Pleasure as the Path to Longevity with Susan Bratton

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TalkToMeGuy : Greetings everyone. This is the Sound Health Radio Show where we talk about the crossroads of the environment, our health and longevity, with Richard TalkToMeGuy and Sherry Edwards' off working on the Sound Health Portal. I would suggest going to the SoundHealthPortal.com, scrolling down just a bit and clicking on the Watch How button. You'll see a short video explaining how to record and submit your first recording. Then go back to SoundHealthPortal.com, scroll down to current active campaigns such as cellular inflammation, biodei-ut, neuroplasticity, or memory, and choose one that is of interest for you. Click on that campaign and click Free Voice Analysis and the system will walk you through submitting your recording. You'll receive an email with your report back usually in one to two hours.

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TalkToMeGuy : With that, Susan Bratton, intimacy expert to millions is a sexual biohacker on a mission to extend your sex span and lengthen your health span. Think of her as an orgasmonaut, someone who travels to the outer reaches of human orgasmic potential and comes back with the map to the territory of pleasure and connection. Her superpower, courage. Susan takes a lion-hearted stand for your human right to pleasurable connection with a willingness to get nerdy on anatomy, detailed about sex skills, and sex science driven on sex drive to achieve that outcome for everyone whose lives she touches.

For two decades, she's guided 300,000 readers throughout through her newsletters. Better lover and longevity wins. Blending pleasure forward practices with cutting edge regenerative science all while making sex smart, sensual, and shame free.

And here's the through line. Everything Susan teaches her followers about their sex life is also expanding their potential for a longer, healthier life. Pleasure and longevity, it turns out, are on the same road. She's also a CEO of the Tony, a supplement company founded on a simple idea. 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts.

If you know which 20% to choose. Their flow and desire products deliver that just right blend of botanicals and vitamins for blood flow, libido, and sexual vitality. You've seen her on ABC, CBS, and NBC and heard her on over a thousand podcasts. She's the best selling author of 44 books and programs, all built around one idea, transform having sex into making love. Welcome Susan.

Susan Bratton : Richard, how's my favorite talk to me guy?

TalkToMeGuy : It's I always, we're always, we've known each other for quite a long time.

Susan Bratton : Yeah, many, many years now.

TalkToMeGuy : It surprises me. And we always have such, we're like, you know, dogs running in the field. So to speak. All right, exactly. I'd like to start here. I'd like to start at the most women's sexual health conversations often begin around menopause. And I would say suspect, but I know your take on it is very different from what most women hear from their OB, GYN. Would you walk us through what's actually happening and why it doesn't have to be the end of anything?

Susan Bratton : Yeah. Well, the good news is that hormones fix, topping up your hormones, fix a lot of the issues that women have been having with menopause, trouble sleeping. The list is really endless. It's like Santa scroll, you know, it just rolls out through the universe. And so much of it, it's kind of like there's two things. There's the health issues, the sleep issues, the weight gain issues, the irritability, all of those pieces. But then there's also the sexuality issues, which are my libido is gone, my vagina is dry, sex is painful, I don't, I don't have any interest in it anymore. And that's kind of my lane is the what, what can we do? What's the multi-factorial strategy for helping the women who do want to keep their sex life going?

What can we do about that? And for a lot of women, it's so much easier for them just to give it up. And the bummer for me around that is, as you said, right in the first sentence of my bio, I'm focused on extending our sex ban to extend our health span. Sex is good for us, pleasure is good for us, orgasms are good for us. Now we don't need a partner to have those things, but let me miss out on things like connection, grounding, oxytocin, feeling seen, feeling loved by another. So one of the things that I think is the biggest misunderstood part of low libido in women in midlife is that sex has never been that good for them. Maybe it was, you know, there were some flash points in the decades leading up to menopause where they had moments of it being great, but often for many women, it's, it's left them feeling like it might just be easier to give it up. And I think that's in great part due to a combination of things like lack of pleasure based sex education, living in a culture that puts male pleasure as primary, forward, foremost, first.

Having had sex that is oriented around the pleasure of penis rather than the way the vagina would like to have sex, like if you took a thousand women and said, who here can tell us how the vagina really likes to have sex? Not one woman would know. They would assume that everything that they have seen is what sex is, but it's everything they have ever seen is what sex is for penile pleasure. And sex for vaginal pleasure, sex for, you know, clitoral pleasure feels just as good to the penis as what the penis has been getting, sometimes better. But we don't see it, so we don't know about it. So we think there's something wrong because we don't love it anymore. And then you add in all of the kind of varying costs of being a woman in our culture today, the all of the emotional, mental, and physical unpaid labor that comes with being a woman in relationship.

And I can't blame any woman for wanting to check out of that. So my solutions are, first of all, their physical life. Take a nitric oxide supplement by the time you're 40 so you can begin to improve the blood flow to your pelvic bowl so that your genitals get engorged with blood, with arousal. Flow down your sex life. Spend way more time in what our world calls foreplay, like sex is intercourse and everything else is foreplay. And we rush through the appetizer to get to the main course when in reality all of it, especially for the female body is sex. How do we do that?

What does that look like? Learning more skills like full body touch, holding and being held without rushing to sex, yoni massage, massaging the vulvo vaginal system with high quality oils and butters that help bring that blood flow in because it takes us longer to get aroused. Being more open to forgiveness around body image issues, one of the good things about midlife is that for many women they begin to move through the loathing and the self-hatred around what they perceive as imperfections of their body and they begin to realize life is short and they should take their pleasure and that they're beautiful just the way they are. We get a little bit less critical of ourselves, a little more willing to be seen in our humanity. So I think that those are some things that are really good. And then one of the things that's great about sex is that like anything, you know, cooking or learning a new hobby and playing an instrument, being an artist, whatever it might be, there is mastery from experience. The more experience you have, the better you get, you often get. You've got, I'm in the saddle and that makes your knowledge about your body, your knowledge about your pleasure, your confidence in the bedroom a little more solid than when you were first starting out.

You're more willing to potentially ask for what you want or realize some things that you need. So that can contribute positively to beginning to have a good sex life as well. Those are some of the real fundamentals on top of hormone therapy. Of course, a big proponent of HRT and also building up your stores of oxytocin.

I think we've talked about that before that. Antibiotics, which we've all had, have kind of wrecked our production of oxytocin and so frankly with low oxytocin production or no oxytocin, barely any oxytocin production, we just don't feel the pleasure and connection we used to. And when you can fix that in your gut, you can begin to have better orgasms. One of the things I learned from Dr. Lindsey Berkson is that oxytocin is a contractile hormone. And when you orgasm, it's a contraction and release. So oxytocin actually helps with orgasmic intensity and ejaculation.

And I think that's interesting too. Like if you can't get a feeling from a good orgasm, maybe you can get it back with a little bit of a top up of your oxytocin. And you can take exogenous oxytocin, you can take it intravaginally, intranasally.

