Bitcoiners - Live From Bitcoin Beach

The #1 Reason Healthy Bitcoiners Still Feel Like Crap & the Decentralized Fix | Dr. Alison Monette

• Mike Peterson

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Can "quantum biology" explain why even the healthiest people are still getting sick? 
In this episode, Dr. Alison Monette reveals why circadian rhythm health is the true foundation of wellness, not diet, exercise, or even supplements. She explains how morning sunlight, light exposure, and your alignment with natural cycles may matter more than anything else you’re doing right now.

We go deep into how Dr. Monette went from owning a CrossFit gym and practicing functional medicine, to discovering that even those models were still too centralized. Through her personal health journey and treating thousands of patients, she realized that quantum biology and decentralized health are the missing pieces, especially for those who are doing everything “right” and still not getting results.

This conversation is for anyone who’s burned out on biohacking, confused by contradictory nutrition advice, or who wants a simple, grounded way to build resilient, lifelong health. We unpack why blue light may be silently wrecking your sleep, how to use sunlight to reset your metabolism, and why your mitochondria are the real key to wellness. It’s not about optimizing harder, it’s about aligning smarter.

If you’ve ever felt like modern life is out of sync with your biology, this episode will hit home. Plus, we explore how this all connects to Bitcoin, self-sovereignty, and why El Salvador might be the perfect place to reclaim your health.

Subscribe, leave a comment with your biggest takeaway, and share this with someone who needs to hear it before they buy another supplement or sign up for another fitness challenge.


Learn more about Dr. Alison Monette
https://www.avenamedical.com/
https://www.facebook.com/avenamedical/# 

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Timestamps:
00:00 What does it mean to decentralize your health?
08:00 Why functional medicine may still be too centralized
12:45 Are CrossFit and extreme fitness harming your long-term health?
19:00 How quantum biology reframed Dr. Monette’s entire medical practice
26:30 What is the most important lab test for inflammation?
35:00 How circadian rhythm controls your metabolism and sleep
41:00 Why morning sunlight is the most powerful health intervention
48:30 Is intermittent fasting actually making things worse?
57:00 What melatonin really does and how to naturally produce it
1:10:00 Is sunscreen helping or harming your skin health?
1:25:00 The connection between Bitcoin, sovereignty, and health decentralization

#circadianrhythm #quantumbiology #biohackinglight

Live From Bitcoin Beach

Alison Monette:

So when you think about your health, you have to actually start thinking in a decentralized way. You're just running based on the signals you're giving it, and everything is timing. So you have to run a day that is really consistent with the environment that you live at you

Mike Peterson:

Allison, great to have you here today. Thank you for inviting me. How did your podcast go? That you did? Yeah, was that yesterday you did a show in here?

Alison Monette:

I'm in vacation mode. I can't even remember. Was that two days ago? Maybe two days ago? Yeah, thank you for letting me use your space. Yeah. Did it go? Okay? It was great. The audio, my producers were very into the audio. They told me to go into a closet, and the place I'm staying doesn't have a closet, so I was so appreciative to have your nice, perfectly sounding space. So they they listened. Said it was great,

Mike Peterson:

perfect. Well, we'll make sure at the end that people know where they can find that and get gets. I have a feeling that the people that watch this podcast can be interesting following up. Yeah,

Alison Monette:

it was a cool story to say. I was taping from El Salvador. Yeah, yeah. Bitcoin Beach,

Unknown:

totally. My wife actually is joining us here listening in. Is the first time she's joined in to listen to a podcast. So I told her, I said, I think we have somebody coming today who's a doctor who, according to her husband, we don't have to, like, work out or do anything anymore. We just have to lay out in the sun and we'll be healthy. So I'm sure it's not that easy, but we're very curious to kind of hear about your own health journey as a medical practitioner, and I know you guys owned a CrossFit gym and have gone kind of through a lot of different cycles of really trying to achieve good health, and you feel like now you've discovered things that actually work. And so we'll dive into the details of that, but would love for you, just kind of set the story for us, give us a little bit about your background, and then we'll talk about, a little bit later, about how Bitcoin came into that. No,

Alison Monette:

thank thank you. Yeah, so I started my medical practice back in 2006 so that's kind of been my professional journey before that, I would say nothing, nothing exciting. Kind of regular, growing up in New England, normal stuff. Go to college. At that point, I planned on going to a traditional medical school. But

Mike Peterson:

hey guys, just a brief interruption. We'll get back to the exciting show here. But I just want to really ask a favor that you guys could make sure that you're subscribed if you're watching this on YouTube, if you are listening to this on a podcast, please take the take a second and review this. You know. You don't even have to write a lengthy review or anything at all. Just click the the number of stars that you want to give us. It really helps us in the algorithms to make sure people are finding out about what's happening here. All right, back to the show. Looking

Alison Monette:

back, I would say, I understand now I was always very decentralized in my thinking. So I was always somewhat on the edge of where I probably should have been according to everyone else. And I decided, no, I cannot plug into just prescribing drugs my whole career. Even though that's I would say my My heart got crushed when someone said to me, You do realize, like doctors in America aren't carrying around their bags, doing home visits anymore, because I just had this idea that I was going to be a general practitioner, like working with families and just helping them to achieve health, and that was just not the way it was. So I kind of went down a different path, and it's

Mike Peterson:

hard to find that out after you've gone through metal and all these years. Good point,

Alison Monette:

I was thankful that at the time, this is the year 2000 I was doing all my pre med so I was hitting all the right courses anyways. And then when someone told me there was such a thing as naturopathic medical school, that it was still legitimate, you could be a licensed professional doctor. My mind was blown at the time, because I did not realize that even existed. Even though I grew up in Connecticut, we've been licensed since the 1920s you know, kind of like that. MD, DO nd framework, there are just so few of us. And do

Mike Peterson:

other doctors consider you guys like the quacks of the fields. Or is that like changed? So yeah, in 2006

Alison Monette:

I came back to my hometown and decided to put up my shingle there, because it was familiar at the at the time, it made sense. And I was only 26 I was really young, like finishing school, and it was, it was comfortable. So I thought, if it doesn't work out, I could always go back to traditional medical school, and I still get plenty of time. So I was fortunate, though. I i I put up my shingle, I advertised for four weeks in this local little newspaper, and that was it. People were already really waiting for a different way of being doctored. And I'm so fortunate to say, I live in a small community, kind of, kind of like here, where it was all word of mouth, people started telling people. And ironically, my practice is exactly what I originally thought of. I treat families, I treat people who work together. I treat cousins, I treat friends, and that is how my practice really emerged. For about 10 years, I practiced, probably very traditional functional medicine, which is kind of how I would say the umbrella has changed over time in America. You know, we've kind of have traditional medicine. And then now we've got this functional medicine side, which is, I would say, kind of being framed as a great alternative to being plugged into Pharma. I don't know if I believe that so much anymore. You know, just changing my own thinking around understanding truly decentralized. I would say functional medicine is kind of on the edge of centralized. You're still kind of kind of have a foot in both worlds, right? Like, you know, it's a different model. It's sort of okay. How do you treat people with maybe supplements or food and potentially exercise as a way to treat them instead of, you know, 10 different pharmaceutical medications, but essentially that is still centralizing someone to to things. And in around 2014 I always look back and I think I I started having patients that that didn't work for, that they were doing everything textbook right now, you know, here we are in the time of 2006 2007 like everyone started getting iPhones and now having access to these, this information, they're self educating. Over 10 years of my practice, patients came in knowing more than I ever could have thought they would know, and then they would come in and say, I've tried every diet like now. I've done everything I tried to do it on my own. Why is this not working for me? So I was fortunate to be again, like thinking outside the box. I realized it was happening that all the things that I did in 2006 that seemed easy. Like when I started my practice, I would put patients on, like, really good diets, get them on an exercise routine. Sometimes, you know, we'd do biomarkers, we'd see their labs and few supplements here and there. And health really could happen in a lot of those people now, when a decade in that no longer was working for everybody. Then I started learning about quantum biology. I was learning more about the physics of the human body, and that's when I came into the knowledge that biology is really only explained by physics, not the other way around. And in medical school, you're not taught anything about physics. You're not taught anything about the history of medicine, because, I hate to say this, essentially, they want you to still be centralized in your thinking around treating patients. Now, I think that worked for a while. Around 2015 I noticed it. I don't know if anyone, if my other colleague, friends, really noticed it, but I decided to, sort of, you know, do my own education. I started really doubling down understanding it, and I still thought I was on the right track, to be frank, like I really went down the route of learning more about, I think, interestingly, now it's mainstream. Everyone's knows about, like ketogenic diets and things like that. I was learning about that, you know, a decade ago, that kind of worked for a while. It worked so well that then I even started a CrossFit gym. I even started a whole online brand to support CrossFitters. Because I thought, Okay, this is how we like. This is the right thinking for health, doing fitness a little different, doing diet a little different. At that time, that seemed like it was working. And then a few years into that. It's like everything CrossFit was changing. It was becoming the exercise modality for the regular person. I mean, I even had my parents do it. They were, you know, in their 60s, able to do this level of fitness. And it was working now with CrossFit, because the regular people could get really, really good. All of a sudden we were creating, like, super fit regular people. You know, the people at our gym were coming seven days a week. They couldn't imagine not coming to the gym. You know, it was almost a weird, I don't know. We were like, what's happened? My husband was involved in this gym. We have some business partners him, and I would say, what's happening here? Like now, this might not be what we developed this gym for, but we still kind of believed in the model.

