Dr. Stephen Seiler joins us to talk about one of the biggest influences on his own work, Dr. Hans Selye who’s been called the Einstein of the biological sciences.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:00
Trevor, hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Chris case and Dr Griffin McMath, the impact that Dr Hans Selye has had on our understanding of physiology can’t be understated. Referred to as the Einstein of the biological world. He discovered and identified the roles of many of our hormones. He brought the concept of stress from engineering to the world of biology and psychology, but perhaps his biggest contribution was to define the general adaptation syndrome, the concept first published on a half page in nature in 1936 identified a common set of responses in our bodies to a wide variety of stressors, which range from exposure to cold to chemical agents to injury. Dr Selly discovered that regardless of the exposure, our bodies follow the same three general phases. The first is the alarm phase, where the body would show signs of shock, including a rise in heart rate and blood pressure, a change of body temperature, acidosis, a rise in blood sugar and eventually a release of corticoid hormones that produce a counter shock to reduce the symptoms. Second is the adaptation phase, where the body would return almost to normal and appear to build a resistance to the stressor. This should sound familiar to any athlete training, is a stressor that we have an immediate negative response to, but then adapt and build resistance, meaning we can better handle the effort. What we can’t forget is that Dr Celia identified a third phase called the fatigue phase, takes energy to maintain our resistance to a stressor. In particular, he noticed that we have to keep the corticoids elevated over time. And there’s a price. Our bodies go into fatigue, and the symptoms of the alarm phase return worse diseases of adaptation, such as high blood pressure ulcers, insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease appear. It is studies on rats. If the stressor wasn’t removed in this phase, the rats would die. Granted, exercise is different. It is original research. He called the stressors he worked with noxious agents, because our bodies don’t like to be exposed to them. Exercise is a stressor, but a positive one, that our bodies like that said, even exercise adaptations eventually reach a stage of fatigue, no matter how well you train. Friend of the show, Dr Steven Seiler has said many times that the work of Celia has had an enormous impact on his own work. Both he and Dr sellia have successfully applied concepts from engineering to the body. So in today’s nerd lab, Dr Seiler joins us to discuss the revolutionary work of Dr Hans Selye and how it has impacted exercise science. So get ready for a generalized response to a great discussion, and let’s make you fast listeners. Fast talk needs your help. We want to know what you think of our episodes, our guests, our hosts and more, please take a brief survey at fast talk labs.com/survey to let us know what you think your opinion matters and your responses will help shape the future of fast talk Get started today at fast talk labs.com/survey
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Trevor Connor 03:22
Well, Dr Seiler, welcome back to the show. I think we’re kind of at the point where you don’t need an introduction. Well, good, because I don’t
Dr. Stephen Seiler 03:28
want to hear another boring dialog from you. That’s good to be back. This is fair. We were actually just talking about your desire to grow chili peppers in Norway, yeah. And the lack of success you’ve had, well, it’s been varied, and it turns out that it’s weather dependent. They need warm weather kind of makes sense. We don’t have a lot of Norway and warm weather in Norway, so I have built a little greenhouse on wheels, and I’m pretty optimistic now. Now I need, though, just like an app on my phone, so that can control the air, gets the internet, so it doesn’t get too hot inside greenhouse. That’s coming because that turns out to not be good either. It’s all about balance. It’s all about balance. It’s all about individualization. It’s all about stress. Oh, I don’t want my plans to get stressed. I smell a segue coming. That’s what I’m good at. I segue right into today’s topic.
Trevor Connor 04:26
So stress, this was the first thing that really surprised me, is stress is such a common term, but today we are literally talking about the guy that coined the modern use of stress, that’s right.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 04:40
Hans Celia Hungarian by birth, but we’ll skip over that. He’s Canadian
Chris Case 04:50
by birth. You knew where
Trevor Connor 04:51
I was going. I knew where you were
Dr. Stephen Seiler 04:53
going. Mr. Canadian Macho Man, I. So Hans, Celia, really interesting fellow that any of us that have had any kind of, you know, training and exercise physiology or curiosity or whatever, whether we know it or not, we’ve been influenced by Celia, because one of the figures that we always see where we, you know, we have a temporary decline in function after a workout, and then it comes back up and super compensates. But if we push too hard, it goes even worse or gets bad again. That general adaptation syndrome came from this wonderful man on Celia, and I don’t think he ever intended that to be the case, but that’s just how it worked out. So fascinating guy, and it’s been his work, it was something I had to really dig back into, to understand training and trying to understand all these metrics that we have developed as a field, both the scientists and the practitioners. We’ve got more metrics than we know what to do with. And so I went back and tried to say, Well, how did people like on Celia? How did they understand these terms like load and stress and strain and so forth. So he’s a pivotal figure for me, and a highly influential scientist that I think it’s kind of fun to dig into and then try to extract some of the understanding that he struggled with, because he’s done a lot of the struggling for us that we can profit from, yeah,
Trevor Connor 06:22
and I think something that will become more important as we talk about this. So he was an endocrinologist and revolutionized the whole field of endocrinology. He basically identified and named a lot of the key hormones that we now talk about all the time. But as he was doing his research. He did most of his research on rats. He discovered he would apply different stressors to them, and at the time, originally, he called it noxious agents, because, again, I can’t emphasize this enough, stress is this term that we throw around all the time. Now he coined it. Well, he didn’t coin it. It existed, but as we think about it. Now, the concept maybe, yeah,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 07:01
he took it from engineers, yep. So he adopted it because it was already in the physical sciences literature. But you also used a word just now in the conversation that’s super important. You use the term stressors, yes. And so you just introduced two different terms, stressor, stress action, effect, and this is super important. And this was part of the struggle that Celia went through was dividing those two, what you do and what it does to you. And this is so fundamental now, but it wasn’t always fundamental. And he himself. He didn’t distinguish initially, but after, you know, he started seeing, wait a minute, the stress oars, like these noxious agents or heat, or, you know, an infection or an exam that’s about to come up and I’m stressed, it’s creating a stress response. So the stress or versus the response to the stress, or was a very important to distinguish those, and that has manifested itself for us down the road, decades later, in training monitoring as say, Yeah, load is what you do. You know, training load, and we can measure that in power times, duration and hours and so forth, or pace and so forth. I ran 20 kilometers at this pace, that’s a load. And then I can go in and say, Yeah, but what? How did I respond to it? Well, my heart rate drifted 20 beats during the course of the effort. My perceived exertion went way up towards the end, I was just at my limit, so I was stressed by this load. So now we’re trying to talk about, how do we measure the effect of the load, the responses to the load, and that’s what I believe Celia would have termed stress. And he would have termed it stress because he had learned it from the physical sciences, the engineers who would measure stress on beams and things like that,
Trevor Connor 09:05