But you can also build up your own stores by replacing the lactobacillus rhodoride that got filled off in your gut when you had to take antibiotics. Could have ever thought that.

TalkToMeGuy : I'm so impressed by how much gut talk there is now.

Susan Bratton : Yeah, me too. I'm happy about it too.

TalkToMeGuy : Whether it's Martha Carlin or William Davis, one of the leaders in that arena in my mind.

Susan Bratton : Yeah, Bill's fantastic. I love him so much. He taught me all that about oxytocin.

TalkToMeGuy : Yeah, I've done that. I've been interviewing him since he wrote the week belly. So we have a long history together. And now this thing that he's on now, man on fire about yogurt, it's like mind-blowingly brilliant. I know. And I want to add in to this mix because I know it's related. We have a category that I don't think very many people have heard about. And something I know that you can speak to is this little known word that men, I don't think if you could go on and take a poll on the street, I imagine 10 out of a thousand men would know what this was. Andropause.

I never hear anybody anywhere talking about andropause. Every... Anywhere.

No, no. Well, you hang out in Denver crowds. But I never had.

And I've been, you know, like there's an annual Christmas or New Year's Day party that I've been going to for 35 years. And I would be willing to take a poll there that 80% of those people have never heard of andropause. Would you talk about andropause? Because everything you just talked about is related to that, but just from the male perspective.

Susan Bratton : Yeah, it's male menopause. They just call it andropause. And it's the loss of testosterone, the loss of oxytocin, the loss of blood flow, lower nitric oxide production, and all of those things, including, and this is something we didn't really mention for women either, but just mitochondrial... You know, loss of mitochondrial firepower, lack of energy, lack of cellular energy, which is probably the single biggest thing that wrecks our sex lives is, you know, the energy. You got to go to bed. You're tired.

You don't have the energy to hold yourself up on, you know, on your arms and do some planks for a while to love or whatever it is. And yeah, so andropause is just the commensurate to menopause and all of the losses that men suffer, especially penylatrophy, penylatrophy and loss of sperm erection, lack of blood flow to the penis. And then that definitely makes the... You know, when you don't have the blood flow coming into the penis, it can't stay hard. It can't lock off and stay hard. And what also happens is sensation loss. Things don't be sex and feels good as it used to.

So what about they're doing it? You can't quite get there. You can't quite get to orgasm. And I think that's really interesting because what happens with the loss of blood flow to the penis is you get the retraction of the capillaries and then the nerves, of course, retract because there's no blood supply feeding them. So you have sensation loss. So you have lots of firmness, loss of erectile, overall erectile function, as well as loss of sensation. That is bigger than you can imagine.

You should... I mean, that's probably... Guys know when they have ED, but they don't know why they can't feel pleasure like they used to. They don't understand the mechanisms of action of that.

And that's it for a while. That's why I Gainesway, the acoustic wave treatment, that it's like this little wand that's applied to the penis down into the base of the shaft, down in the perineal area. And it's these little waves that go into the tissue and they do tiny little bits of micro-damage that then your body comes in and repairs and builds back better. It gets the capillaries growing again, then the nerves come back. You get more blood carrying capacity of the penis, especially if you combine it with a vacuum erection device, a penis pump. Often guys that are beginning to have signs of andropause, they can start lifting weights, doing high intensity interval training, eating better, getting better sleep, and taking some testosterone precursors, supplementation, taking some nitric oxide, and using a penis pump. And that pulls the blood into the penis so that you don't get that capillary and nerve retraction and you keep the blood carrying capacity of your penis working. And all of that is kind of like a return to health or return to energy. You get to stack in there and then senolytics. I think working on replacing the senescent or zombie cells in our body bag, we have what, 72 trillion cells in our body, roughly.

And they get broken and damaged over time. And if you do senolytics, whether it's pulsing, rapamycin, or taking fisetin, or things like that. And then you're also, you can do intermittent fasting, of course, or fasting mimicking diets like the Prolon, which is the one I like because it's easier than me worrying about fasting. I just do a Prolon, I pulse my Prolons every couple of times a year. That really helps keep the energy going too.

TalkToMeGuy : And could we get some benefit from, maybe not as direct as using a Gaines wave, but do you think this also ties to mitochondrial energy? Can we get mitochondrial benefit from either either or both PEMF and red light exposure?

Susan Bratton : Yeah, for sure. The PEMF, of course, is fantastic for just stimulating the regenerative systems of your body. And red light or photobiomodulation is fantastic for stimulating mitochondrial development. So I think red light is great for recovery.

So is PEMF. They're really good for recovery. So they help a lot, especially when you're working out or when you're using a penis pump. There's a red light wrap that comes with the penis pump I recommend. It's called Stimulate. And you can wrap it around the pump or you can wrap it right around your penis.

And your testicles. And what's nice about putting red light on the testicles is that it stimulates the lating cells, which are the cells that make a soft drone in your testicles. And then for women, there's red light therapy in the V-Fit vagina device that allows you to intravaginally stimulate the vaginal mucosal lining with red light therapy. And that stimulates mitochondrial efficacy and that helps thicken that tissue, especially when you combine it with estrogen. I would imagine we will be seeing cross-state massagers that have photobiomodulation built in so that a man can stimulate his cross-state with a cross-state massager that also gives him red light therapy in that area. So you get both the massage, which generates blood flow, which brings in healing and growth factors to the area with photobiomodulation, which helps with mitochondrial stimulation so that you have better, healthier tissue. It was funny, I was just traveling with Tim in Switzerland and we were walking out of a restaurant and he goes, hey, the guys at that table when we were walking out were talking about cross-state massage. And I said, oh, good.

Men are talking about it together now. When I first started recommending very specific cross-state massage tools that I think are the best of breed, I have three that I really like to recommend. It's kind of like a small, medium, and larger one. They have different features and things that I like. Most of the guys who were following me, there was not a lot of uptake on it, but I just keep telling them when they're on my newsletters, here's what you should do. These are the ones I like. Just try one of these.

These are the differences between them. More and more men are doing it now and thanking me for normalizing cross-state pleasuring and espot orgasms and things like that. Because frankly, the whole idea, this notion of extending your sex span to extend your health span, most studies, of course, to date have been done on male lifespan and ejaculation is really one of the biggest supporters of extending your lifespan and your health span because you're moving that ejaculatory fluid through.

You're having frequent ejaculations and that's very good for you. I now, when I speak to women, like next week, I'm going out to Vegas to speak at an event that is for midlife women. I say to them, encourage your men to masturbate. Normalize the masturbation in your household. Take time to self-pleasure and make sure your husband knows you. You want him to use a penis pump. You want him to have a cross-state massage tool.

You want him to be ejaculating regularly because that really goes along the lines of the other thing I say to women in private rooms, which is it's not your job to give your partner an ejaculation. That's not your job. That's their job. If you're complete during love making, you just stop. They can masturbate and they do it a lot.