Mike Peterson:

Yeah, we it's kind of its own cult to the CrossFit. You know, looking back,

Alison Monette:

I value every second that we did it. We own the gym for six years, it was a really cool community of people that were trying to find health, right, you know, like, really, at the end of the day, everyone wants health, you know, I think about it from from the well standpoint, and most of my patients that come in who have a lot of, you Know, wealth and financial background, they'll say to me the same thing, what do my millions get me when I'm almost dead, like essentially. So we thought the CrossFit community, these people were really thinking about health from not just fitness, not just diet. They were thinking about it from their whole at the time thought lifestyle perspective. And this is why we started the gym. It was why I started my brand field lab. The idea behind it is that it was a way to educate this community about how to run your health kind of a way to help people that weren't patients of mine. Because this whole time here I am still, you know, seeing patients in my practice. At that time, I had three other doctors working for me, you know, it was kind of this really sweet moment of what I thought was right. And then my husband and I start, you know, here we are. We're keeping track of our own health. We're doing great, you know, I had my daughter, everything's looking great, you know, I follow my own labs. We're feeling good. And then about two years into CrossFit, I see things coming up in my lab work that I couldn't really explain. And it was, you know, these are the things I tell patients, like, Oh, this is, you know, high sensitivity CRP goes up. This is a warning sign for your health, like, your check engine light. And then our check engine lights are going up. And then, because I'm a doctor, I have people from the gym. What was that? What was that? Oh, yeah. So it's called, yeah. It's like, you know, labs. I would say this, like, labs have become a functional medicine nightmare. I'll have patients come in and say, Oh, I just did all these really cool tests and spent, you know, 1020 grand to get all this information. And that that's like, cringe worthy to me, because if you really know what you're looking for, you could do a test, like a high sensitivity CRP, not use your

Mike Peterson:

insurance. What is that? Yeah, so it's actually like,

Alison Monette:

this is the way I think about it. It's like the check engine light for your health. Your liver produces this inflammatory signal as a collective of all of the the inflammatory messages within your body. So it's a simple way of your body saying health is starting to not be run in its normal state anymore. And I will say this in all my years of practice, if I could do one test for a patient, and that's all you had was, you know, if you're self paying, you can do it, I think for 15, $20 like, it's not expensive to grab this information. I'm sure you could even I saw labs here, like down the road. I mean, it's really great. And you put in a couple other simple labs, and you can take that information, and if you have a practitioner that actually understands it through the lens of physics, running your biology, that's an easy warning sign to sort of understand your health context. So of course, I'm doing this for myself. I'm doing it for my husband. I'm now doing it for these other CrossFitters who are, who are patients, but then also come to my gym, and it was really the moment that, you know, I don't know if it's ever happened to you, where you think, oh my gosh, I just invested all this money into into these things, and it's not right, like, it's not like, I don't even I don't have money to waste, like, I'm starting my practice. I don't have any financial wealth. I'm self made. I open my doors with $12,000 I kind of scraped together. And it was unfortunate that. We kind of had to to realize this is not the truth. There's something more

Mike Peterson:

to this story. So when you say, when you say, you started noticing this. Do you attribute like these patients were just getting older, and so this the CrossFit wasn't, you know, was while they were getting in better shape, it wasn't staving off these things, or was it actually like having a negative impact on their

Alison Monette:

bodies. Great question I see now, because it took me a little bit to try to understand it, because I didn't understand it at the time. I thought, you know, here these people, they're doing these really great workouts. They're eating on point, like textbook. Every traditional doctor would say, you are nailing it. But then when I started seeing, again, the autoimmune, some of these things that with with health, they're kind of the gateway diseases where, if that starts to go, you probably have other things down, down, down the pike, yeah, and that is where I actually found sort of a deeper dive into a doctor I had followed for for years before that that then I realized I better, I better do a little more of my own research. So I kind of doubled down on on health information, and that led me down a kind of quantum biology, but physics, so I needed to educate myself more on all of that. And it took me about a year. But once I actually did that education and saw it differently, because I had to look at it differently. I thought, you know, the right fuel, the right movement, where I came to learn, there's a she's deceased now, but her name was May one Ho, this really interesting quantum physicist who was doing her work, you know, decades ago, but she is who discovered that humans actually run on light, bio photon. She kind of put some old work together that made me realize, wait a second, the environment is imprinting on us, not the other way around. You could eat perfectly. You could move perfectly, but if your environment isn't running your body on a 24 hour cycle as it should when you violate the rules, when you're working out inside this blue lit gym at seven o'clock at night, doing a phenomenal workout, you're killing it. You've got muscles, you look great. You're ready to go with the CrossFit Games, and then you go home. Have to eat your dinner, because, God forbid you don't eat food, you're going to be starving. Now you're going to bed at 10 o'clock, rinse and repeat. You're waking up doing your work day, and now all of a sudden, you look great, but your health is is actually adapting internally to try to compensate for running a day. That isn't the terminology circadian run. So when you think about your health, you have to actually start thinking in a decentralized way. You're just running based on the signals you're giving it, and everything is timing. So you have to run a day that is really consistent with the environment that you live at. So I'm in Connecticut. The biggest challenge is that December, a day in December, looks really different than a day in July, and it makes it very difficult if you're if you understand what I just said about your health, your day in December has to look different in every aspect. You know, when you wake up, when you're going outside, when you're eating, even when you're doing your fitness. So, so

Mike Peterson:

and that probably historically worked when we had agricultural society or people that adapted to the their environment, but now that we live in a place where everything's kind of uniform and you have regular business hours. I guess that doesn't work anymore, right?

Alison Monette:

So I'm going to talk about, you know why I'm here, because I always say this about Bitcoin, beach, El Salvador is the beautiful thing is, you guys don't even realize, like, you just have this naturally, you have a stable light cycle that doesn't change much?

Mike Peterson:

Yeah, I think it's an hour difference at the most. Yeah, I will say

Alison Monette:

I'm, I'm not jealous about much, but that makes me jealous, because in the winter, it's unfortunate, you know, we, we wake up and we, we have sunrise is really late. Sun set is really early. And when you understand this circadian perspective, then it does make for a harder way to create a day that health can thrive in. Now I will say this, I have a lot of perspective now that it can be done. When I first learned this, I kind of. My husband, I thought we're probably gonna have to move like this, like we cannot run health here in Connecticut, because once you know that you're like, how do I even make a day happen? Now I'm fortunate. I have my own businesses. You know? I I can make my own schedule. So that's what I did. I made sure every morning I could be outside at sunrise to turn on my circadian gene network. How the body works is really cool. If you cared about, you know, if you care about

Mike Peterson:

the, yeah, I would love for you to kind of explain what you see as, like the foundation, foundation of good health. What is it that's important? How is light involved? I'm assuming that you still feel the nutrition and other things exercise still play roles huge. Or maybe you don't. They know I do, yeah. So I love for you to kind of lay that out for the audience of this is kind of the most important thing, and then kind of stepping off from there, as we kind of circle out. These are things that also have some impact. But if you get these core things, right? These are less crucial, and how those, the interplay is there, right?