to give our listeners an idea of just how big an influence has had. He then wrote a book explaining this whole concept of stressors and stress response. And this is the thing I wanted to point out. He was an endocrinologist. He was studying hormones. He was studying chemicals in our body, basically. And when he wrote that book, the field of psychology jumped on it. Said, this is great, and that’s what brought this whole concept of stress into psychology. So when you say, I’m stressed for an exam next week that was adopted from somebody who came from the biological world.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 09:41
Yeah. And now, you know, I think we’ve become even more aware. I think an extension of this is the stress bucket model, which kind of plays on this idea that it’s not what you do, but how you respond to it and but eventually, if it kind of all goes in the bucket of. Of the different stressors that may or may not push us over the edge that we react to differently. My son reacts to having very little money in his bank account with almost no stress at all. It’s a stress or potentially but for him, man, you know, he’s chill, and not just because he has me as a backstop economically, but just he doesn’t get stressed. I would be way more stressed if my bank account was as poorly. So that’s that individual aspect of things is different stressors affect different people differently, and they accumulate differently. You know, if my boss is a jerk and I’m going through some problems with my health, and if a child, one of the killers for parents is, if their child is having a problem one of their children, then the whole world just caves in on that problem. So everything else gets harder. I can tell you that from experience. So this individual nature of these stressors in our life, both psychological and physiological, it seems like Celia created a framework for understanding that. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 11:10
but I will point out one of the biggest complaints he had till the end of his life was how indiscriminately the word stress was used. And as we’ll probably get into in this conversation, there are specific criteria for something to be defined as a stressor, but it just became this household term that people use for a lot of different things. Yeah, and not to compare myself with Celia, but I’ve experienced the same thing with polarized training.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 11:37
Any of these terms it takes on a life of its own. If you get kind of connected to some conceptualization and your name gets stuck to it, then that conceptualization will be used and abused and misunderstood and so forth. So it’s just the nature of the game. And he wrote books at a time when before this is pre internet, pre social media, you know, so these books were highly influential. If so he were alive today, he would be an amazing podcast interview. He would be, you know, he would be one of these people that would just be because he was so good at explaining things. You know, he was made for this era, I would almost say, in terms of his ability to take science and make it understandable for the public. I
Griffin McMath 12:25
think one of the things about this word being used inappropriately at this point is what we see happen with a lot of other words that we end up coining within pop psychology is what it’s called. So I imagine Dr Celia, kind of like the Beatles, puts out this great work of art, and then it just becomes viral, trending. It really strikes a nerve with a certain audience, and then everyone kind of popularizes it in a very trendy way and remakes it for their own purpose. I think stress we see that now with the term gaslight and other terms that have been made viral. Sure,
Chris Case 12:59
Trevor, I was going to have you briefly describe the experiments he originally did with the nocuous noxious agents to give people a sense of how he came to understand the concept in these rats that he was working with.
Trevor Connor 13:16
Absolutely and, yeah, nocus and noxious agents, very different. Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 13:23
That’s good. We got to attack each other as quickly as we can. Well played Trevor. Look at the title
Chris Case 13:27
of it. Okay,
Trevor Connor 13:28
fair enough. But quickly, just to give people an idea, because you mentioned this, just how prolific he was. He wrote 32 books and published over 1500 articles, and probably his most cited article. These were not short. It says
Chris Case 13:42
nocus Does Okay, verified a syndrome produced by diverse nocus
Griffin McMath 13:50
Nine font. He’s like, can you see this from three feet away?
Dr. Stephen Seiler 13:56
Folks, just so you know, behind the scenes, these people are competing with each other over a word and what it actually means. So this is how nerdy I just was enjoying
Trevor Connor 14:07
the opportunity to make fun of
Chris Case 14:08
Chris as an editor for so many years. When I see a word like that, it just sticks in my brain. It’s a photographic memory type thing you used noxious earlier. And I was like, I didn’t call you out on it, but I figured I’d plant it in there so we could have this debate. He
Griffin McMath 14:23
has used both. We’re just bringing the nerd to the nerd lab
Dr. Stephen Seiler 14:27
today. So well done, Chris. My goodness.
Trevor Connor 14:30
So to answer Chris question, I think it’s really important to point out that he has been referred to as the Einstein of medical research. And I think that’s important, because you look at the history of Einstein, he wasn’t even a professor. He was working in the patent office, and he published this paper, the general theory of relativity. That was absolutely groundbreaking. And with Celia, you saw something similar in 1936 he published. His paper that Chris was just referring to, and I’m not even sure you can cover it, a paper was published in Nature column. It was literally on a page with two columns. It’s one column, but it was absolutely groundbreaking. And Dr Sadler, I’ll hand it over to you, but this is where he basically defined this idea of general adaptation syndrome. The only thing I will say about it before I hand it over is he, as I was saying before, was doing research on rats, and he was discovering when he was applying different stressors to him, notice I intentionally didn’t use Oculus. It could be cold, it could be chemicals, all sorts of different stressors. He was seeing a common response, and so dr Saad, I’ll hand it over to you, and please give the basics of this. Well, first
Dr. Stephen Seiler 15:46
of all, you got to start with him in Hungary and in Slovakia or wherever in that area. But he starts out. His dad’s a surgeon. His mom runs the clinic that his dad held, and they kind of expected him to become a surgeon too. So it was in the Family Medical School. So at age four, he spoke four languages. At age 17, he starts medical school. Age 17, I don’t know what I was doing at age 17, but I sure wasn’t all right. At age 22 he’s done with medical school and does a PhD. At age 24 he’s finished with that in organic chemistry, so he’s already got an MD PhD at age 24 and for those of you are keeping count at home, that’s freaking unusual. Ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. But the interesting thing is, already, when he was a medical student, they were going around and they would have these different medical doctors who were specialists in different diseases like diabetes or tuberculosis or whatever, and so they would then be very focused on very specific symptomology around that, around heart disease, around these different diagnoses. But our young 1819, year old, hanselly was walking around in these rounds, and he’s saying, Yeah, but you know what, when I look at these patients that we’re seeing, they all kind of have the same symptoms. They look sick, you know? They just don’t look very happy. They are losing weight, they have lost appetite, they typically don’t want to move. They kind of just become very stationary. And he called it the syndrome of being sick. So he was seen kind of a universal while the doctors were so focused on the specific. And he took that away for 10 years, you know, because he was just a student at the time, but the syndrome of just being sick and that influenced him when he then started doing this noxious age and stuff, because then he says, Ah, now we’re getting that generalizable response, because he started seeing a pattern in the gastric ulcers and increases in the adrenal glands got bigger and the thymus shrunk, and, you know, so that he saw some generalizable changes in these rats.