They do it well. Embrace it in your relationship. Support your husband in letting him know that you want him to be a regular masturbator. It just makes everybody happier and healthier in that long-term relationship.

TalkToMeGuy : Have you written about your cross-state massage devices yet in your sub-stack?

Susan Bratton : I don't think I have, but that's a great idea. I will do that.

TalkToMeGuy : I have a number of men. I would like to send that article to them because I get a lot of questions about that. I have a friend in Albuquerque who's having cross-state issues. He's an old biohacker himself from a long many years. He's using all sorts of things.

That's all I'll say for now. Really try to like, how can I get something in there? How can I get ozone in there? How can I get hydrogen peroxide or something?

Speaker 3: I don't often wonder for men with cross-state issues.

Susan Bratton : A lot of it is because of being sedentary, but I think there's a lot of it as well that could potentially, I bet, will learn in the coming years that a lot of it is due to viruses, bacteria, and yeast attacking the cross-state gland. It's a gland in a muscle. It's an interesting thing in the cross-state. I think that yeast infections, Candida, Candida albicans, overgrowth in the cross-state are probably quite common for men.

TalkToMeGuy : It'd be interesting to, this is not a study that the head of the Veterans Hospital in San Francisco, Carpondale, I can't remember his first name, was helping soldiers who are HIV positive stay healthy and vital by giving them rectal insufflations of ozone. I bet that there's, just as you're saying, I bet that those people, if they're still with us or if they live long enough to study, that they would find that their cross-states were healthier and didn't have issues just by doing a simple insufflation.

Susan Bratton : Yeah, the mechanism of action in the ozone is to starve the tissue of oxygen so that the viruses or bacteria die, some of them, not all of them, right? But the whole notion of ozone is basically create an anaerobic state of the tissue temporarily to starve the oxygen-loving bacteria from replicating? Not exactly.

TalkToMeGuy : Explain it to me. It's more, well, ozone is O2, which is a diatomic molecule. So it's O2. So you, ozone means that somehow you disassociated the O2 and when it comes out the other end of the, through the reaction chamber where the ozone is created by just pumping, in most cases, medical grade oxygen into a chamber that disassociates the oxygen molecules. And when they come out the other end, they're temporarily O3. And that O that is bond there is really horny to bond to something because it's a diatomic molecule.

It wants to be O2, wants to be O2 in a bad way. And so what it'll do is, as soon as it, if it attaches itself to a pathogen, it causes the cell wall of that pathogen to explode because the oxidative reductive potential, the ORP of that O2 is so radical, it won't last very long, but if it contacts a pathogen, it kills it on contact. So it's more about creating, I think it's a combination of killing things and then what you're left over with is you're left over with very clean oxygen going into an area. So it's more of a pathogen killer.

Susan Bratton : Pathogen killer, but not by starving it from oxygen.

TalkToMeGuy : No, not by starving it because the half life of ozone is less than five minutes. So, and that's why when I used to design water purification systems, you had to have monster systems to purify like, let's say a million gallon pool, you have to have monster systems to purify that water at high speed.

But it works beautifully once you have the system set up. And I've had ozone insufflated and IV'd. And it's a bizarre, the very first time I got an IV of ozone, the bizarre thing is I could actually feel it traveling up through my body.

Oh, you could, huh? You could actually feel it traveling because it was sort of like, not exactly tingly, but definitely like you could seal it like floating to the top of your brain. And it was an amazing sensation and quite invigorating and vitalizing.

Susan Bratton : I've had ozone IVs many, many times. I've never done like a 10-pass ozone, but I've done, you know, I'll go in two or three days in a row or every other day for a week kind of thing and do an IV ozone. When I'm run down from traveling and I probably have caught some bugs, that's when I tend to do it and it works very well. And it's a broad thing how little ozone goes into you that makes you feel better. Yes.

TalkToMeGuy : Yeah, it doesn't take very much. It doesn't have to be, I think, well, that's it. I'll say this very briefly. I think the reason that the Rolling Stones are alive and vital today is once or twice a year they go to Europe and get their blood run through a dialysis unit and that the final thing before the blood goes back in is that it's ozonated.

Susan Bratton : So when I was getting ready this morning to come on your show, one of the things that I was thinking about that I wanted to talk to you about was something that I've recently done that was really helpful for me energetically, energy-wise. And I went down to part of a Yarta about, let me see, five or six months ago now. And I had plavmaphoresis, which is basically what you just said, which is blood dialysis, essentially. It's blood filtration. The Russians invented it. And it's very simple.

They just take a big, well, bag your blood out and run it through a filter and stick it back in you. And my, you know, I've been on enough. I'm sure you remember that I had COVID very badly. I almost passed from it.

I had the novel virus then I got it two more times. I'm very susceptible to it. And it was, it took me years to recover from it. And I just was getting, my immune system was not strong. And if anything could be gotten, I was getting it. And my doctor said, I really feel like what you might be struggling with is spike proteins, your body's not clearing from COVID, that if we could get those proteins, filter your blood and get them out of you, your immune system would have to stop dealing with that all the time. And it would have the energy to fight off other random things that come your way.

Are you willing to try it? And I said, yeah, I am. That's, that makes sense. I feel like my immune system is depressed. I'm getting sick all the time. So I went down to Puerto Vallarta for 10 days. And every other day, I had plasma freeze.

I think I had it three or four times in the entire, you know, experience. They also put me in HBOT. And they did some ozone and things like that too. And I came home and I was sick for a while. It was hard on me. I was super tired. It took seven weeks of me coming home and being just, I just had to rest.

I could work a little, but then I just had to go to bed. I was in bed for seven weeks after I did that. And I thought, oh my god, I hope I didn't make a mistake. I hope I didn't do something that made it worse for me. I was just exhausted. And at the same time, I was also doing a peptide protocol therapy.

They were, they were doing a number of things. First thing they were doing was peptides to support my immune function. And then they were doing peptides to support my mitochondrial function, right? They were doing a series of pulses of various peptides. And I was under two doctors care, who both were, you know, really had their hairy eyeballs on me. And after about eight weeks, my energy came back.

I've had, I was just traveling with Tim and Carl when we went to Switzerland. They both got sick. I did not. And I was in rooms with them while they were sick. And I didn't get sick. I wanted to get sick before that.

And so I'm really glad I did it. My focus with regard to my longevity is energy. How do I keep having energy, more energy instead of less energy?

How do I support having energy that can sustain me? Because in my sixties now, I feel like my, my brain is just full of great analytical thought, ability to, you know, tie many concepts I've learned over the, over the eons I've been on this earth now together. I feel wise. I just, everything's kind of gelling in my brain in a way that I've never experienced before. But to get that, to get that thought working and out of me to share with others, which is what I like to do, we got to have energy.