Alison Monette:

So I started thinking about, you know, who thrived at my environment throughout history, and then I realized I don't know anything about history. I don't know any of these things. So, I mean, thankfully, I've had a lot of time to learn. But you look, I mean, where I live, you know, the Native Americans thrived in New England for for a long time, and did really well. And I have patients that are Native Americans, like it's really cool to ask them questions. Now that I know this and I realize, what do they do? I have this one patient who's become a friend, and he didn't even realize he wakes up every morning, goes outside for sunrise. What most people don't realize is you are an entire solar panel. Your eyes are just brain tissue. They're derived from the same neretoderm that your brain is derived from. So we've we built this structure to have brain on the outside with this amazing solar panel. When the light hits that surface, it actually gives you information about what day to expect. So if you live in Connecticut, that's how your body actually knows to run winter mode versus summer mode. Now you already said it. Unfortunately, most people live 70 degrees the same time you wake up, the same time you go to bed, you eat, the same time, all year round, 365, because you're living inside, it's really nice inside, and you never have to consider that. The days are different. But when you don't consider that, and you're not running your brain and solar panel on the physics of the information coming from the actual sun, then all of your health starts running in adaptive mode. So most people don't realize, like a cell, which is that basic unit of the body has different opportunities. So it's taking all the information from your environment and and the brain, which is like a quantum computer that lights going into your eye. If you actually thought about this as as what's happening there when you're outside, the light is going in right through your pupil. There's a direct track to your hypothalamus, and that's running your cells on for daytime. All of that is so easy when you're just outside, you know, no contacts, no glasses, no sunglasses, nothing impeding that signal. This is a cool fact because I I work with patients, and I will tell them their whole health story. I laid out there like I'm all in for my patients. Some people aren't ready to be all in for themselves, but if I can convince them do nothing else. Sometimes, at the end of the visit, let's say that's all frankly, like too much. I can't even do that. I work 12 hours a day. Sometimes I've had patients only get the sunrise, sunrise and then eat soon afterwards, we'll typically redo their biomarkers will follow up and over the last five years, I can tell you, I believe it more and more and more now. Now I'm a true believer. It took a little while. I kind of had to try it out with patients after I'd already done it with myself for for a couple years. And that is what runs your health. If you are running your cell machinery on then when you eat good food, when you move your body at the right time, when you wake at the right time, go to bed at the right time. All of a sudden, you run those cells in that normal, optimal biochemical mode that doesn't happen for people anymore when you're living a modern life. Style. So now we see disease symptoms, you name it. It's just the adaptive phase of these cells. Sometimes it's happening at one spot. You know, maybe you're a pancreas and you're going to develop diabetes. Maybe you're a liver and you're going to develop poor metabolism. And the body's amazing. It's really trying to just live and and live long enough. It always hopes that you're going to turn the signals back on. If you can get the light right, the circadian function back on, then you can rebuild yourselves to say, perfect. When the food comes in, you can metabolize it. Even this is the science is there. It's known that when you get sunrise, spectrum of sunlight, because this is also important, that when you're outside the spectrum of the sun, if you had a spectrometer and actually looked at the rainbow of the sun, you would realize it's always changing, and that's actually what your brain is looking at. So it knows to run morning versus noon, time versus four o'clock. And when you're getting that now, your liver knows to actually metabolize food. All that machinery is worked out morning sunlight into the hypothalamus tells your liver turn on, be ready to run normal biochemistry. You put the food in, and it's like you're a Ferrari burning 93 octane and all seems good. When that's not turning on, you can put in the great, amazing food, it blows black smoke, and now you're a Ferrari. I would say to patients like, you're the dead Ferrari that you're putting the fuel into, and it's just leaking out the gas tank, and you're blaming that, you know, the maybe the food's not good enough. You need to restrict more, you know? Now we're in this phenomenon of, like, people trying to do even crazier diets. And in America now we've got like this ozemba culture, because, again, like nothing is working, because, unfortunately, the doctors aren't teaching patients about this, mostly because they don't know. I didn't learn any of this in medical school. If I also hate to say this, you know, I have friends who are colleagues of mine, who I've talked to about this kind of because I think it's the coolest thing that I was never taught in medical school, and that I can actually help patients to ultimately learn how to run their own health so they don't need me. And I've had my colleague friends say, How am I going to make money if I don't have patients that are customers? Like, how am I going to survive in my in my practice? All like, until I retire, and again, like, my thinking is, what do you like? What do you mean if you don't get people better than, how you going to get more people better? And I'm not sure what I see in medicine, just because I'm in it, and I know a lot of doctors, for many reasons, they have no interest in really getting people to the point of learning how to run their health because how are they going to continue to run their practices that they've been taught to run? Kind of again, traditionally.

Mike Peterson:

So

Unknown:

that's a lot, sorry,

Mike Peterson:

push back a little bit on that, because I have a little hard time, you know, I know a lot of people in the medical field and and would they actually say that? Because I know, obviously, incentives impact what we do, and I know, especially in the medical field, you know, with the way I've seen it, even with the way drug reps run, with the way that, you know, the doctors are more likely to prescribe if they're friends with a drug rep, because they'll take them offline, or they'll do, you know, their things. And so I've definitely see how those incentives creep in. But would they actually verbalize that and say, We don't want our patients to get better, because that's going to affect our practice? Affect our

Alison Monette:

practice. So, I mean, I've had that said to me by, you know, friends who are doctors. I remember going to my state's like annual convention, you know, to get CEUs, and we had a someone doing a presentation about how to make your patients good customers, an actual like one of the presentations for all of the NDS in Connecticut. And I sat there and I thought, you know, what's happened, you know? But

Mike Peterson:

was that instruction, well, make sure they stay sick so they're visiting you all the time, or was it just trying to provide better customer service?

Alison Monette:

You know, it's a good question. I wish I could say it, lots changed since 2020 you know, I look back, and I think I believe everything I did in my whole career, you know, I recommended way more supplements and leaned way more on diet and exercise and and I at the time. Time, that's all. I knew. You believed it. I believed it. I do believe that, in general, doctors still believe in what they're doing and they're they're believing they're doing the best for their patients. I mean, I know some of the doctors in my community, they truly believe the answer is the pharmaceutical drugs they they truly believe it, and that's just what where they're at in their knowledge set. So I don't think they're being all nefarious, that's for sure. Yes, but I also would say we've come at to a time where patients are getting sicker and sicker and sicker. Kids are getting sicker and sicker and sicker the I believe this like the doctors should be realizing what we're doing is not really working. Yeah, and who should be leveling up are the doctors. But 2020, burned out. So many doctors in America that I mean, I the early retirements are insane. The my friends who say I can't wait till, like, the day I can retire like it's it's really changed quite a bit. Yeah,

Mike Peterson:

no, the friends I have in the medical field are don't seem super excited about it. I mean, they, they, you know, a lot of them, I think, would maybe do something different if they could go back. Yeah.

Alison Monette:

So then I think what's happened is it's driven this whole kind of functional medicine mindset, you know? So when I came out of, out of medical school, there wasn't functional medicine as it is now. So if you were doing alternative medicine, you were kind of the woo, woo quack. But I will say this, like, the MDS and the DOS over time realize, like, wait a second, like, those NDS are kind of getting people better, and they're doing diet, they're doing exercise. Like, who can't get behind that? Like, as a doctor, that's, I believe, what we all want to do for our patients. So in America, there's Institute for Functional Medicine. It became really a way to educate traditional doctors to do naturopathic medicine. That's That's my my perspective on it is that that really helps, because if you're MD trained, and you're pharma model, and you're kind of like, it's not really doing I mean, it's hard to feel really great about that in a lot of cases. So it drove a lot of doctors to be able to go do that education practice a little more alternatively, and that's definitely legitimized what I do. I mean, I used to have to tell patients or people, they're like, What do you do? Are you a doctor? Like, they're so confused. A real doctor? Hi, he got, you know, and then I thought, here, oh, like, I had so many conversations about, yes, I'm a licensed professional doctor. I realize you don't know what I am, but we've been actually licensed, you know, longer than the DOS. But there are just so few of us that it seems foreign. Now it's way less foreign when I say functional medicine. A lot of people know what that is, because they are thinking, Well, I don't want to plug into the traditional system. That's a nice alternative. However, again, my perspective now is that's still all centralized. You're still stuck not knowing how to run your health. So

Mike Peterson:

going back to how you run your health. So, so tell me ideally, what is it? What does a day look like for somebody in rhythm with the sunrise and the sunset, and when they go to bed, when they wake up, when they choose to eat like? What are you looking for, for ideal health?

Alison Monette:

Yeah, so, so this is probably good perspective, because I always think with patients, I tried to help them understand and and think the right way, so they understand their context. So, you know, it was really easy in 2020 because, like, when the pandemic happened, a lot of times I had patients come in and like, what the gym is going to close? This is, you know, this was a big moment The gym is going to close. I work out every day. Like, how much I'm going to get fat? I am going to no longer be healthy. Like, oh my gosh. What if the grocery store has no food in it? What if I can't buy my supplements? Like, it was a weird time that I actually thought, well, what if you had nothing, right? If you literally had no access to anything you could get simple local food, and you're just living a day, kind of like the Native Americans in Connecticut. That was when I had my aha moment of, how would I actually tell a patient how to run their health and and I truly will say in March 2020 I did not have that full perspective, so it was my mission to actually figure that out, because I thought this could happen. Who knew what was going to happen then, and that's what made me do research on circadian biology and. Circadian function. And then, when I realized that everything about human biochemistry is run by an electromagnetic signal, I realized that if you get your day right, you actually can run your health. So what, what should be happening is this, around 3am Your body has an automatic clock.