Griffin McMath 18:08
So are you saying that before he did this work, there was just this very pointed everything was treated in isolation, in silos, and then basically he looked at this and saw the forest for the trees. Saw the whole picture. He even
Trevor Connor 18:20
said in his paper, he went through the history of what preceded his generalized adaptation theory, and said all this stuff had been discovered, but the problem was, researchers were looking at each aspect in isolation and not seeing that there was this bigger trend. And basically what he said is, I took all that and realize this is a general response, a non so the really critical word here is non specific response to different nocus agents. They’re
Chris Case 18:50
synonyms. You can use noxious,
Trevor Connor 18:53
but basically the different noxious agents,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 18:56
this is getting obnoxious,
Trevor Connor 19:00
which has noxious in it?
Dr. Stephen Seiler 19:03
Well done. Dr Seiler, well done. I waited for that opportunity to do that. Yeah. So it gets even better, because as I looked a little bit at his work, many decades later, there was a Japanese scientist that found his raw data from the seminal experiments with the noxious agents. And you gotta remember back then, so you wouldn’t have used super sophisticated statistical procedures to look at the data. It would’ve been pretty simple compared to what we do today. We beat the data up with statistics. But the Japanese scholar said, Well, if we look really carefully at the raw data, we would see that even within these rats, yes, most of them showed this generalizable response, but there were some rats where they only showed that the thymus shrunk, but the adrenals didn’t expand, didn’t hypertrophy. And then we had other rats where neither they seemed to just tolerate the stress or. Dollars better, and that’s starting to sound like individual responses. And so I would almost argue that’s a more realistic and correct interpretation that’s consistent with, you know, it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you respond to it. It’s even more compelling is the if the RE analysis of the raw data from his seminal experiments, because there were even rats that individually handled these stressors differently or better than the average rats.
Chris Case 20:29
So you’re saying based on the time when he was doing these experiments, in his lack of some of the tools and lack of sophistication of statistical analysis that we have today was actually somewhat responsible for him determining that this was or coining the term general adaptation syndrome, in a way.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 20:50
Yeah, maybe that’s an interesting point that he I don’t know if he had a little bit of a cherry picking thing going on, but it doesn’t in any way take away from his main finder, it just said, the devil’s in the details, and even in that data, which we see with any kind of study we do, is that there’s individual response variation. That’s one of the darn challenges of science, right? Yes, it could be so much easier if everybody responded the same way, but they don’t. And so that’s kind of part of this story. Is the individual variation that some people handle uncertainty better than others, some people handle physical stress better than others. But if we start adding up a bunch of those things, a bunch of those stressors, eventually we all cave. Eventually. It’s too many balls to juggle at once, and we collapse, we struggle. So that’s this idea of we have our individual tolerances for the bucket of stress orders that we’re dealing with at any given time.
Trevor Connor 21:54
And I think that’s a good segue to talking about the three stages, because I think that’s so important, particularly as athletes, we focus on the first and the second stage. We forget that there’s a third stage. So I’ll quickly introduce and then please take it away from there. But stage one is this alarm. Stage you get hit with the stressor, and your body basically goes, damn, gotta do something. You can have quite severe reaction, depending on the size of the stressor. It can potentially kill you. But if it’s a lesser stressor, you’re going to have an alarm response. But then that leads to this stage two, where you build a resistance, you adapt to the stressor and basically almost go back to normal so your body’s able to handle this stressor. But this is the stage three, so you think, now I’m adapted, I can handle this. If that stressor remains on the body and isn’t removed, you eventually go into this stage three, which is exhaustion, where all those symptoms of the alarm stage come back, and if the stressor isn’t removed, it can kill you.
Griffin McMath 23:04
So this stage three is the asterisk, and the argument that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? It’s like, yeah, until you get to stage three, and then you actually get weaker. Yeah. I mean,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 23:13
we could start using terms like overreaching, over training syndrome and so forth. That would be, we’d put that over in that exhaustion stage. But just as an example, since we’re coming into summer, let’s use heat as a relevant stressor. And I’ve been playing with it. I’ve been trying to bring back my sweat response. So I have put on a thermal singlet, long sleeves, and then a thick hoodie, wrapped it over my head, sit on the bike, no fans, no light, no roof window turned on. I’ve got a little bit of ventilation, just so I don’t run out of oxygen. And then I’ve been doing rides just like a 200 205 watts, for 70 minutes, and then measuring my heart rate response and ventilatory response. And they suck. These heat rides suck. They don’t feel fun, and they make you feel like you’re totally out of shape, but you do adapt, and we know that athletes are using these in various ways. Heat adaptation rides, either in a heat chamber or in in their bathroom with the heat on or whatever, or like me wrapping themselves up in clothes, because now I don’t live in Texas where I get it naturally, and there’s an alarm stage. And for sure, there’s physiological responses that are just out the door. The heart rate’s just going through the roof. My breathing frequency is going up steadily. If I were able to measure other things like cortisol, I’m sure it would be spiking, but there’s an adaptive response over time, and my sweat rate increases, and the heart rate doesn’t quite increase as much, and the breathing is more under control. And there’s several sweat adaptations that happen. I turn on sweating faster. I sweat over a bigger surface area. So the rate of sweat increases and the loss of salts is lower. There’s better salt retention. So those are the four main adaptations to heat. But obviously, if I go too far with these workouts, either I push it too long or too hot, or in real world scenarios, the heat stress is too big, then we can have heat strokes and heat exhaustion and some major medical trauma associated with excessive core temperature and so forth. So it’s a we try to thread the needle and use the heat as a stressor to elicit some positive adaptations that are good. You know, plasma volume expansion, we get maybe a bigger stroke volume, but we don’t want to go too far. So this idea of these three stages is kind of built into a lot of the training we do altitude sessions or interval sessions, or whatever it might be. And we’re going to talk about whether this whole theory applies to exercise adaptations. He certainly went back and forth in what he wrote, but I do think this does apply, and it’s really important for people to remember that you train your body, you adapt, and you start feeling great, you’re very fit. And we just get in this mindset of, oh, this is going to last forever. And I think the lesson here is, no eventually you’re going to get to a point where the adaptations your body can’t maintain them, and you’re going to go into exhaustion and you can’t push through it. That’s where you have to remove the stressor, which is, in this case, training. We have to remember that Celia, I think he did ride a bike some to work, so he wasn’t totally sedentary, but he wasn’t a athlete. He wasn’t athletic or super interested in training, as far as I can tell from what I’ve been able to read. So it was a little bit, I don’t think it had a lot to do with him, that it worked its way into the