Yeah. And it gave me my energy back. I've been really good. I mean, I've been, I've been pushing 150 pounds of luggage up hills and carrying it upstairs. And I, when I went traveling for six weeks in Europe, I didn't go to my workouts. I didn't lift any weights. I did some skiing and things like that. But just all the steps you do, all the luggage you have to list, all the, you know, riding on the trains and running down the, you know, roads and doing skiing.

And I got home and I did my first ARX, which is ARX. What does it stand for? I don't even remember it. I have to Google it. It's a machine. It's like a weightlifting machine that does the eccentric, concentric movement. You resist and push.

You push against and then you resist against it pulling you. And you do it for many different body parts and it has a graph. So you can see what your last, you can either see your last time you lifted or you can see your best time you lifted. And I, I think it was set to my last time I went in, which was like months and months ago now.

And I could do about 80, 85%. I hardly lost anything from not having done that workout for months. And I thought, oh, this is, this is good. This is exactly what I'm talking about here. Now I'll get back in there and I'll go every week for an ARX.

I'll do three Vaspers. I'll start working out with weights in the studio. It'll all come right back. Every, all my muscles will just go right back again. They get a little flaccid from not doing the weightlifting and the ARX and the Vaspers, you know, continuously throughout the week, but you can pop right back. For me, that's my motto is take silicon and keeps on ticking the old time X commercial that we all know about in our elder era. Yeah.

That was really, really good. So the plasma foresis is, I don't know why it's so expensive here because there's nothing to it. I think it's just overpriced because it's a new kind of functional modality. And I think the prices will come down over time, but that and things like ARX and Vaspers and focusing on mitochondrial function and phenolytics and, you know, of course sleep, of course nutrition, of course, right? But I think these are the things that seem to be making a difference for me as I age and keeping me not only going strong, but going better than ever. I feel like it's better than ever.

TalkToMeGuy : Well, I think a full spectrum of pleasure, whether it be, you know, sexual, intellectual, you know, keeping the mind stimulated. We're both information junkies. And we mean that the best of ways. Yep. Can't ever get enough, evidently. So I think that stimulates all the happy hormones, having that, you know, constant pleasure from learning, whether it be, you know, physical activity or anything we're doing with our body, where the body is in one way or another, deriving pleasure, I think is beneficial and extends our life.

Yeah. And it's good for us. It improves our attitude, our mood. I can get pretty dark and dank when I'm doing research on, you know, the latest toxin that we're releasing to the environment. I can get pretty cranky.

Susan Bratton : Me too. Broken hearted. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy : Yeah. With me, it's just on the verge of rage. But people don't think that of me, that I would have that, but it is really right on the verge of what we're doing to the environment, which in turn affects all of us. There's that, you know, let's get glyphosate out of school lunches. That's my current favorite grant.

And I want to toss into the, I wasn't going to do this, but I have to, but I also think I'm not complete. I've worked with Ozone a lot. I was a member of the International Ozone Association for two decades. So I've been with a lot of Ozone people. I used to go to the conferences in LA that were medical conferences about Ozone when Ozone was legal in the United States. And so I'm a fan of Ozone on so many levels. And, or at the same time, I have to toss in, I'm not yet certain that you can't get similar results from receiving Ozone IV as you can by doing a long slow, like a half a day IV drip of a high concentration of vitamin C, like 20 grams.

That I'm not certain those won't be equivalent outcomes. It's just that the ozone is done in two minutes and the half a day of vitamin C is half a day. But the end result is still, I think, very similar because in a certain way vitamin C is also an ORP kind of action, how it kills things and stimulates the immune system.

But I'm working on that theory. I'm going to do another interview with Dr. Levy who wrote the book on using a variety of things, including vitamin C. But I think that's a possibility. And also one of the advantages of the vitamin C is I have several friends who've done IV, not IV, done Ozone.

No, no. Vitamin C enemas. So like about a 10 gram vitamin just to squirrevate.

Don't need buffering, don't care. And hold it as long as possible because you're assimilating into all that mucosa. And actually I had the friend of mine in Albuquerque with prostate issues try doing a enema with vitamin C and he liked it because you get a little buzz off of it because it is slightly stimulant. But you don't have to take it in the arm, which is kind of handy. And you can do it yourself.

And you can do it anytime you want. You just hold it as long as you can and then you evacuate your bowels and you're like, wow, I feel much better. So I'm, well, I've always been a pro vitamin C at high dose.

And vitamin C in general. And I think, and my hit off of you're, while you came back sick, as I have the feeling there was die off. Yeah.

Stuff on a mass level. That's reasonable. Yeah.

So now I want, we're gonna jump because we're coming back into the theme. Yeah. About libido. Yeah. So we, I don't remember which show it was that we talked about libido was a biomarker of health and I use that now because I think that's really true.

Yeah, it really is. I have a note here that I'm trying to recontextualize, but it really is a kind of vital sign. And it's not something Western medicine has really any way to monitor. They don't, there's no way if I ever had a doctor ask me, how's your libido? They don't, and there's nothing there. They got nothing. And what is a low libido? What is our body telling us with a low libido? I guess that's how I'll put it. Yeah.

Susan Bratton : Well, I think the best way to contextualize libido is to do it comparatively. I like to compare libido, desire and arousal as three different things. So we are, we understand what we're talking about together. libido to me is your overall health. When your health is low, when your mitochondrial function is down, when you're dealing with any kind of health issue, any kind of health issue from hormone dysregulation, to gut issues, to anything, you're not going to have the energy to want sex. You don't, you don't replicate your species if you're not healthy. It's like, it's that simple. We're driven to replicate, but if we're not healthy, we don't have the energy to do it.

It comes down to energy. I always know what's going, how well I'm feeling by how horny I am. And I'm not necessarily, let's say, I think men generally walk the earth, and these are generalizations, hornier than women do. And we've all heard about spontaneous versus responsive desire at this point. I think Dr. Lissi and Beverly Sasson, I don't think I've got her name right, but she wrote, she did a study on this and said that, you know, men are generally, because the testosterone is higher and testosterone is definitely a hormonal molecule of lust, of replication, of conquest, of, you know, horniness. And women are spontaneous, men are spontaneous. They wake up in the morning, they've got morning wood, if they're healthy, they, you know, and men's hemodynamics work faster. So if they see something sexy, they're more visual, they see something sexy, they get turned on, they get aroused, they're ready to go, they're ready to go faster.

It's just an easier mechanism for them. And the, I've been, it's interesting because I've been studying the neuroscience of, of libido, of desire, of arousal. And I've been relating it to the differences that I'm seeing in sex tech. What sex toy manufacturers There's how they're using AI, how they're using AR, augmented reality, and building pleasure systems for men versus women.