Mike Peterson:

That's when I wake up every night. Yeah, well, it's the interesting thing,

Alison Monette:

so in the hypothalamus, which is that if we drew a line through your pupil, you're landing right there. In the hypothalamus is an actual clock called the Super cosmetic nucleus. It runs just like an automatic clock. So the good thing is you will always wake up and always go to bed, but it can be entrained. So light can actually fine tune the clock. But when you do things can also be secondary. Light is primary, then temperature, timing of eating, when you're stressed, when you're working out, those can kind of calibrate that clock. We assume, when we're born, you're born with a really good, functioning, brand new clock. And if you think back to when you were young. Most of my patients will say, oh gosh, I love the days where I never had to think twice. I would wake up in the morning. You'd eat your food during the day, you do your day, you'd go to bed, you felt great, had plenty of energy rinse and repeat. When that starts declining, that's really the moment that your clock is probably starting to run down because you're not giving it the right signals. The signal it needs is sunrise, at sunrise. So sun. So

Mike Peterson:

just to set the context for people, just so they can kind of make this simple, so say the sun's rising at six o'clock. Yes. When should this person be waking up?

Alison Monette:

Yes. So around 3am your body is creating a rise of cortisol to wake you up at the right time. So if you were running properly, you'd wake up. You'd be awake just before sun rise, the actual time. Normally, I'll tell patients, like, look at the weather app on your phone, it will tell you the exact time of sunrise, not having to see it. So that's important. You don't actually have to see the sun. You just have to be outside unimpeded light into that clock in the brain when you're outside at the right time, the color temperature of everything you're experiencing is the same as that sunrise now. So, so

Mike Peterson:

when you say just so, I want to make sure that we make it simple for people. So obviously it gets light, there's there's the time of first light, and there's a time of the actual sun rise and so, and obviously on the coast, that's going to be more distinct than in other places. But so are you saying that they should be out at first light? Should they be out when at sunrise? What's the what's the timing on that? It's

Alison Monette:

a great question, because everyone I've talked to here in El zonte asked me about first light. Because this is like surfer this is like surfer community. So they're all about first light in Connecticut in the winter, if I told patients to go out at first light, they would hate me. They already hate me when I tell them they have to go out and it's zero degrees. Now I'm here in El zonte. I'm out at first light, getting that because it's so easy to do here. However, the minimum that you need is actual sunrise. Suns at kind of zero degree latitude, even if you just get that minimally and experience the first transition of the sunrise light.

Mike Peterson:

So and how long of a period is that? So I tell patients,

Alison Monette:

12 minutes. Now this is something I've kind of figured out in my brain, just on the physics. So typically speaking, if you go outside and you're getting unimpeded light into your eyes, when light hits your vessels, it creates nitric oxide, and that brings blood flow to an area. So if you're outside and again, this is not perfect. There's a lot of science that says different things, but if you look at the average, I figured out the averages within three minutes of being outside, you get about 60% of your body's blood flow into your retinal artery to pick up that color temperature bar code. So three minutes, 60% so I'll typically say, if you'd spend 12 minutes, you're probably getting all of your body's blood flow into your eye. Now, where's that blood going? Everywhere. So now all your cells and now your brain, which is signaling. Through neurotransmitters and all the hormone pathways, everything is in on mode. It's like the switch got flipped on when you do that every single day. That's the number one signal to entrain that clock. So if it's if that's the only thing you can do right, you never want to miss that, because you need to go from nighttime mode to daytime mode to do all the things that we actually do in the day. When you do that, it changes everything for how the health can then be run.

Mike Peterson:

And what is the importance of it being at at sunrise versus at, say, somebody who wakes up later and they get up at 830 up at 830 and they go outside and the sun's out, what is the difference?

Alison Monette:

There? Great question I have. I'm like a real geek, so I've got all these meters that tell me about light. So I have a spectrometer, I have UVA UVB meters, and when you're out there at sunrise, there's this really cool balance of red and blue, and this peak of red in a certain frequency in the 1200 nanometer range, and the UV light hasn't started to emerge yet. That is what our brain used as a color signature to build, then all that circadian machinery from because think about it, it's the only message that kind of is guaranteed in the day, and it's always a little different. So if you took today versus tomorrow here, you know, closer to the equator, it's going to look pretty similar, but it still will look a little different. Where I am, it looks really different. So it's really important to get it right when you live higher latitude, because if you don't, health will crumble way quicker. And that's the really tough thing, because your eyes are really not just a camera. You know, we think about the fact that we can see things, but the eyes are truly a brain, and it doesn't need to see because we have what are called non visual photoreceptors, so they're not part of our camera vision, but what they're looking for is the blue light is the red light is the UV light. And when you put all of those non visual photo receptors that our human body has developed over time, we became what we are because of the environment imprinting on us, and we just did that with massive complexity that we can do the things that we do because we utilize that color temperature so uniquely to turn on all that circadian machinery to then turn on all of our body's adaptive mechanisms so we can go live in Canada and survive. You know, we can go further north, where the Neanderthals couldn't, because they hadn't developed this non visual photoreceptor ability in their in their body plan that we Thankfully, this is why we got to where we got to we did. So you can, you know, you can live in Connecticut, you can live in in El zonte, Bitcoin beach and and and still run in a healthy way, but you're going to be your healthiest when you connect to the environment that you're living at.

Mike Peterson:

So it's not the, you know, amount of time outside or necessarily being in an environment where there's more sun and more sunlight, it's, it's more adapting your day to the rhythms that are in that particular environment. Yeah.

Alison Monette:

I mean, we can see that, you know, some humans, obviously, humans have been able to thrive everywhere. Now there is some cool genetics and epigenetics and mitochondrial genetics. You know, most people don't realize that your mitochondria, which are the parts there's there's engines in your cells that actually run like little time machines, essentially, and there are there, what are allowing you to adapt to being high latitude, low latitude, and over many years, the mammalian plan allowed us to create different mitochondrial genetics to then adapt to your environment. So if you live in Norway, and you're living a life connected to being outside there, you know, being exposed to the cold, when you do all of that, right, and you eat, you know, locally, like they eat a lot of seafood. So think about food as information. You know, food is just a. Sunlight in matter form that we then put into our body, and our GI track is just another solar panel that's getting the information from the food. So it's another way for your body to know, where am I if I'm getting light from the environment I'm in versus, you know, in where we live. I mean, especially after the pandemic and people working from home, I started seeing people who hadn't gone outside in a week. They didn't have to, they DoorDash their food, they work from home. Everything they needed was inside. They netflixd All day long, and all of a sudden, that was the first time I ever saw people had no reason to go outside anymore. You know, you guys have a really amazing situation because it's, it's so beautiful to be outside. You don't even have to think about it that it's drawing you out there. You know, in Connecticut, it has to be purposeful, yeah.

Mike Peterson:

So taking it back to the the ideal day, you're there for sunrise, and then,

Alison Monette:

then, yeah, so then, then if, if you are in a body. So, you know, again, I'm working with a lot of patients, one on one, so I understand their context. So everyone has a different health context. Most people are coming to me with with health issues, so they have a lot to turn back on. So many of my patients, I tell them, you you cannot run your health unless you can get your circadian machinery back on. Once it's back on. Now you need to use the cells as they're designed to be used. So you have to put food information into the system so your liver knows to take that information and start turning the cells back on. Now, I say food because it really needs to be, you know, real food. It can't be processed, ultra processed, from a box a bag, you know, go to any American grocery store and it's most of it's not food technically, you know, unfortunately, I hate to say that, so I talk a little less about food, because, in my opinion, most of my patients know when you know a box of cereal is garbage, like you're, you're, yeah, no, I don't know most

Mike Peterson:

People know that, but I think there is a lot of, you know, confusing information that comes to people about, I mean, you know, with with a big thing now is intermittent fasting. And so what would you say to that? Right? So that

Alison Monette:

is, are you asking me this? Because now you're thinking about this timing thing, right? Yeah, because

Mike Peterson:

you're saying that you should eat soon after, when you're talking to other people who said, No, you should wait and have your first meal later in the day, because if you start eating early, you're gonna eat more throughout the day. And so right, what would you say to that great