periodization in physiology literature or training literature, the idea of the GA s and what maybe he wasn’t accounting for because, remember, he was using, he was doing so called noxious agents, nocus agents that were unnatural, or they were artificial. The rat is now being thrown in a cold water or and made to swim every day in the cold water. Or they were literally, sometimes there would be some operation anesthetized, and they’d break a bone so that they would have physical treatment. Physical trauma, and that was the stress or or cold, or literally, in a sense, poisoning them, you know, chemicals, chemical exposure. So that’s different from exercise, and particularly different in the sense that we have to remember that our genetics is, I would almost say we’re optimized for exercise. Our ground state, our baseline, from an evolutionary perspective, would have been that our genetic evolution was honed in the fire of physical activity. And he kind of pointed that out when he said, exercise is unique in that you see almost no alarm stage. It’s very minor, but the adaptation is huge, which is different from most others, because our bodies like exercise. I think the ground truth here is that our bodies thrive with daily activity at some level, but as in all things, enough is good and too much is not. But I think the exercise stimulus, I don’t think it would be appropriate to compare it directly with a innocuous agent or noxious agent, and so that’s a caveat that’s worth remembering, but exercise will still induce those same systemic level responses that are associated with activating the sympathetic nervous system and activating the HPA axis and turning on cortisol release so the same mechanisms and pathways are turned on with a sufficient exercise load,
Trevor Connor 28:57
you just touched on something really important. So going back to he felt that the term stress was thrown around too much. He made a very important distinction, that for something to be considered a stress response in this general adaptation theory, you have to be able to produce it by multiple disparate stressors. So cold produces it. I hate to use the term, but some of these poisons produce it. You can apply different things to the body that have nothing to do with one another, and they all seem to produce this same stress response. Then he goes, that’s a true stress response. And he did cite exercise and say, I don’t really apply exercise to this because you have a specific response. And he also talked about fighting viruses, you have a specific response. So for example, you pick up a weight, you do bicep curls, your biceps gonna get bigger. That’s a specific response. If you put you in cold weather, your biceps not gonna get bigger. So he said, you know, a lot of what you see in exercise, a lot of that. Adaptation is actually a specific adaptation. It’s something that’s different, right? Listeners, fast talk needs your help. We’re planning to make changes to the fast talk podcast, and we want your feedback. Please take our quick survey at fast talk labs.com/survey this survey is brief, and your responses will help shape the future of fast talk visit, fast talk, labs.com/survey, to get started. So do you want to go back to the alarm phase?
Dr. Stephen Seiler 30:27
Yeah, this is a little bit tricky for me, because I don’t necessarily think that it maps perfectly onto what we do in the training situation. But the GIS has probably been used most in a strength training scenario, to be honest, it’s in periodization models associated with strength and power, and so the alarm stage in that context would be that I do six sets of 10 reps in the, let’s say, the squat, and I haven’t Been doing heck a lot of strength training, so that’s sufficient to do quite a bit of cellular damage, you know, with the eccentric loading. But now I’ve got membrane damage so that can be measured. I get delayed onset muscular soreness, all of that would be that alarm stage. And as I walk out of the gym from the workout, and subsequently, for another 2448 hours, I’m actually weaker than I was before the workout, right? My physical performance in the squat is worse than it was before that workout. So I guess that’s in the typical vernacular that would be that alarm stage. But then I turn the corner, and the soreness goes away, and I get a super compensation, as we would call it. And now in cellular terms, we might say, well, there’s a bit of actual protein synthesis that’s happening, and probably some connective tissue has adapted a bit, and so forth. And now I’m more resilient, and I can if I were to repeat that same workout in that Super Comp phase, I would have less of an alarm response. And so you’ll see these classic pictures of this cycle of alarm Super Comp. And we get kind of this riding the wave up, because we’re at the crest of each Super Comp. If we time it right, we do a new workout, get a new alarm response, but we’re starting from a higher baseline, and we just keep going. That’s this optimization of what it looks like in reality. Does it look like that? Well, no, because there’s day to day variation. We have good days and bad days, you know? But that’s the kind of the meme of the Super Comp, and it goes back to Milo of Croton, right? Progressive overload. So now we can fit together some of these thoughts. Is Celia has given us a framework for the idea of progressive overload.
Trevor Connor 32:52
So something I want to add to this, two things that I thought were really interesting, is he pointed out what happens when you have multiple stressors on the body. So one that I found interesting is when you’re in the alarm phase for one stressor, and then you add another stressor, it’s not additive, and you will actually have better resistance to that other stressor. So let’s say you did something to put yourself in an alarm phase, and then you go into a cold environment, you’re actually going to be able to handle that cold environment better initially, but that flips when you get into that stage of resistance where you’ve adapted to one stressor really well, your ability to resist other stressors really declines. And I think that’s an important one for athletes, because we’ve noticed that in high performing athletes, there’s this kind of contradiction of in some ways they’re Ultra tough, and in other ways they aren’t. So when you continue to apply that training stimulus, they can handle it really well, like a Tour de France athlete can handle extraordinary amount of stress, but they get on a plane and there’s a virus anywhere near them, they’re gonna get sick. It’s because they’ve lost their ability to resist other things that they haven’t adapted to.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 34:10
Yeah, or they’re immunosuppressed chronically, because the daily load during the Tour de France, or, you know, cross country skiers in Norway are notorious for they don’t shake hands during the winter, just by default. And it’s not because they’re they don’t like you. It’s just that they are super sensitive to risk of getting any kind of upper respiratory tract infection or something. So they you’ll just see the athletes are just kind of staying away from any kind of contact because they know they’re immunosuppressed, or that’s their baseline assumption is as soon as they cross the line, they’re getting warm and they’re getting away from people, yep, well, and I think we can extend that. And now I would argue that adaptation is cellular. I think what Celia didn’t have access to was genetic information or the molecular. Biology of exercise, because that his work predated Watson and Crick predated maybe seminal work by halazi in 67 which was also with mice and rats or swimming, you know, and finding that there was mitochondrial proliferation in the muscle. Then all sudden, we start taking off on this new type of laboratory, which is the molecular exercise biology laboratory. What are the cellular level adaptations that are happening when the athlete exercises, or the mouse swims, or so forth, and you see this whole cascade of changes in mitochondria, capillary density and so forth. And now we can even say, Well, what are the signals? What are the molecular level signals? None of that would have been available to Celia at the time of his seminal work. So it’s worth having a chronological context here. So if we go back and put it into that context, then he was onto something without having all the details.