I can bookmark that and describe it to you if you'd like later. That's the libido where women are more responsive. We need to feel safe because we're estrogen dominant, and estrogen is a molecule of safety in addition to a number of other things. That safety, we need to feel very safe before we can move into arousal. Because we are in the world of the Homo sapien, we are the prey. And so we don't walk around, we don't wake up with morning wood, we don't necessarily get spontaneous erections.

Sometimes we get pelvic blood flow that engorges our clitoris and labia a little bit more than normal. But generally we need to move into safety and pleasure and connection to get turned on. So libido, and that's another reason why women say I don't have any libido because they're often comparing themselves to men and expecting that they should have the same response as their male body partner who's always begging them for sex and pestering them for sex and wanting sex if they're healthy. So health in libido are two sides of the same coin where desire is about how do we feel about our partner. And often women are frustrated with their partners as well in middle age where their partner may not be meeting their general needs in the relationship. And so it's harder for them to have desire for their partner. And also women are very hard on themselves.

Again, estrogen is the molecule, one of the things it does is it makes us judgey. We have to be judgy because we're always doing risk assessment all the time. Are you safe or not safe? Are you safe or not safe? Is this safe or not safe?

Am I safe or not safe? That's going on for us in the background. That's one of the 47 tabs we have open at all times where men and testosterone don't feel unsafe. So they're just like, is this hot? Is this hot? Is this hot?

Is this hot? Right, it's a whole different conversation. So the desire is how do I feel about myself? And because we're judgy.

Oh, I'm fat, my boobs are saggy, my butt is big, my cellulite is ugly, my stomach is poochy. We're hard on ourselves. Where are our men if we're in a partnered, you know, if we're partnered with a male body person, we, the man is like, too good to me generally.

I mean, if we're within a reasonable health ratio, you know, we look good to you guys. And so that desire is very difficult. That has to be there for our, we have to have health and libido. We have to have desire for ourselves and our partner.

You have to feel desirable and with the desire you. And then a razzle, he's ready to go. Boom, fast acting, hemo dynamics, he sees your boobs, he's ready to go. And our world has told us that sex is intercourse, not sex is his things, stroking, breast pleasuring, oral pleasuring, you know, all of the other things that get us into and help us climb our arousal ladder. And so we're often couples are driving toward intercourse way too fast for the female body. And if she's been penetrated faster than she would want to, if she knew better, then she doesn't want to be penetrated anymore. Because it's just, it's overwhelming to her. It's too much for her. And then if she feels like it's her job to give him his ejaculation. And then if he's starting to age and it's aging longer and he's pumping away, that's the last thing she wants is to be penetrated too fast and to be jackhammered and to be pumped away on until he has his ejaculation. Like that whole system is a fail. And that's often why mid for midlife women are like, I gotta, I gotta opt out of this whole, I don't want this anymore.

This is not serving me in any way. You go on about your business, do what you need to do. Don't ask, don't tell.

I don't want to know. And I think it's a shame because if we understood all these dynamics and we had more pleasure based, slow connected sex, everyone would want it more. And if women did not think that they had to be turned on already, if they could get down, if they could sit down on that bed with their partner and be like, well, I'm not turned on at all, but why don't you hold me and I'll tell you about my day and then maybe you can rub my feet or my neck and then maybe you can give me a yawning massage and I'll see if I can get there nine times out of 10. If her husband's not pressuring her, her partner's not pressuring her and he's willing to give her unlimited yawning massages and he doesn't get mad if she can't quite get turned on in a given, you know, in a given possible moment of pleasure, then she'll be willing to sit on that bed every time or nine times out of 10. And then when she sits on that bed and they slow it all down and they allow her to get things off her chest to begin to feel safe, to let down, to heart connect, to feel pleasure without pressure, she will have great sex with him and she will be like, okay, I'm wanting to try that over and over again because it's nine times out of 10 or maybe even more. We end up having incredible work asms together and I want to do that.

TalkToMeGuy : And I'm going to step back for a moment, back to Man and testosterone. I think one of the reasons is just genetically down the how many, every tens of thousands of years we've been on the planet that way back in the day, plan of the cave here, when men used to go out of the cave to try and find something smaller than them to kill or anything that they could bludgeon with a giant stick and come back to the cave that they, you know, we were, that part of the human race when we were hairy beasts running around, that was part of why we were so testosteroneized, I think, is because we had to go out and do that and we had to be bigger and stronger or smarter or somethinger to be able to do that, to go out and kill the giant yak.

I don't know why yaks, but that's what comes to mind and drag it back to the cave and feed the all the family in the cave. And that's how we are wired still to this day. We still have some of that in there at the foundational level, but that is our, you know, in regular world, we still are supposed to be the one going out and doing that and protecting the family.

So that's a testosterone oriented like action. I don't have more to that. That's just a thought. Yeah.

And I'm surprised that the time is already here, but we're going to go a few minutes over. Sure. I really want to talk about your line of the 20 products because I was aware of them, but I didn't, as I studied for the show and really looked at them, I had a whole bunch of thoughts about them, but just that they're really good.

Susan Bratton : Thank you. Boy, I'll tell you, that means a lot coming from you, Richard.

TalkToMeGuy : You know, I really like the O.G. supplement guy, so and botanicals, deep wisdom. So thank you. What makes you say that? Well, nicely done. They're all, this is part of the, there's a desire line. You have three different formulations.

And I think in formulas, that was actually, I was going to, well, I'll save that for later talking about stacks. But for example, the fenugreek, the desire fenugreek. And at first I think people would think fenugreek, why?

Why? What's fenugreek? It's, but it's nothing. It's a diuretic. It tastes like anise.

What is that? But it has so much benefit to the kidneys, to the overall flow of fluids. And I mean, mostly the lymphatics and that kind of thing in the body, reducing pain.

You know, it's classic for people who are in state of weakness to give them fenugreek tea. Now, a lot of this is, in my brain, I have a mix of allegorical along with research, Chinese medicine, the hobby of reading pharmacopias. Reading pharmacopias from the days of when pharmacists actually took a book and made the compound every time. That was like a hobby. I used to read pharmacopias because I thought they were like, wow, look, they used to make this.

That's amazing. So, you know, fenugreek in my herbal brain is a very nice, soft, gentle diuretic. Good for nursing mothers because it helps kind of control that flow, but also good for the system. But one of the things that all of your three formulas, the fenugreek and tubulus and even the tongue cat ali, they are all benefiting in my mind, the kidneys, and therefore the adrenals. Because the adrenals are superrenal, meaning they ride, I've always thought of, the adrenals as the horsemen of the kidneys because the adrenals ride physically on top of the kidney like a horse, like a guy on a horse, a person on a horse.

And they're right there. So, they have a sympathetic relationship and people don't think about that part of it, that they are really related to each other and their osmotic fluids and how everything works is really in sync with each other in a certain way. So, if you have stressed out kidneys, you're going to have stressed out adrenals. If you have stressed out adrenals, you're going to have stressed out kidneys. So, that all these formulas are benefiting the adrenals by affecting the kidneys.