Alison Monette:

question? So when I learned about intermittent fasting, that was some of the the nutrition stuff that I dove into back in 2015 because it was sort of getting popular in the functional medicine space. So I embraced a lot of intermittent fasting with patients because, again, I thought that was the right thing to do. Now most people who do intermittent fasting because it's a little bit of a stressor on the body. Now you're changing some signaling the body does like a little acute stress, most people will do pretty well from the traditional intermittent fasting recommendation, which is like, eat from 12 to eight. You know, sort of that became a real conversation. I found that patients of mine who did that, especially the CrossFitters, they loved it. They're like, Oh, perfect. I can eat from 12 to eight. I'll work out, I'll go home be able to eat before eight, like eat my big meal. I won't go to bed hungry. And that was part of the problem. Is that when you're eating, when your liver metabolic engines are not on in the short term, you might see a little effect. In the long term, your health internally in the cell starts adapting, and you're shifting your biochemical machinery, and now you've shifted it to quick energy production. It's like survival mode for the cells you're not running the proper we call it the TCA cycle, like when you really think about health and human cell function, that is where you want to be generating energy when you're not running a circadian cycle and eating properly at the right time. Then you run adaptive and you still function, you but you function you're not optimal. So I though started when I learned this thought, Well, why are we intermittent? We intermittent fasting is just not eating all day long, right? Like when you really look at what does that even mean? It should. Mean, eat when it's light out. Don't eat when it's dark out. So I started shifting patients to eating during the hours of light. When I was learning all this, I thought, well, intuitively, that makes way more sense. If we're supposed to turn on ourselves and what's the one thing we need to do, we have to fuel our body with good information so we can run it to do all the things we need to do. Why are we not eating like this? Makes no sense. In fact, that was when I realized that's kinking up the machinery even more. It's running now a stress response that's gone, gone chronic, and then it's crushing all the health deeper down, and it's actually confirming the problem that you don't have light right. You don't have the food timing right. And now everything is shifted to night time. And when you do that, your body can no longer run nighttime mode, which is the cleanup crew your body is supposed to while you're sleeping, do amazing cleanup, and you're supposed to wake up the next day kind of refreshed and renewed. And when you don't do that, you now have autoimmune disease. You now have a kind of cancer metabolism. I mean, these maybe sound controversial, but the science is really there, and that's what I was seeing with patients the second I shifted them, said, You know what? We're going to do this differently. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm learning. I really feel strongly, the science is there. Let's, let's change this course. When I started getting patients sunrise, eating within that first 3060, minutes, now, eating during the hours of sunlight to be truly the true nature's intermittent fasting now in the winter, that means short window. In the summer, that means a little more flexibility, and when you do that now, I can tell you like autoimmune disease is totally on the rise. I test, I screen for it in a lot of my brand new patients. I do it all the time now, because I'm shocked at how much it's there brewing. There's a marker called Ana. It's sort of like saying pre diabetes for autoimmune disease when you're getting very low numbers and the textbooks are not right. I literally see it probably in eight out of 10 new patients that are coming in with health issues. It's there, and it's because people aren't running those repair cycles anymore, because we're doing our day how we want to do our day, but we're not actually running our day based on what nature is telling us. Because, you know, would you, would you start making dinner at eight o'clock at night? If, if it's dark at six o'clock, you know, if, if you weren't living in modern times, you would just never do that. Yeah, you would go to bed, and you'd wake up when the sun came back out and you'd seek food again, so

Mike Peterson:

taking it back to simplifying it for people. So the key thing is to be out there for first light to eat within an hour of that time, and then the rest of the day, I'm assuming a normal lunch and dinner before dark, is that? Yeah.

Alison Monette:

So I'll typically say start there, you know, start by just framing it out as eat during the hours of sunlight, eat real food. Try not to snack, you know, eat meals so your satiety hormones can be retrained, because we shouldn't be hungry at night. If you're hungry at night, it means all the circadian morning cycle, what's happening there is not running in on mode. Once you turn that back on, you won't be hungry at night. Now I tell you this because I did all this myself. My husband and I did this for years before I ever started telling patients what to do. I've always done everything. I tell patients what to do because we were we ate, always late at night, and because we were hungry, once, we started changing this because I intermittent, fasted for years, because I thought it was right, but around 2019 I realized it was not right, so I changed it. My I was mind blown too that I was no longer hungry at night on my regular work days, I generally eat at 230 in the afternoon, and I'm never hungry or need to eat again in the evening. And when you get all those hours of true then fasting before you fall to sleep, and then when you're embracing darkness. So at night, when the sun sets, your brain that clock is looking for dark mode, but dark mode is no blue light because that's the photo receptor. That non visual photo receptor, called melanopsin, is the one that's really kept. Calibrating the circadian on and off, because once the sun sets, the blue is supposed to be gone, and once your brain and solar panels sense that, then everything about the cell machinery turns to regenerative repair mode. So when you fall to sleep, melatonin is the hormone that we attribute to sleep, but melatonin is the massive cleanup crew hormone. It can only be activated by darkness, which is no blue light. So that's difficult if you don't know about that or aren't aware of it. So at sun set, ideally no food, no light, because remember, food is light. So as long as you're not putting light information back into the system, you're then going to bed at the time when your body should be naturally tired. Now we were also, I mean, my my husband, never would go to bed before 10, 3011, like for for most of our existence, because we were never doing the circadian day right. Once you do it, right? I mean, in in the middle of the winter in Connecticut, we're lucky to be up at eight o'clock because it's sun rises at 430 we're we're already done eating. I'm wearing nighttime blue blockers at that point. So they're blocking 100% of the blue photons. We mostly live with lights off and red lights. It's, it's, it's, it's an evolution. But when you do that, right?

Mike Peterson:

So, so you're saying at night, you should avoid having lights on in the house, or you shift

Alison Monette:

them to, you know, their options. You know, nothing's as good as darkness. But I also recognize, like people need to live, yeah. So I've found that it's not a hard rule. It depends on your context, though, like, if I have patients who have cancer or or or real, you know, chronic issues, I tell them, You're not going to like me when I tell you this, but you need darkness, like you don't have any wiggle room. You need to do it 100% right now, you know, I have a 10 year old she, still complains about this. So, so like, we have, you know, red lights. We have amber light bulbs that have the blue taken out of them. We still have incandescents, so that's also a lower blue option, and we just use as little as possible, kind of like, you know, America in the early 1900s where, you know, you can see where it's really been since the LED light bulb in these last 20 years that, you know, things have changed. Now I drive by, you know, people like, like, we're never up at night, but we had a early flight to come here, so it's like, I'm never up at 3am but we're driving to the airport. We're wearing our blue blockers. It's like every house is lit up. You know, we're just living in different times. And to me, from a as a doctor, I can see why health is just crumbling for people, because this is how they're running their environment, and they don't even know because their doctors don't know this. So how can they help them to understand it? Now it's as simple as it sounds, and because that's the hardest thing for people to listen, they're like, What do you I actually they'll often come back and say, I didn't believe you because it was so simple. We're so used to everything being complicated. Patients will still come in thinking, I'm going to give them this really crazy, strict protocol with all these details, because that's where functional medicine has gone. But that's not what you need to build the foundation on. Now, some people do need some dietary tweaking. They need exercise tweaking. I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but I'm saying, As a doctor, I can tell you, I have many people who are doing all of that textbook perfect, and it wasn't working for them. Hence, then going deeper, it's, it's, it's a half truth, it's some truth. It's just not the full way you're running your actual cell health.

Mike Peterson:

So just once again, to put it in context, so would you say so you had two different people. One of them was getting up seeing morning light and then having a bowl of ice cream for breakfast. And the other was like sleeping in not not getting up, getting up, having healthy breakfast and exercising which, which one of those is going to be better off in the long run? You

Alison Monette:

know, I wish I didn't have to say that, because I know this sounds crazy. I totally know it sounds crazy, but that person waking up for sunrise, getting outside, getting their brain. On can actually tolerate eating that ice cream more than that seemingly healthy person? Yeah, sadly, like, this is why we're we're so stuck in healthcare, because if we just understood that, you know, obviously I would never tell a patient go eat ice cream, but I would rather them do that then, then do it the other way, and have a broken clock, because now they actually have disease knocking at the door, you know, and that and and then that's the thing. Patients will come in. They come into me much later, you know. So that's the only problem. Is that I'm normally someone's last resort. You know, they've gone to every specialist. They've seen literally every specialist, and then they don't know where else to go. They've gone to Dr Google. They've, you know, they're doing everything right. And somehow people find their way to me, historically, through a friend or somebody you know more recently, you know, I'm doing some other things, like a weekly podcast. So now, you know, there's a little bit more of a way people are hearing about it, but it's unfortunate that that I'm often someone's last resort. So then what I say sometimes sounds crazy, because they'll say, Well, how come my rheumatologist, my neurologist, my Gemma practitioner, my cardiologist, didn't tell me any of this. Now that that's a new thing. In the last six months, I've had patients sitting in front of me. You know, a lot of young people with with their health just they no longer have it, and they've gone everywhere, and they've landed at my door, and now they'll say to me, You're my last resort. I'm only here, but I'm, I'm the last resort, which is kind of too bad. And then, you know, the sad thing is, they'll come back and we'll, you know, we'll work together, and they'll say, every one of my specialists says, Oh, you're just a medical miracle. You're, you know, it's it. Who knows? No one can explain it, but I'm like, I've been doing this for 20 years. I can't. Everyone can't be a medical miracle like it doesn't make any sense to me, and then they'll tell their friends, because I just had a 29 year old who brand new patient. We went through his whole story. We did we did his, you know, put him on the right track. And then he said to me, like, I was kind of his last resort. He didn't really, he didn't come in thinking he was going to believe what I told him. And then he's like, Oh, you actually are smart, like you knew about physics, you know, it's just not what people think. And then he said to me, he made a comment. I said, Are you telling me, like, you don't know any healthy people your age? He's a PhD. He said, Actually, I know five people my age with cancer. He said, that's actually kind of what, what happened? He's like, I started realizing my health might not be good, and I needed someone to evaluate it for me, because it's, I could have cancer. Like, that's, this is, this is where we're at, you know, which is why, you know, I'm so fortunate to have have a microphone, you know, to be able to talk a little more about it. Because my day to day, I can only see, I see patients all day long. I'm seeing 10 to 12 patients a day, and that's not enough people who need to hear this message. So

