginable because it's enjoyable on your car ride, maybe count your breath, maybe have maximum intent while you're driving. 

Turn on the blinker, feel the blinker, don't just hear it. Don't think it's annoying. Someone honks, feel that honk. Maybe feel words coming from. Be present even though you don't want to. That's going to build mental toughness and then enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself a little bit, take the edge off, breathe, enjoy, and then spiritually do the same thing. Challenge yourself so far. 

Psychedelics is a great tool that's probably the most powerful tool for catharsis. Push it, push the spirituality as far as you can, and then also just give thanks to whatever you trust is spirit, whether it's religious, whether it's nature, whether it's the universe, whatever it is, give thanks and just be happy about it. 

So all these things will bring us back the center. And that's like my little shtick that I share with my clients and as much success as possible. I get a lot of people that call me and crying, and emailing me with great thanks and that's it. Even if it's one person, I'm so thankful for that and I'm thankful for being able to do this. Thankful to connect with you. What more can I ask for?

Luke Storey: [02:34:32] Thank you for all of that. I think the leaf blowers are inside my headphones right now. And it's a great opportunity for me to practice because I'm like I really care about the sound on this show, the presentation. And also, it's funny, as you're saying that I'm like, yeah, cool. I can become at peace and balanced with the leaf blowers.

Adam Wenguer: [02:34:53] Yeah, right. You don't need to kick them.

Luke Storey: [02:34:54] No. And it's always the reframe. It's like, oh my God, I even have a yard that I steward and somebody is taking care of it. You know what I mean? It's just so annoying.

Adam Wenguer: [02:35:06] It's gratitude you need to have.

Luke Storey: [02:35:07] I spent 32 years living in apartments, mostly in LA. And there was nothing to garden because it was all concrete. Man, thank you so much. I'm so glad you came out, too, and that this worked out and that you're able to bring your family. And Khalil said you guys are really going to hit it off. Trust me. Just follow up. Follow up. And I appreciate your persistence. I know we texted a little bit and life and a lot of CBD in my life and all that. I was like, I'll get to it later. But then we started to connect more and I'm just really glad you came out. So thank you so much.

Adam Wenguer: [02:35:38] Thank you so much for having me, buddy.

Luke Storey: [02:35:43] Thanks for joining me and Adam for this expansive conversation. Now, my hope is that it leaves you inspired to create the life of success and meaning that you deserve, just as Adam has. And now that you're educated on the vast topic of CBD, I'd like to remind you to support Adam's company and your own health and well-being at the same time by visiting lukestorey.com/elementhealth. And don't forget to use the code LUKE for 15% off anything and everything you want to get over there. And you'll also find that link in the show notes on your podcast app, by the way.  So make sure right now, as you hear my voice to tap, follow or subscribe on your podcast app so you don't miss next week's show about the Harmonic Egg.

And before we part ways, I'll make one humble request of you. If you felt inspired or even mildly entertained by today's episode, please take a moment to text it to a couple of friends or even post it to your social media accounts. Now, I know many of you regular listeners do this on an ongoing basis, and I want to let you know how much I sincerely appreciate that. And also that just taking a few seconds to do so makes a huge impact on the show's growth and longevity. So thank you in advance and retroactively for your support of the Life Stylist Podcast.

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