Now, they have lots of other characteristics. The herbs all have, you know, whether it's the fenugreek or the tubulus or the tongue cat ali, they all have different characteristics that are also beneficial, but that was my primary thought of like, I realized I should be taking the tubulus because I have some inflammation issues, adema issues from congestive heart failure. I'm not dying, but it's just that that's what Western medicine would call it. And how these are just all really good foundational formulas, herbally, and they're based in solid supplement language of, you know, complete B vitamins. Did you know the company Super Nutrition? No, I don't think so.

Okay. It was around in the 70s invented by Patrick Mone. And he was one of the first early sort of spin-offs of the world of orthomolecular medicine thinking. So, they were high dose, kind of like Durkin-Sandy, high dose concentration of supplements. Like, you know, you take their niacin formula and you'd flush for 10 minutes and people would be freaked out. But they, the formulations that you have are, to me, looks similar to that world of, you know, let's have a full blend of B vitamins along with these wonderful herbs that you have in there.

So, would you talk a little bit about each? I mean, I can jump in, but like, let's start with the Phenugreek formula. Why did you, how did Phenugreek surface as a reproductive tonic for you?

Susan Bratton : Yeah. So, one of the things that I wanted to do, the supplement company that I run, there were a lot of libido products out there. There were a lot of aphrodisiacal, you know, supplements out in the marketplace. There were things for men to have more semen volume, build testosterone, things like that.

And one of the things that I wanted to do was come up with some kind of a libido booster. So, I did a look at the whole marketplace to see what people's formulations were. I tried a lot of different products to see what I could feel in my body.

And I studied Ayurvedic's traditional Chinese medicine. And then I also looked at the clinical data that was available, both animal studies and human studies on clinical data with regard to aphrodisiacs, that was my root interest. And we humans have been eating nuts, roots, berries, flowers, plants, seeds, you name it, for the millennia that make us feel lusty and horny because libido is the other side of the coin of our health. And when we feel turned on, we feel better.

When we have hornyness, it makes us feel good about ourselves. And I came, I did a lot of cross-tabbing of traditional wisdom with modern-day clinical data. And the three botanicals that kept popping up over and over were Tonkata Ali, Tribulus terrestris, and Fenugreek. And it's interesting that Tonkata Ali is a root from the Southeast Asian area. Tribulus is a flower, the puncture vine, a little yellow flower from the Mediterranean area. And of course, Fenugreek is a traditional Ayurvedic formula, you know, plant. And they all are very similar, but they have different expressions. And for me personally, and my customers tell me they have some different feelings in their body when they take these.

And my general feeling is that Tonkata Ali makes me feel like I took a little testosterone. It's the, and there are two more, Maka and Kakao. There are five botanicals. There's lots of other libido botanicals, but those are the most well-studied.

We have an understanding of what efficacious doses are. And Maka and Tonkata Ali are kind of the same and they're both roots. They are the, they're like, you know, they just make you, they're like deep. And they have like masculine energy in your body.

The Tribulus terrestris is more like the feminine aphrodisiac to me. It's more flirty. It's more playful.

It's more, ooh, it's like that. That's how it makes most of my customers feel. And even as men, you want to feel that. You don't need to feel always feel that, uh, sometimes you want to feel that, ooh, yeah.

Oh, and then the Greek is equanimous. It's calm. It's, I'm not stressed out. I'm in a flow state. I'm open to pleasure. I feel good.

I'm, it's like a golden honey syrup feeling. And one of the other things that I learned in studying the Tanicles is the notion of herb cycling. The idea that if you take the same thing for a long time, it's efficacy wanes. The other thing that I wanted to do was have an effective dose. How do I get an effective dose? And then the last part of my thinking was I don't want to have a libido botanical that you just take.

I want to have a multivitamin, multimineral complex that it's built into, because if you don't have magnesium, if you don't have boron, if you don't have some of the fundamental methylfolate, vitamin B9, if you don't have things like that, your system's not going to work that well. And we live in a world, and you talked about it earlier, the glyphosates on our crops. We are in a monoculture, agra business food supply that doesn't even have much nitric oxide left in the vegetables. We don't have much nitrates left in our vegetables, because our soils are nitrogen depleted. So we're not getting a lot of people in their general diets aren't getting a full complement of vitamin and minerals. So what I did was I said, I'm going to make three different daily multivitamin, multimineral complex with high quality methylfolate, trimethylglycine, a really nice formulation of 100% of the RDA vitamin mineral profile, and put the libido botanical in that so you skip a step. So it's like you're getting your one a day with a little something more. So that was my strategy. And then I made it a 90 days supply where you take desire, but desire comes in three flavors, if you will, and the flavors are toncatele, tribulus, terrestris, and senigreek.

So you're herb cycling while you're getting your fundamental vitamins and minerals, and that they're high quality product. It was a very expensive product to make. I've got a fairly low margin on it. But the way that I build my supplements, my nitric oxide booster flow, which by the way, I have a new link for our listeners for that product where I can give you a free bottle now, my volumes have come up to the point where I can give the first month free. So if you go to getflowfree.com, you get a free bottle, you can try it and see how you like it. When I create things that you can feel in your body because they come from high quality food derived ingredients, not just synthetic lab created products, I end up being, I make money in the long term, it's as more of a sustainable business because I might not make the profit on the beginning of our relationship over time as you refill and buy or get on subscription or what have you, then I can make a little bit over time and that is better than just trying to sell somebody one thing and make a bunch of money on a crappy product. And so I went for the long term approach to my strategy. I couldn't do the vitamins with maca, I would have liked to, but you would have had to take like six or seven capsules and I think that's too much for people.

So because you have to have a fair amount of volume of material with maca where the other ones are a little stronger in smaller dosages, smaller physical dosages and cacao, I'm like, I'm not putting that in something, you just eat some chocolate man. That's like as easy as it gets. Like I'm not taking that away from anybody. I like my dark chocolate. So that's my strategy going into it was combine ancient wisdom with clinical data, put an efficacious dose, combine it with fundamental ingredients, make it very high quality so that and I ran out of material and I had to move to a different manufacturer and it took me months and I reformulated it at an even higher quality.

I got rid of a few of the flow ingredients and made them better quality and went with a better capsule and it's now three capsules instead of two because I wanted to have the best ingredients I could. But I've had people who were like, when is it coming back? I don't like it being here.

I'm stuck. You know, I'm a small company. We make small bath products and so we are a mom of pop shop and we're super fussy about who we work with and what goes into it and all that stuff. We're not one a day in centrum math market bath synthetic ingredients.

So that's kind of the story of desire. It is in stock now, which is wonderful. You can go to the20storeth20store.com and I've got all three in there, grab them while they're in stock and what I think is the most fun thing about it is I know I'm getting my daily vitamins and minerals and I actually take extra magnesium. I take a couple of extra things.