Mike Peterson:

I'm curious, going back to the to the sun, I know you're, you're familiar with Dr Jack, who we've had on the podcast here, and his, he's a big proponent of, like, tons of sun. You need to be out all day. You know, we see His cult members. I say that all around the beach here. Yeah, he's, he's brought a lot of people into El Salvador. Sometimes them wearing no clothes, because, I guess they want all their body exposed to to the sun. So do you follow that line of thinking also? Or is this totally different? Because he talks about a lot of these similar type things, but, but he's also a big proponent of just being in the sun all the time. So where does that fit in, in your view? So,

Alison Monette:

you know, I've professionally followed Jack Since 2014 you know, I act he provides a lot of free information. So for from 2014 until early 2020 right before the pandemic, I just kind of read all of Jack's stuff. I mean, he, he has years of reading. And I really casually did that for about six years, which is kind of where my journey went with how I changed my thinking. Then in 2020 I realized, again, oddly, right before the pandemic, but because I had my own understanding of health changing from my cross with people, it's weird. You know, timing is always weird, right? That he has a, you know, paid membership for information that you. Frankly, would probably get, or would definitely get him canceled, you know, so like, you know he he's pretty he's pretty vocal about things that should get him canceled. I don't know how he hasn't gotten canceled. Maybe he's obviously here in El Salvador, so he's pseudo canceled, maybe. But he retired, you know, his need to be back in the States. However, I started paying for his information behind the pay wall as a health care practitioner, which is a little different than what most of his members are paying for. There's a unique set of information that's only accessible to health care practitioners that that is Jack Cruz, like really done well, yeah, very coherent, super scientific, great references, all of it. So I would definitely say, like, I've been heavily influenced by Jack Cruz, his thinking, but I'm fortunate because I've worked with 1000s of my own patients and myself. And he always says this, you know, don't trust me. Verify. You know, he's obviously become a bitcoiner Over the years, and his thinking is very much decentralized. So I never believed him. In fact, that's kind of how the first six years went. I I started to cross the gym and was doing my own thing. But then in 2020 I realized I needed to learn more. And then, fortunately, the pandemic happened. And he's actually who I'd probably heard about Bitcoin a number of times after that, but he had mentioned Bitcoin in july 2020, and it was the first time I actually really sat and listened to it as, oh, this could be legit. I hate to say it like that, because I always

Mike Peterson:

all my introduction. Most people had that type of pathway. Yeah, I don't

Alison Monette:

know. I mean, you know, here I am, like, I'm so into the health space, and obviously, my lens, my world, is health and CrossFit. Like, I'm just, you know, I'm in the beginning of my profession. I really had tunnel vision. And because of that, though, Jack started, Dr crew started to put out more information about decentralized thinking. And it was really then, because my thinking was already in the right track, that I realized, oh my gosh, there's so much more to decentralizing everything. So that's my own journey, where it's influenced by Jack. Now I wish everyone, in some ways, could just retire and come live in El Salvador and be in the beach and do their day in the sun, and I know why he's doing what he's doing. I've seen patients not have to do that and make tremendous progress. And I'll send them down here after they've done a lot of work with me, and I'll send them down here for a month. And they I just had a patient who was here for a month in February. Now she's been working with me for a couple years. She is vitiligo, which is an autoimmune disease where your, your, you know, skin pigmentation gets obliterated. So she's got this vitiligo. And she had gone to every specialist, younger girl, sportscaster, so she's, she's in the public eye, and they they also did her, it's just going to get worse. It's going to get worse, and you'll probably not have a career, and it's going to be over. And she found me through somebody, you know, this is the story. She's a couple years in. She just came back from El Salvador. She stayed here in El zonte. I saw her. She is pigment coming back. It gives me chills thinking about it on her, on her hands, and, I mean, she was crying. She's like, this is so valuable that you can actually rebuild your health. Now she lives up in Massachusetts like she's not doing it perfectly, according to Jack, but not everybody can just give up everything and move to El Salvador. My perspective is that at least try to do your health right where you're living first try that. If it doesn't work, well, maybe, maybe this does need to be your plan B. But for a lot of people, they can get a lot right just by learning these basic concepts. But,

Mike Peterson:

but I guess, going back to my original question, do you think that the most, the more sun exposure, the better. So did I see some of the people that that are the jack adherence? You guys tell because they got the glasses like you got on there? Yes, and they are just brown. I mean, their noses peel and they're like, they look like they just been bacon in the sun for the last two years, right? Is that what you think is the the ideal, or where, where would you come in that like, hey, too much. Some can do damage to you. Or is it like, hey, the more the merrier, right? No,

Alison Monette:

it is. I toe the line of. The the light the sun is is where all of our electromagnetic information comes from. So that is primordial. Now, it doesn't mean you have to go live out in the sun and just be under it all day long. It's, I look at that and say, it's not really living a life right now I use light strategically at the right time of the day, so that way you can use it to recalibrate that circadian clock. Now I have come to El sante for for my health, because, frankly, it's way easier to get that light I, you know, come for these trips. It's my fourth time here, because I think of it as I'm doing, as I'm doing all the right things where I live. I'm running my clock really well. I'm outside as much as I can be. But I also don't, you know, need to be a appealing lobster, if that makes sense. But then I come here and I have a really good built solar callus, my solar panel, my eyes and my brain are ready to take this in. And I think about the light here as like a refill. And when you refill, because you store light internally, that's how we rerun our actual physics. Then I I'm kind of banked, and I can go back home to Connecticut, and now, you know, spring and summer are coming, I spend a lot of time outside, but probably more like traditional like how I when I was a kid, I would spend all day outside, but I was, I'm in the woods, I'm bare feet, I'm I'm doing whatever. I'm gardening. That's kind of how I live my life. That's how I tell patients to live their lives. Now, some people need, when their health is really bad, they need a lot of the right information from the sun to get it right. I think a lot of the people that come here that are Jack crews followers are probably pretty unwell, if that makes like they're not their health is not not good. So they're the ones that are coming because they realize that they've done everything they can do in their environments, and nothing's working, so their only option is to come here. But it's more than just the sun. It's the fact that you've got a day that's pretty much almost the same clock all year round, you know, like that makes the body not have to work to be so adaptable. And then it's, you know, it's just so easy to be outside, but you could be outside, you know, a lot I'll tell patients, like, if you're in El Salvador, because I send patients here, like, you don't have to come back and have spent all hours in the sun, because I brought my UVB meter here. When you're in the shade, you're still getting a great light signal. And you know, if you're getting it right, though, you're still going to develop melanin. Melanin is is a semiconductor that really makes us human. That's why Jack so Embraces the Sun. I think where he's at. This is my my thinking, I hate to say the word think I followed jack for a long time. You know, he's in his early 60s. He realizes his health got destroyed by his career. His option is El Salvador, and he needs as much of that light signal as possible to try to run his cells in the on he doesn't have a lot of flexibility. But that's Jack's context. You know, he's always talking about context, and that's, I think, the hardest thing to translate, is not everyone is Jack's context. Most people have not been neurosurgeons working, you know, Night Shift trauma call for all of their years of their career. I can tell you, I understand my health quite a bit and and I've only met Jack once. He probably doesn't even know who I am, which is totally fine. And we chatted. I mostly said, hey. Just wanted to thank you for putting out this work for professional people like me. I don't need him for anything else. I'm not in his cult. He, you know, like there's no need for that, but, but how I'm using his information is is really valuable, because I've helped so many other patients by translating it and helping them understand their context. And I look at it for me, and I don't need to do that. I see how my health has transformed. Personally, stopping doing CrossFit every night, not being at the gym until seven, eight o'clock at night, not eating at 830 when I came home, staying up till 1030 and always then, you know, missing sunrise, not eating in the morning when I shifted that for myself, I no longer had to CrossFit seven days a week, and I didn't become overweight and didn't lose my health. Now I track it, and that's the aha moment. All those biomarkers that were the check engine lights that were on. I was doing CrossFit and intermittent fasting and doing everything textbook perfectly. Are now off, which is so cool when you really sit back and say, Okay, I'm not saying, like, don't do anything, but now I do, like my husband and I will do rucking. So we'll put on, you know, a weighted backpack, and we'll just, we walk miles. My daughter hates it, like she'll go nine miles, and she'll say, how many miles is that like? But she does it. We don't make her carry weight. But, you know, we're doing it as a family. We're outside. You know? We ditch the sunglasses years ago, like we just thinking about it. As long as you're getting the right signal, you're finding your way to fitness that that is intuitively in nature,