Trevor Connor 35:57
You know, it was the other thing that he didn’t have at the time, so in his paper. So this is a second most cited paper. It’s called the general adaptation syndrome and the diseases of adaptation. He spent 10 pages trying to figure out, what is it in the body that causes these general stress responses. And you could see his frustration, because he went through the entire list and just went that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. And, you know, he was an endocrinologist, he focused a lot on hormones, but said, but it still doesn’t fully add up. Like you you remove the adrenal gland, and you still see some of the responses he very briefly mentioned, and he put in quotes, leukoproteins. And what you realize is, at the time that he was doing this, our understanding of the immune system, like they hadn’t even coined the term cytokines, was very rudimentary. And if you ask me, it is the immune system that’s producing these stress responses, but they just didn’t have the knowledge of it. At the time, they didn’t even have the terminology he was putting in quotes.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 37:01
Yeah, and we do have a big sympathetic nervous system response, so that you know the two communication systems in the body, one super fast and one slower. The super fast is the nervous system, and the slower is the hormonal system that has to depend on lymphatic and blood flow and so forth to move around in the body. So, so it’s like shipping versus air traffic in terms of speed or something like that. But these systems are both part of the adjustment to exercise, and then you might say the stress response. And that’s an interesting thing, because you got to first decide, well, what’s just normal physiology? Because if I take off running, my heart rate goes up, my breathing goes up. Is that a stress response? I would argue. Well, it’s an appropriate reset of a bunch of physiological controls to meet the need, and that would fit in with what we would call an Allostatic kind of view of control, versus a more the traditional canon model of everything is feedback inhibition, or feedback control mechanisms. So I would say that that first response when you start running and your heart rate goes up, I’m not going to call that a stress response, but when it plateaus and then starts drifting up slowly over time. Now I’m going to say, now I’m seeing that the initial capacity the body is having to mobilize more and more to maintain that, and it’s been I’m seeing evidence of it through heart rate, through breathing and so forth. That’s in my world, that stress response.
Trevor Connor 38:36
So, you know, interestingly, he did address the nervous system as one of the potential controllers, and he did studies on rats where he disconnected the spinal cord, and you would still obviously not to exercise. They couldn’t exercise, but you would still see many of the stress responses. Even with basically paralyzed mice, there was no neural response. Man,
Griffin McMath 38:59
these poor mice, Peter clearly did not exist. Fact that
Chris Case 39:02
he might not exist. At this time, I’ve seen some cringing from grit, my
Griffin McMath 39:06
gosh, I’m like, we need to give a statue to all these rats. Because, wow, I’m
Dr. Stephen Seiler 39:10
not sure the Institutional Review Boards would allow any of this stuff. Now,
Chris Case 39:15
it does seem, Dr Seiler, like you are admitting that sometimes there’s a gray area between what is, quote, unquote, a normal response and what is a stress response, still,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 39:26
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that this is important. You have to kind of decide, you know, I’ve had chats with my PhD student around this is that, you know, the allostatic model, which basically says, Look, homeostasis is not what the body is constantly pursuing. Walter Cannon would have said, you know, homeostasis, meaning we always want to be at some specific set point. Well, that doesn’t make sense, because then how that means, if I take off running, I’m immediately my body is trying to pull me back to homeostasis. No, my body is adjusting the set point to handle the demand, and it’s a totally appropriate resetting of that. And that’s what the allostatic model would argue, is saying, well, it’s not always fighting to get back to baseline, but it is trying to be stable around some set point. And so if you think about the fast phase of you know, if you take off running, you have the fast component and a slow component, right, you know, so your body quickly adjusts up oxygen consumption and it stabilizes. So you get on the bike, you ramp up to 200 watts. 200 watts is below your first lactate turn point. It’s comfortable within, let’s say 10 minutes. You’re flat. Your heart rate is now stabilized. It’s flat. You’ve gone up to some new set point. But you’re not stressed by the 200 watts. And if I ask you, what’s your perceived exertion, you say, I don’t know, nine. You know, 10 on the Borg scale, that goes to 20. Okay, so pretty chill. And then we ask you that every 20 minutes, and it stays just low, because it’s Trevor Connor. And Trevor is used to doing four hour rides, so he’s well within his comfort zone in this ride. But if Steven does this, and at 200 watts, 200 watts is okay, but Steven doesn’t do four hour rides. He does, you know, two hour rides, 90 minute rides. So he’s good to go for 90 minutes, and then after 90 minutes, he starts, his heart rate starts drifting up, his breathing starts kind of going a little bit up, but he’s good after two hours, only a few beats increase, yeah. So pretty darn stable, pretty no stress. Gets off the bike after two hours, goes straight to the dinner table or straight to the cold beer, and feels good. And heart rate comes down quickly. You know, heart rate’s in the 60s within two or three minutes, but if Steven keeps going for three hours, different ball game now, that stress response is starting to kick in. And if I go four hours, which is easy for Trevor, at the same wads, four hours the next day, I’m going to feel that and my heart rate will have been quite a bit higher. At the end, my breathing will have been a lot higher, and I would have been feeling sorry for myself and wanting to get off the bike. So this is this issue that we both would have shown the same flattening out at the beginning, and maybe even the same initial perceived exertion, but very different stress responses subsequent to that, as a function of our differences in fitness and capacity and so forth. So this is where, for me, that we would distinguish the initial adjustment to a stress response physiologically, or a mobilization increase. You might say,
Trevor Connor 42:54
I love that you brought up the work of Dr cannon because he was writing about the same time as Dr Celia, and Dr Celia referenced him many times in his papers and his concept of homeostasis. And as I was reading this, the way I saw it was, Dr cannon identified the fact that the I agree with you, it’s not that we have a baseline that is constant. Homeostasis is about the body always trying to find balance, trying to find a set point that it can hold. And I think that’s what Dr cannon recognized when he defined homeostasis. I think what Dr Celia did is identify the mechanism, this general adaptation theory, by which the body tries to maintain homeostasis, because that’s ultimately what it’s about. You’re trying to get into this stage of resistance. Where your body has once again found a homeostatic balance. But I think again, one of the most important things that he identified, and we, Chris and I, recently did a whole episode on homeostasis, and this is where we ended. The episode, is that the body can find this new homeostatic balance for a period of time. So the you know, develop this resistance for a period of time, but eventually it’s going to fail. And I think that was the really important thing that Dr Celia added, is that eventually homeostasis, if you have a stressor that remains, eventually a homeostasis is going to break. And you were pointing that out with your example, that riding a 200 watts is a stressor. You can maintain that no problem for an hour. You can stay in balance for an hour, maybe two hours, but eventually your body’s not gonna be able to maintain homeostasis, and you’re gonna crack, I
Dr. Stephen Seiler 44:37