I take extra vitamin C and things like that. But what I love about it is when couples do it together, it's really cute because they'll each describe their experience of the three different libido botanicals over the 90 days. And those are some of my favorite stories that I get from couples is how it affects them. And I think that when couples do it together, it's a really sweet like sexy couples project that is very health oriented and it just warms my heart. So that's my very favorite thing about the whole desire product line. Well, I think that's such a,

TalkToMeGuy : I don't know if you wrote that. I've read and heard so much by the time I talked to you, I forget where anything came from. But there was, I did hear that part that you suggested, you know, that you talked about couples taking it.

And as I thought about it, I did think that was a very cool thing. When I was in the herb store, there were times when I did a lot of tea blending, custom tea blending or the blend of a day. And one time I made an all rose tea. So it was a variety of roses from around the world that I collected all organic from various growers.

And I made tea out of it and added some spices and a few other herbs to develop the full flavor, but also and also a little bit of stimulants, which means like a little bit of ginger to help carry it into the system. And couples would come back and they'd both had, they'd both, they'd stand and talk about their experience. And it was just so cool. So it gave me a flashback to that time where the women would come in and feel completely like heart filled. And that was kind of my direction of drinking flower tea. It was that, you know, it was heart filled and how they felt more radiant and more loving and more caring. And the men would discuss being, you know, feeling a little more gentle and soft and a little more inner like, but I'm not sure what that is. But you know, just the experience that couples have by using the same supplement is a great angle. And I mean, they look good way.

Susan Bratton : One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the ascension. You know, because we're talking, because we're trying to like move from a patriarchal paradigm in our culture to something that's more equal, has a more equality base and to lift women up and empower them. One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is this notion of masculine and feminine and polarity. And I've always felt like I'm as masculine as I am feminine. I've always wanted to have the whole spectrum. And I think that one of the things that's hurt the men in our society is that they don't get to explore their feminine side. And when I have been thinking about moving from patriarchy, all of the people that I'm, all of the young ins and that right now, they're like, we're moving into matriarchy. And I'm like, no, I don't think that's what you want to do. I think you want to move into synergy.

Synergy is a word that I heard from my friend, Davieshi Shakti. I go on her podcast, it's called Beyond Patriarchal Sex. And I think a lot about that as does she. So we're very much kindred spirits. And she taught me the term of synergy. And I think the desire, multivitamin, multimineral complex with libido botanicals, is a way you can actually feel synergy in your body. It's like a kinesthetic experience of synergy, which I think is so freaking cool. And I've been thinking about the ascension model going from this, you know, what the red tantra world would have talked about with regard to, you know, masculine feminine polarity.

I don't even like that thought anymore. It's not polarity. To me, it's integration, where we have all of these things within all of us and we can cultivate them. And so when people first start out sexually, at least I think generally for many women, their experience was probably, I am the receiver and the man is supposed to, you know, kind of do me. He's supposed to come me. Like this is a very common paradigm is that he gives me orgasms. He, you know, he strokes my clitoris. He goes down on me.

He penetrates me and gives me intercourse. And I had my job as to come from now. But now I think one of the things that women have had to learn is how to stay in sensation and how to be present to sensation and not dissociate from pleasure and how to stay in our bodies because of all the shame and manipulation that we've had around our sexual psyche. And I think that's a great place to start is learning how to really feel and to come well. And if the stimulation comes from your partner, that's a great place to start. But more and more women now with sex tech are also starting to solo pleasure and give themselves orgasms manually or with their pleasure tools.

And all of that is good. Any orgasms you have, any way you get there, the more that you can have and the more different kinds of orgasms you can have, you know, the better. So you, so you're maturing and you're learning over time and you're expanding your orgasmic, you know, panoply of options.

That's great. And then as women become more sexually confident and sexually mature, they can learn more skills and they can begin to, you know, take charge, run the bedroom game a bit, maybe, you know, control things, be on top, whatever it might, whatever you might think about that as being more masculine. And I love that as, you know, an era of evolution.

And then they become switchy. Oh, I can actually flow back and forth from giving and receiving. And so can my partner, we're getting better at just being in whatever state our body wants in the moment together in our exploration of pleasure today, right now.

So then we get that switchiness, which is great. Then we move into what I call a flow state where it's not even masculine feminine, I'm on top, you're on top, any of that, it's just we are now starting to just roll, really roll together. Then you get into what I would call a conjoined, theta state of bliss together, where you don't know where your pleasure starts and your partner's pleasure ends. And this is where you start to really, it's almost like an igniting of a match when you get together, you can go from like hopping on the bed to being extremely turned on by each other and doing all sorts of positions and techniques and having all kinds of orgasmic pleasure together. And that ability to meet in that moment of bliss and ecstasy, the next step beyond that is where the two of you find God or Gaia or you touch source or you feel a connection to the consciousness of humanity.

And you realize that you're not alone, that we are all one. And that's like the mycelium, right, of the of the mushroom, like we're just, we are a connected web, you touch God through sex, which is somewhat the tenets of red tontra is is getting to those ecstatic states together. Now, I don't know what's beyond that, that's where I am in my sexual evolution, that's how far I've gotten. But one of the things I know is that in sex, there's always something more.

That's why sex is so scary and so repressed by our religious paradigm, is because women who are sexually expressed are a lot harder to control and people who find God and connection to source and love making are very hard to get to come to church and tie and very hard to control. So I don't know what's past that. I don't know if you know or if you've been past that. That's where I am in my evolution. And I love to describe this ascension model and help people see what they're I'm a chef. I write the recipe so you can follow them and come like I do and create these experiences like I have. And I show you the map to the territory. I don't know what the next recipe is or what I'm cooking, but I know it's out there and I'm looking for it.

TalkToMeGuy : And I know you mean that. That's the great thing about all the years I've known you. I know you mean that. You are not kidding. You're going to find it and you will write about it and do workshops on it when you find it. That's for sure. I want to jump back for a moment. I want to jump back for a moment because we didn't talk about the flow. And I hadn't really I'd been taking the flow for a while. I really like it. And some of the bonus points, one of the amazing bonus points to me is that the citrulline is you source the citrulline from organic watermelon.

I do. So that's mind blowing because nobody does that. But then also I hadn't realized that it also I knew it had the spinach, which is also organic, and NAC my old friend, a great glutathione precursor.

And then the not a lot of people talk about it or acknowledge it. The pine bark, the maritime pine bark, which I think is just a stupendous, I'll call it a herb, even though it's not truly an herb. But it's just I made this note here to myself about, you know, pine bark gives the kidney adrenal horsemen the superhighway flow.

Susan Bratton : Yeah, it's a flow. It's a flow state. Pine bark is a flower. It's not exactly what it is. Yeah. And it's really like it's very similar to cacao, I think. It's like chocolate.