Mike Peterson:

yeah. So what's what's your position on sunblock,

Alison Monette:

the so this is my position, because I know it's very controversial. I think my husband said Your dad's a dermatologist. Uh, yeah, yeah. So I was like, Oh, I like that. He's a dermatology PA, okay, yeah, only because this comes up quite a bit. So if you're disconnecting from everything you know, and you think about your skin as a solar panel, there's an optical physics guy named Scott Zimmerman. If you this is cool because you have dermatology family background. He is who helped us to understand that if you didn't think of this as a body, and you thought about it through an optical physics perspective, when light hits your surface, you've built a cell to take in that light message, and all of the filtering and messaging is meant to work under that full spectrum, unadultered sunlight, color temperature. Now in medicine, we took a scientific study that was done many years ago with isolated UV I'm like a researcher, so I vetted this out because I didn't believe any of this either. I mean, I worked on glasses until 2020. Was when I finally realized, like, oh my gosh, why am I filtering the light and polarizing the light that my brain is supposed to be doing for me, but your skin is really cool because Scott Zimmerman helped us to realize that when you get light properly at your surface, you build melatonin during the day. It helps run all of your hormone your neurotransmitter pathways, because, again, we're built to get the light and adapt to it if you're getting morning sunlight, so you need to be out there at sunrise, exposing whatever sun you plan to expose later in the day. If you were able to do this, took a skin biopsy, you know, every 1015, minutes, to see what was happening in that skin that had been exposed to that transitional light. So as the light gets stronger, you'd realize this skin is building SPF naturally for you, and it's properly filtering the light, but also buffering the UV so you adapt and don't turn into a lobster. Now I've personally, uh, I vetted this out for like, two years before I ever started talking about this with patients that I know it sounds really, really crazy, but when I learned this, I lived on a lake, so all summer long, I remember the first summer, I said to my husband, because he, he, he was the actual, I don't know if he told you this, he was, he was the person that turned into a lobster. He was white as a ghost. Anytime he would go outside, he would be a straight lobster. So he'd always protect himself. We when I learned this, I said we're going to run the whole summer this way. We would wake up at sunrise, put our bathing suits on, go out in the boat. We would spend the whole day out there. Now we had cover on the boat too. So so we try to get sunrise to about 10 o'clock, as much surface light, no sunscreen. You cannot wear sunglasses, because that also makes you burn more based on the brain signal. And when you do that, right, you build your solar panel to actually protect you. Build more melanin, which actually filters the UV light. He, he, I'm actually a very naturally, I have a lot of melanin. I have a kind of Native American side, so I don't typically burn anyways, so I wasn't a good experiment, but he that whole summer never sunburned. And then we. You like, I knew I was onto something. This is probably 2018 the summer of 2018 and then, you know, then, then we have people that are with us, like, what are you doing? Then, you know, we tell them, they're, they're experimenting. For me, I'm reading the science. I'm, you know, I'm really doubling down. And then I realized, Wait, everything was based on, really, this one study that was isolated UV I mean, if you take UV light and put it on any cell, of course you're going to cause cancer, because that isn't how the sun works at all. It's isolated laser UV light like but that's not a context that any human is ever in. Now, this made me go down the rabbit hole of Australia. You know, so Australia, and I think around 1980 which is when I was born, did the largest campaign, largest successful campaign, slip, slap, slap. Of sunscreening, skin protection. I mean, here we are. It's 2025, the skin cancer in that country is not better. And I actually met someone the last time I was here from Australia, that was a jack crews member who reminded me she's a little older, she reminded me about slip slap slap at because she lived in Australia, because she was kind of telling me about she was out, she was trying to be in the sun. And she said, everyone in Australia thinks I'm crazy, because they've done such a good marketing campaign. But she said, I know so many people with skin cancer, so how can that be? Right now, again, this is so much more than just saying, don't wear sunscreen. I tell patients, if you can't do the light ray, if you cannot get out in Sunrise sunlight, then just seek shade. Wear cover. But the problem with the sunscreen is, if you saw what that was filtering now, all of a sudden, what light actually, you know, if you think about like a layer on your skin, the light that gets to your cells is altered, light spectrum. Theoretically, I don't know this for sure, because I don't have the way to test it myself. I have to believe what I've what I've read and heard, what gets to your surface is blue shifted, if you look at blue light, because we do have those non visual photo receptors called melanopsin, when the blue light is received at a higher ratio without the balance. Now, because now UV lights filtered. It's filtering some of the red light, the blue light actually creates more growth signal to develop things like skin cancer.

Mike Peterson:

So so you're saying that if you are out at first light and your skin is exposed, that then later in the day, it won't burn

Alison Monette:

exactly, but it has to be in that order, which nobody's nobody's doing

Mike Peterson:

that I would push back on a little bit, because I, you know, as a surfer, it's very normal to go out at first light. And I've noticed at times when I stay, if the waves are really good, and if I stay, especially here in El Salvador, where the sun is very strong. If I stay out for several hours, I definitely will burn right?

Alison Monette:

So the only difference of that context, I thought a lot about that too, because it's a unique thing here. I don't have this happening with patients at home, is that now you're in the middle of a pool of water that's reflecting light differently than if you were here on the on the ground. So that is a little bit of like a not natural context that if you know, it's nice that we've invented surfboards, but it's put humans in a situation where, okay, you have to think a little differently about that. I would agree if, if I was a surfer, which I'm not, I, I, they're amazing. But I would think about just more, like coverage of my solar panel versus sunscreen, unless you're using like a, like a true, like opaque, like a zinc oxide, because then you're you're blocking Exactly. The problem is, once you start to filter, your skin has to adapt, and that's where everything is going wrong. So, like some of the, I mean, I'm, I'm assuming, if you took a spectrometer and looked through some of those wetsuits, like they're, they're opaque, like they're, they're protecting you. You're not getting filtered light message. And a lot of them now I see like, they're wearing, like the sun block. That's like, color, yeah, so that's, I think, actually doing it right. And then I love, you know, this is the thing you can't wear sunglasses when you're. Uh, surfing. So your brain is always getting the right circadian message. And I've watched the surfers here for the, you know, the world's championship, sort of championship, and they're, I'm like, man, they're, they're doing it right because they're, they're gonna be sunrise, they're all going to bed. Like, they're kind of, you know, getting, getting they're all going to bed, they've eaten early, and they're kind of like they're doing the right day and just out of pure intuition, but because the sport kind of gets you at the right time, right

Mike Peterson:

so I'm curious, like, for somebody like myself, I've, I've, I'm very curious about all this stuff, because as I've gotten older, I turned 50 this last year, and I've really, like, my sleep is just a huge issue. I have a hard time getting enough sleep. And I think my whole life, I ran with not enough sleep. But, yeah, when I was younger, I could just do it. You just kind of force your way through it. And you think, you know, it's like a take pride in it. Like, no, right? Totally. And so, you know, I realized a few years ago I was just like, Man, I'm just exhausted all the time. I wake up and I feel like crap, like I something's wrong with me. I thought it was dying or something and and so I've been working on, like, going to bed earlier, and so now we're trying to get in bed like by nine o'clock. Sometimes it stretches to 10, but it used to be, you know, I wouldn't go to bed before midnight, but now I find that I wake up at like, two or three o'clock in the morning and just cannot go back to sleep, and I'm just like, laying there drives me crazy. So Right?

Alison Monette:

I hear this so much like this is a very common question and part of someone's health context that I hear all the time. So the number one thing I would think about is that you need to build more melatonin during the transitional morning light. So like I, if I were you, I would take my day and I'd say I'm doing all my everything after 10am and I'm trying to get my morning spot on. If you get sunrise grounding. The grounding here is amazing. That helps the signal even more you do that.

Mike Peterson:

So explain the theory behind that. Because that that has always seemed a little like to me, like I get the sun, I get that, but the grounding, I'm like, I mean, I I feel like the people that adhere to that or healthier, and so I but I still don't feel like I can, like, conceptualize, right, and rationalize it?