guess, one of my favorite expressions, and I wanna say I created it, but it’s just there is no steady state. That’s basically what we’re saying is, at some level of granularity, there is no such thing as a steady state. But if we zoom out enough, then yeah, we see steady states. Does that make sense? There’s no perpetual steady state. Our bodies have limited resources. Resources, whether it’s fuel or fluid or cognitive load, there’s numerous, you might say, limited, resources that will slowly be used in that acute situation. So the steady state is a nice fiction, I guess you could say, at a granular level, I’m going
Trevor Connor 45:21
to put this in very aspirational terms. Our bodies are basically designed to try to achieve something that, as you said, is not achievable.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 45:29
Yeah, and it’s semi achievable for some semi duration, some finite duration, and that finite duration shrinks with intensity, with magnitude of the stressor. So Celia absolutely has been an influence for me, and he also gave me confidence, because I said, Well, you know what? He adapted information from engineers, so I’m not going to be scared to do that either, to try to put physical science stuff into a biological context. And he had to work at it, because there’s issues to deal with. And then I’m trying to figure that out too, is in terms of thinking about these, all these metrics, and trying to kind of sort them out and say, well, these metrics, this set of metrics, is basically just external load. And then here’s a set of metrics that seems to be kind of related to those stress responses during workouts. And then here’s a set of metrics that seem to be related to downstream negative effects that persist a while, like heart rate variability that goes down and, you know, resets and peak lactates that seem to go down and can’t get my heart rate up, and readiness to train goes down, and so that’s a kind of a strain. Those are some metrics that seem to fit under this strain respect. So there’s been a deformation. We’re bent. We’re bent out of shape, and how are we going to get back to normal? Almost always it’s some aspect of rest, some aspect of just pulling off the throttle and giving the body a chance to recover once you move into that strain response, you know. So I’m kind of just playing with the engineering terms, just like Celia did to create a imperfect but useful framework. Maybe. So to use his terminology, you got to remove the stressor If you push too far. Yeah, as far as we can tell from the research, it’s really the only solution, and even that may not work very well, because you eventually have to also bring it back a little bit. You have to the over trained athlete, you know, eventually they’ve you’ve got to start reintroducing some load and slowly working them back. So it’s a tricky problem, the people who really fall off the cliff with the overtraining syndrome? I don’t think that happens as much anymore, because we’re more conscious of all of this stuff. We’re doing a better job. But it does still happen, and it’s tough. It can be career ending. So you know, it’s rest is part of it, but it takes even more than that to get back,
Chris Case 48:00
if you were to be able to test blood and look for blood markers, is there something that would say, this is an Allostatic response, or this is beyond that, and this is now a stress response?
Dr. Stephen Seiler 48:14
We’d probably need to have baseline data on this individual. That’s always the thing. But I think one of the things we’d want to measure cortisol, which is part of that axis, from all the way up in the hypothalamus, in the brain, it’s working its way down, is the release, eventually, of these corticosteroid hormones, and one of which is cortisol. So cortisol is often kind of as a stress hormone. Sure, if we were to be able to look inside the body to understand how much load was being applied to it with a marker. I feel like I’m thinking about this because we have discussed the Norwegian method a lot lately. And you know, the ingebrigtsens are going out there and taking blood lactate measurements throughout these sessions. And I’m wondering, is blood lactate the one that you want to be looking at, or is there some other blood marker that is more specific to load that would tell you more and could help you fine tune even better, if you could measure it. Part of me wants to go back to cortisol right as a probably a somewhat lagging indicator, but a useful indicator of an overall stress response. I think that during the workout, I am getting pretty well convinced that some aspects of breathing, some ventilatory variables, particularly breathing frequency, is a pretty telltale sign, because of the way breathing is being regulated. So cortisol would be a hormone I would look for, look at, I want to track the relative relationship between their heart rate and their breathing response, because we find that that combination, that ratio, seems to be really sensitive to the degree of mobilization that you might say that the athlete is having to bring up today. Dig. You know, How deep are they digging? I guess would be in the vernacular of the everyday athlete. But whether there’s another marker that’s an interesting question is whether there’s some metabolite that, you know, maybe should be in this picture, it depends a little bit on where it’s coming from. You know, is it coming from within the muscle? Then it’s got to be leaking out if it’s coming from whereas, you know, if it’s a hormone, and that’s one thing, if it’s coming from some, you know, the liver, or maybe the spleen, it’d be, I don’t know, we’ll see, but I just to not abandon the known physiology. I think cortisol is definitely a candidate continuous
Chris Case 50:38
cortisol monitors. That’s the next thing, next big thing, just because
Dr. Stephen Seiler 50:42
you say that we need to really understand, or it’s kind of nerdy to think about that continuous glucose monitoring. Now that happens. How is it being done? Well, it’s going into the subcutaneous interstitial fluid, so it’s an extension of the blood. We’re saying we don’t have to actually be in the bloodstream, because whatever’s in the bloodstream eventually diffuses out into the interstitial fluid, so it’s slower, but eventually those two will show the same thing. And so you have these micro needling that you’re putting the device on, and it’s measuring interstitial fluid, and it’s measuring specific ligands, specific things. In this case, it’s creating an electrical current that is analogous, or in proportion to the amount of glucose, the concentration of glucose. The technology is there to do the same with lactate, but the technology is there to do the same with lots of different substances, different chemical agents. So the military is funding research on how to use this basic technology of interstitial fluid analysis, using chemical detection in all kinds of ways. For example, to say, hey, if we’re in an area where there may be chemical warfare, we want to be able to detect whether our soldiers have been exposed. So eventually, if we find this magic stress substance, ligand, whatever you wanna call it, that they’re gonna be detectable. They’re gonna be detectable with the appropriate chemical conversion. Because it’s always gonna be some kind of a chemical conversion to an electrical response that then can be calibrated and read on a Bluetooth device or something like that. So I think we’re that’s one of the core technologies that’s going to continue to develop, is just being able to have a chemistry lab that is on your arm,
Chris Case 52:36
attached to your arm, yeah, yeah, a little mobile lab. Right
Dr. Stephen Seiler 52:39
now, it’s glucose, but it’ll be a lot more than that, and probably in some research settings, it already is a lot more than that. It’s just that the commercialization of these things is slower, but a lot of it often starts with military research. That’s just the bottom line. So these things are happening. It’ll be interesting to see if something pops a new detection, but lactate will be the next one. It’s on the shelf already. That technology, I’ve been approached myself by a couple of different companies. So I know it’s out there, but it’s more about, is the market sufficient? Do they want to use the energy on it? Because obviously, diabetes is a bigger deal. It’s a you know, clinical applications are more lucrative than fitness applications, I think is probably fair to say.