It's got those dark cannons in it. And they really help with blood flow. Yeah, what I tried to do was find the food sources that most often help the most people with blood flow.

And in all my studies, clinical data and indigenous wisdom, those were the things. And the bitter cherry, that's a vitamin C. So it's apparently really, and I don't understand the mechanism of action of why the bitter cherry works so well with the spinach powder, the water melon powder, and the pine bark. But I don't understand the mechanism of action. I just know that in the data, it shows that when you add B to the citrulline and the pine bark, it accelerates its efficacy.

TalkToMeGuy : Do you know? Sometimes in herbal formulations, because I do consider this an herbal formulation, even though it's not the exact direction, but that's what it is. Sometimes you'll add something to it, and it will have either. It might not be a direct scientific research, there's no PubMed article about why it has that action, but there is power in the synergism of a formulation. I've worked with herbalists who think of singles more so, whereas I'm more of a formulating thinking herbalist. And I've done things where it's like, why bitter cherry? I don't know, but it works.

Yeah, sort of, you know, that's an experiential thing. I know that I would add it to certain, like, I would add bitter cherry when I would, in the mornings at the herb store, I'd go through the store and I'd make old-school Chinese decoctions, which means that you take the root, mostly roots, and you put them in a ceramic bowl, and you cover and you boil it, and then you reduce it down, and then you add more liquid and reduce it down until you're drinking sort of a tarish substance. And I would offer it to anybody that came in the store that I knew, and they'd all look at me after they tasted it like, why are you drinking that? Because it was like road tar with, you know, maybe bug parts floating in it. But it was just kind of like chelogy. Yes, that seemed like, oh my god, what is that thing? Yeah, I love it. Yeah, that's the way I feel about decoctions. I love that sort of bitter, slightly harsh, you know, aggressive action on the palate, but I know the benefit for that.

Susan Bratton : I love tinctures too. Tinctures are really nice, because I love bitters. You know, being in Europe, they eat bitters. You know, there's no bitters around here. It's really nice.

TalkToMeGuy : It's really nice. No, the Europeans are much more bitter-oriented.

Speaker 3: They are. The original chef I trained under was German. And so we were always having various bitters, mostly in the bar, using bitters. Or also sometimes in cooking, we'd use a little bit of bitters in a sauce or a darker, meatier like stew sauce. Or even in sauerkraut, sometimes we put some bitters in there, bitter drenchen.

Susan Bratton : I just got this new sauerkraut. I have to tell you about it. I'm sure you can get it in your local good earth. It's called Wise Goat Organics, Golden Raw Sauerkraut. Wow. It has organic cabbage, turmeric, ginger, mustard seeds, spices, and sea salt.

TalkToMeGuy : Oh my God, is it so good? That sounds wonderful. I'd have that on rice.

Susan Bratton : Yeah, well, that's one of the things they say is mix it in with rice.

TalkToMeGuy : It's a thing. I can't help it. That sounds great. I'm writing that down now because I love good sauerkraut. I love all things fermented. But I think that goes back to the gut. We're moving through clothes here, everybody, don't worry. Yeah. That I'm really surprised back to the Davis and the Martha Carlin world of gut health. Yeah. I'm really stunned that it took us this long to actually realize that the gut is really the center.

I know. But I'm so excited that we're here now, that everybody is talking about good health and microflora and eating fermented foods because I've always eaten fermented foods. I've been eating like natto since forever, since the 60s, man. I love natto, which is a weird, slightly creepy textured slimy weirdness, but it's so good. Good for you. That's a whole other show.

Anytime you can get in here. Natto is still good for your heart, so good for blood flow. It's so good for blood flow and it helps break down the plaque. We just don't talk about that.

Susan Bratton : I have to be careful having natto. I can't take natto canes because I still menstruate at 64. Wow. Because even early in my 40s, when I first started going through peremenopause, I started taking progesterone, then I added estrogen and I kept my systems topped up for the last 20 years and 25 years. I'm unusual in that way, but I have a regular menstruation, but if I take natto canes, I bleed too much.

It just spins everything out too much for me. I don't eat natto, but when I got home from Europe, because I was eating out most of the time, even though it was super healthy, my God, the food is totally different over there. Totally with Scylla Sridharai yogurt, my William Davis yogurt.

I got my Kim cheese and my sauerkraut and my refrigerator. I love gut shot. Do you know about gut shot? No, what's that?

Oh, it's this wonderful ... I'm looking in my fridge right now. Farmhouse Culture is the brand. It's a fermented daily tonic. I like their ginger beet. They have a number of them, but it's basically pickle juice. It's brine. Then I also take a bite of coconut cult.

That's a yogurt, a probiotic coconut-based yogurt that is 16 different probiotics in it. In the morning when I feed Kim, because I feed him, I feed my people because I want to be fat. I want to eat and I want them to eat well.

This is the way I take care of my family. I line up a little shot of the gut shot. I give him a little spoonful of the coconut yogurt. I make him a yogurt bowl with fresh fruit in it, a little bit of nuts and seeds, pumpkin seeds, and some dates, and whatever is in there. When we have our lunches and dinners, I give him the sauerkraut on the side. Nice. I think it's going to live a long time because of all of that.

TalkToMeGuy : That's right. That's how it should be. I think we should be eating more fermented foods. That's another thing that the United States doesn't do unless you go into the right cultures. Fermented foods are a thing in many countries. They are. Every day normal. Of course, we have fermented food.

Susan Bratton : I was happy to get home and fill my fridge back up with all my yogurt and fill my fridge back up with my gut shot and all those things because, oh, and by the way, right now the Rio Red ruby grapefruits are in season. I just had one before I got on this interview with you. They are really good right now. Do not miss the Rio Grand ruby red grapefruit.

TalkToMeGuy : I will be going to Oliver's Smart Grocery Store up here in Santa Rosa after the show.

Susan Bratton : That's a nice bitter too, the grapefruit.

TalkToMeGuy : Yeah, all things bitter. I love bitters. I'm not sure where that came from. I think we have to stop now because we can casually go for another hour. We could go for hours. That was stupendously fun.

Susan Bratton : Oh, it always is so nice to talk to you. Informative. Yeah. If any of your listeners know what is beyond touching God through sex, please have them contact me. I'm at betterlover.com.

If anybody is going to have a listening audience that's been beyond where I've been, it's you. Betterlover.com is where you can sign up for my newsletters. I also have a sub-stat called Longevity Wins. I talk a lot about the kinds of things we were talking about today on the show. Thank you for having me.

TalkToMeGuy : If you want more, Susan, I cannot recommend Longevity Wins enough. It is a great column. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really good.

Susan Bratton : Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoy the heck out of you. Thank you for our ongoing friendship and dialogue.

TalkToMeGuy : You bet. I do love our conversations. They're so good. All right, everybody. Have a great rest of the week and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.