Trevor Connor 53:23
So the last place I want to go, he talked a lot about what he described as diseases of adaptation. So his idea here was that during resistance, you have what he calls adaptation energy, you know, just taking all these physiological mechanisms, the energy that’s being invested in a building resistance or adaptation to whatever the stressor is, but eventually that energy depletes, and when that happens, you go into a disease state. And he was referred to many of these diseases, from hypertension to rheumatoid arthritis to diabetes to cardiovascular disease, what we would call now the diseases of civilization. He really pointed to the corticoids. And basically said corticoids are great for building resistance, but keeping them chronically elevated for that long ultimately has a very negative impact on your body. And that was his theory. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that one biggest stressors he used, and please laugh at me for how I pronounce. This is deaths, oxycorticosterone. That was horrible, overdoses, basically, he was slightly poisoning these rats, but it’s actually with a chemical that exists naturally in our bodies and how that constantly led to these diseases of civilization. I think this, to me, answers a question that we’ve constantly had about nutrition. Where people go, we’re eating these foods. You’re telling them they’re bad for us and they lead to disease. But I ate it for decades, and I had no problems. Now I have this disease. Explain that, and what I see is, if you’re drinking all. Time, if you’re eating fruit loops every day, you’re essentially seeing this general adaptation syndrome, where this is a stressor on the body. It’s a very mild poison that causes a stage of resistance where you’re not going to see any sort of disease, you’re not going to see any sort of negative consequences of eating these foods. But eventually you hit that exhaustion stage, and then you start seeing these diseases. And it’s, again, a generalized response. So nutrition researchers say you eat Froot Loops. Here’s exactly how they cause rheumatoid arthritis, or exactly how they cause diabetes or any of these particular diseases. You might not be able to identify an exact mechanism. It’s more they are sparking this generalized Adaptation Syndrome. And as he said, If the stressor is not removed, eventually, these are the diseases you see. And you guys,
Chris Case 55:51
I’m laughing because I don’t want us to get sued by Kellogg,
Griffin McMath 55:54
literally, I was like, Fruit Loops causes
55:57
this host of diseases, the
Trevor Connor 55:59
generic fruit loops that you find
Chris Case 56:03
the generic ones. Yes, yes, you brought
Trevor Connor 56:05
up Kellogg’s. I wasn’t thinking Kellogg. Sorry.
Chris Case 56:07
Post, was it? Post?
Griffin McMath 56:09
I think this also goes back to what Dr Seiler was saying with the individualized response, because you can see the person who’s 80 something has been eating this way their entire life, and then you might have someone else who eats like that for three days, and their body says, Oh, hell no, you know. And has such a different ability to handle that stress load. But
Trevor Connor 56:29
there’s so many interesting things that are brought up here, because if diet, a bad diet, is causing you to be in this constant state of resistance, remember other stressors we aren’t as able to handle them. So if the diet is putting you in this stage of resistance, then other things, like viruses, other stressors, you your body just can’t handle them as well. And those might be the things that have caused disease, but it was created by an environment of having to constantly deal with a bad diet, something that he finished his 140 page paper. With that I found really interesting was allergies, and you’re seeing right now this huge rise in allergies, and kids going, what’s causing this? And he even put right in the paper, this was a quote from, actually another researcher who was really complimenting Dr selio, said, I have suggested that the physical allergy is a perversion of a normal physiologic reaction, the alarm reaction of Celia. And he goes on to continue saying this, that the general adaptation syndrome and allergies are incredibly close, somehow closely linked. And so again, potentially, if we are constantly putting our bodies under these stressors by diet or other things, and you’re in the stage of resistance, then you would see that perversion. You would see that increase in at least, according to what he wrote, you would see those increases in allergies. And you’d be scratching your head, going, why? Because you’re not thinking about this general adaptation syndrome. You’re looking for a specific cause
Dr. Stephen Seiler 57:57
where you can go even farther. You know, I know you’re super interested in nutrition, and I am, too, because, you know, pizza is important for me, chili peppers and I would argue that if I put avocado and tomatoes on a pizza, store bought pizza, that that now is a nutritious meal. So just where we know where I stand on nutrition. Hold on,
Trevor Connor 58:23
is it a Kellogg’s pizza? No,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 58:27
it’s a genetic pizza. It’s made in Norway. What I was going to say is, I do think there’s interaction among these different stressors. And exercise as a stressor, I would almost argue, has a protective effect, has a ameliorating effect on dietary inadequacies of some types. You know, if you want to talk about which type of macronutrient distribution you are taking in and so forth, you know, a lot of exercisers basically says, Well, you know, if I’m training a lot, I can eat anything. But if I’m not training so much, then the nutrition becomes a bigger deal. So that would be one aspect of this, is some interactions among these different stressors. And then we’re back to this bucket model, the stress bucket model. There’s been studies like a scholarship athletes at the University of Texas, they were subjected to a really tough DOMs inducing strength session, and they were subjected to them at two different time points. One time point was just during the middle of the semester, and the other was during exams, during the late semester, end of semester exams. So just the stress of it being the exam period, they responded, they recovered slower from the same Dom’s inducing workout. So again, this brain, body connection seems to be real. And so the overall stress. Load that is perceived by the brain may actually, or seems to be actually impacting the physiological responses out in the body. So that’s an interesting, you know, mind, body connection. That is, I think even Celia would have, still would have been fascinated by the details that are emerging. You know, he would have, if he were living today, he would be so amazed and so engrossed in trying to understand it at an even more detailed level. But he certainly gave us some decent frameworks for where we are today that I think live on way past his death, which is now, you know, he died in 82 so over 40 years ago, and we’re still talking about him, so he’s had a huge impact, and it’s up to us to make sure that impact is appropriately adapted and adopted in the setting that we work in.
Trevor Connor 1:00:52
And I think that’s probably a great place to leave this, because we’ve said this before, we try to focus often on what was the research that was produced a month ago? You know, a week ago. You know, if it wasn’t written in the last couple of years, and it’s outdated, but the importance of reading some of this older research because of just how groundbreaking and important it is. I mean, the study I read was written in 1946 and absolutely fascinating and still absolutely relevant to what we’re doing nowadays. Totally.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:01:23
I do think that’s a great ending message for all of us is, in the age of hyper stimuli from all different media, it’s easy to forget that we have a history that our brains as humans have been very active for a long time and had some really amazing, creative bursts, and it’s we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. In that regard, is that we do build on the shoulders of giants, as scientists, as coaches and so forth. And that’s, that’s okay. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel constantly. So Celia was man, just a giant, and I’m proud to feel like I have learned a bit about his work and try to do the best I can to connect the dots a little bit like he did. Well, Dr Seiler, always a pleasure. Yeah, same for me. The gang is back in town, yeah,
Trevor Connor 1:02:19
and we’ll leave it at he lived 60 years in Canada. Oh, boy.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:02:24
He clearly enjoy living in Canada. So something was very good about Canada for him. And he did try John Hopkins in the United States, and that wasn’t so great. So he went to Canada.
Chris Case 1:02:37
You don’t even live in Canada. Trevor, so it must not be that great?
Griffin McMath 1:02:46
Yeah. Mike
Trevor Connor 1:02:47
Myers, there’s nothing more Canadian than a Canadian living in the US.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:02:54
But that’s kind of funny, because I when we move to foreign countries, we sometimes reach back, trying to keep our identity connected, you know, we want to use I sometimes feel this need to be the American in Norway, you know. And other times I hide it as
1:03:12
like, maybe right now, right now,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:03:14
I have to say, in the current environment, I am not wearing any America’s great shirts or anything like, Yeah, but I gotta ask, Are you the only Texan living in Norway? Are you aware of any other Texans in Norway? Heck no. Actually, because of the oil industry, there’s quite a stream of historically and even Currently, there’s a lot of Texans that work, live and work in different parts of Norway. In the oil and gas industry in particular, there’s shuttle traffic, you know, from my city to Houston, Texas, just because of some of the offshore industry issues and so forth, the technology development around platforms and stuff like that. So, yeah, there’s plenty of Texans. It’d be better to ask, Are you the only Texan living in Norway that doesn’t know anything about oil and gas.
1:04:07
There we go.
1:04:10
Yes, yes, I’ve won a few
Trevor Connor 1:04:14
good, very good. That makes me feel better, because I’ve always had this image of you being the sole Texan in Norway.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:04:20
No, absolutely not. And we all complain about lack of good Tex Mex food.
Chris Case 1:04:25
This is why I’m telling you, when you’ve got this second option, you’d grow your chili peppers. Get out of academia. Get the food truck going. The Food
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:04:33
Truck silos, hot and spicy. Silas, spicy salsa. Shack, Tyler’s polarized chili, polarizing,
Chris Case 1:04:43
polarizing. You either like it or you hate it. It will
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:04:47
smell on your breath, and you will keep people away from you so you will be polarized. Oh, my God, it’s good to have a plan B, so I’m figuring out my retirement strategy. Okay, there we go. Griffin has tuned out. She says, Oh, Jesus, they’re talking about chili again. No, she’s
Trevor Connor 1:05:06
looking up the legal side of mentioning Kellogg’s. I know
Griffin McMath 1:05:10
Chris has. Chris beat me to it, and Chris also beat me to the why are we putting up Canada so much when you’re in the US comment, that’s
Chris Case 1:05:18
been our shtick for eight years. That goes back to the original episode was Trevor gave me license to pick on him, if there was nothing else, the said pick on Trevor.
Trevor Connor 1:05:31
So here’s my answer. When I am in Canada, they all think I’m an American, so I have no canadianness. When I’m in the US, I am Canadian, and I have a lot of canadianness, so I stay down here to maintain my
Chris Case 1:05:45
practice your training. You’re in training. But that
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:05:47
contrast you mentioned is the same for me. I mean, if I go to the United States, then I feel like, Oh, my God, where am I? You know, I don’t know. So there’s a contrast of going back and forth between these two places and whatever you’ve adopted as your second country. It does mess with your head a bit. Is, you know, which Am I right now? But I’m I’m happy with it. And to be honest, I do believe that all great friendships are partly built on having something to make fun of with each other, some little jab that we can constantly play with and it keeps us happy. I mean, I with my rowing buddies from 30 years ago, man, we can get on a Zoom meeting, and we’re right back there, you know, messing with each other. So, but that’s what connects us, part of it. So I think you guys are best friends. You say you kind of scared me, because if that’s the basis of friendship, I think Chris is in love with me. Oh, boy,
Chris Case 1:06:45
I was until that comment. Trevor,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:06:49
anyway, so that’s, I think that’s part of our friendship too, is we all make a little bit of fun of each other. So, yeah, agreed, and it’s accepted. It’s part of it. I don’t, nobody takes offense. It’s
Chris Case 1:06:59
done with respect. All right, we’ll
Trevor Connor 1:07:02
leave it there always a pleasure. We’ll meet again. I’m sure that was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions Express talk are those of the individual. Subscribe to fast talk wherever prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a rating and a review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs, join the conversation at foreign soft fast talk labs.com or learn from our experts at fast talk labs.com for Dr Steven Seiler, Dr Griffin, McMath and Chris case. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