Alison Monette:

Yeah, no. So it's really, it's simple in that, you know, as humans, if you look at our, our the palms of our hands and the our the soles of our feet, we have sweat glands in those areas, which is, you know, very different than like our closest genetic ancestor. So, you know, we've been walking upright for all these years. But there's a reason why we have sweat glands in our feet. Because when you have that moisture, which the water is really what's making us uniquely operate, you take that foot, bare foot, on a surface, and you get a little bit of moisture. Now, you actually can take in all of the electrons from the earth, but you also discharge all your protons. Now this is the basics of, you know, atomics and physics, where, when you really dial into the cell, everything is is protons and electrons. Inflammations, protons, health and optimal function are electrons. So if you want, if you think about this simply, as we were always meant to take in electrons from the earth throughout all of human history, and only now that we have, you know, Rubber soled shoes. Did we stop doing that because we were supposed to constantly discharge those protons. It's how so the earth is obviously a big ball of electrons. When you see how the movement of protons and electrons go, protons will always get discharged from us to go to the earth, and we will always take in the electrons from the earth. And it's like a recalibration the original science, which seemed woo, woo many years ago, was Clint Ober, he though has some really built out science through it's called, like the earthing Institute. This I always say, Don't believe me, go go like go find the researchers. You follow that bread crumb. There's a, I forgotten his name. There's a scientist that now works with him that runs that earthing Institute. He actually is really dialed in on the science. Speaks about it very coherently. And if you simply understand when your feet are on the earth and you're able to discharge your inflammatory. Signals take in more electrons. This is because of the light. So this is little Jack cruise 101, the photo electric effect, which is what Einstein told us, that how you interact with with light photons is only through electrons. Means you need to bring as many electrons into your body as possible. So when you are outside, you have something for that light to interact with. If you never ground, you could live in El Salvador, which this is, you know, I think probably too much about this. And I think when I look at people, and I kind of see their health and I see, oh man, like they're they're in the right environment, but they're wearing their shoes, they're wearing their sunglasses, like I see them putting sunscreen on and and now they're no longer living in El Salvador. They could be living in Connecticut indoors, and you don't realize it, but the second you put those bare feet on that sand, and you guys have this volcanic sand, there's even more electrons and magnetic field coming from that, which is why many people come here. And I generally talk to people, and they'll say, I feel so well here in El Salvador now I'm sitting at the beach. So everyone's doing the same thing. They're walking on the beach. They don't even realize. They feel so well because they're they're discharging their protons, taking in their electrons, the lights Great. Now they're this photo, electric physics, run body. It's amazing for health, but it has to be in the morning when everything's getting stronger, and your cells are turning on. If you do it later, it doesn't run with your body's clocks. So,

Mike Peterson:

so it's not bad for you, but it's not like

Alison Monette:

I'm looking for, like the a plus, yeah. So then I think about you, if you built so all that morning would build melatonin in

Mike Peterson:

the morning, be out in the sand. Be, yeah,

Alison Monette:

eat your breakfast. Like, start your day with good information and energy coming in, you know, then do your day. You know, the like, I'm sure you have a crate. Like, I was like, the day is probably happening. There's stuff happening. Try then to eat dinner before sunset, if you're doing anything after sunset, you know the 100% you know, orange or red, blue blockers. Use those if you're indoors, if you're outdoors, you're always good, you know, unless you just have all fake lights in on and then when you go to bed, you've you've built melatonin from being outside during the day. That's what people don't realize. If you look at melatonin, it actually has a cage that it's built on that's that absorbs UV light, like it's it's you're meant to build it during the day. You activate it at night in darkness, which is the blue blockers, the no food. And when you get that right, you need a little bit of time, but now you sleep well because you have enough melatonin and you've activated at night, and now you can run that sleep cycle when you're sleeping. That's the best thing you can do for your health, everything. It's like the renovators for your health come in and they clean up your structure. It takes time, though, that's that's the hard part. So,

Mike Peterson:

so the the waking up at two or 3am and not being able to go back to sleep is that is probably not

Alison Monette:

enough. Melatonin enough. Yeah, you probably don't have enough, and then you might not be active. It's probably both pieces, not enough. Built during the day, not enough activated at night with the true darkness. And that runs you it runs down over time. And you know, you say, Oh, I'm 50. Is this normal? But I would tell you, it's not normal. I've had patients who are in their 80s. Get this, right? They'll say, Oh, I look so weird in these orange, blue blockers, but I'm sleeping like I did when I was 20. And that's what really cleans up your health. I mean, that's the doctor in your body, which is amazing when you tap into it, yeah,

Mike Peterson:

so and, and just taking melatonin is not a

Alison Monette:

no. Actually, the really interesting thing is, you know when, when you look at the studies now, people who take exogenous melatonin actually screw up all of the feedback loops for for normal health messaging, because your body's producing it. So generally, anything your body is making you don't want to put into into the system, at least not long term. Once you do, it actually affects the thermodynamics. So we know with melatonin, we can actually see that it changes some of the features of the eye that run the computer. And you know now we're, I'm seeing this a lot. My kid patients, because even the traditional doctors will prescribe melatonin for kids that have trash sleeps. But really they just, they just have broken circadian clocks because they're running on their iPads all day and they're never no one you know where I live, like kids don't even go outside anymore. They don't have recess sometimes now, in the schools near me, my daughter's home school because of this. So this is why we can be here now. Yeah, but the kids are really easy to get back on track because their brains are looking for the information. You know, to be honest, at your age, at 50, you should be able to recalibrate this really quickly. The people that have the hardest time are my 20 and 30 year olds, because their brains have been run on bad light messaging for most of their life, and because the brain doesn't actually fully mature for about 26 years, if you've been run in those first 26 years, not on sunlight and grounding and instead on iPads and indoor light, your brain, your circadian clock actually doesn't work quite as good, so they take longer to fix. But you should be good, because your first 26 years of your life, we didn't have iPhones. We didn't have iPads. I actually think about this quite a lot, because the iPhone came out when I was 26 knowing this now I have, I have no doubt. I would have, you know, I used it when it first came out, for like, 10 years. I didn't know this stuff. And I think, oh my gosh, what a gift. Because had that happened earlier, I would have been as affected as it's just such a problem because it's it's close proximity, it's really shifted light frequency. Those are, those are deeper conversations. But I would say for you, I think you could get your your sleep back on point, and that changes everything for your health. And when you're running your circadian day, putting everything at the right time, you know, you've basically sent your watch, you know, back to the the watch person, they've they've refreshed and renewed it, and it's back to running automatically. When you run that automatically, you could eat ice cream for breakfast and actually be okay. Now I say this, yeah, I only because this is a good point my health coach and my one of my she has my marketing and everything. They're married. They're a married couple. They're going to be 29 this year, so they've been journeying along with me since, since 2019, they're a great experiment, because they he was my crossfit coach for me, they were very connected to doing all those things, CrossFit, fasting, ketogenic diets, paleo, you name it. Perfectly fit. Look great. 2020 happens. We're everything shut down. They're still like they work for me in my medical practice. So we're now doing different things. We're jumping in the lake when it's cold. We're we're outside, you know? We're doing all these different things. They stopped CrossFitting. They stopped doing all the crazy diets. They basically simplified their whole life. They do everything outside, you know, gardening, you name it. You would look at them and you'd say, how actually, her uncle still doesn't believe that they don't go to the crossroad gym. He's like, Michaela, what are you doing? They look exactly the same as they looked. Actually, she looks phenomenally better than when she went to the crossroad. Gym, seven, you know, seven days a week. She looks phenomenally better. She never misses the sunrise. So he looks great too. Never misses the sunrise. Eats in the morning. They similarly don't eat at night. They're the 29 year old. So if you looked at them, you would think they're absolutely gym people, and no one believes them unless they know their context. And then when you see that, you realize, okay, here's, you know, here's a jack Cruz, who's early 60s. I'm 44 they're 29 we all have slightly different contexts. I'm not, you know, I had six pack back then. That wasn't really health. You know, Jack's a little different. They're, they're at a spot where they were lucky. They learned this early enough that now they've matured their their brain, their mitochondria, and running a good circadian clock. They've got a buffer for years. I wish I had learned this earlier. I still think I learned it early enough where, you know, I'm doing really well, you know. Jack learned this too late, you know. So here he is not really able to get rid of his extra weight because he's used all his mitochondrial capacity. So. But he's in a different phase of his life. But I think it's cool to kind of pull it into your context and say, okay, you know, you're 50, but I think you've got a lot of capacity left to run your Hill. That's good to hear.

Mike Peterson:

No, that's, that's, that's encouraging. So taking it back to we've gone on for quite a while here, so, yeah, probably try to bring it in here. But I'm curious is to talk a little bit about Bitcoin and El Salvador. Usually that's the focus of, yeah, we, you know, obviously love delving into health and other things. But curious as to what brought you to El Salvador, we've talked a little bit about that, but how Bitcoin ties into that. And then what you guys see as your future, as far as involvement in El Salvador and and what we would tell the people that are kind of thinking about maybe trying to move here or visit and, yeah, just kind of your experience and how El Salvador has impacted your life? Yeah,

Alison Monette:

no, El Salvador. I have a unique kind of coming into El Salvador, and it's, you know, through the lens of hell. So I would have, if you asked me five years ago, I would have never thought I would be in El Salvador today, kind of thing, right? So looking at health through that decentralized lens, is what made me realize I didn't know anything about money and finance, and, you know, I'm young enough to when I started my practice, like I weathered 2008 very early on, I didn't have any money to lose, you know. So I remember that, but then I also remember I never, I did sort of traditional stuff that people told me to do. And from 2008 to probably 2015 I'm like, we're making no money here. Like my husband, I'm like, we don't know anything about money. You know, my parents are great, but they didn't, they didn't have any financial background. Like, I know nobody in the finance space, but I do know something's not right. I'm like, we're never going to be able to be able to retire. So time passed, thankfully, though, in 2020 because now I'm already decentralized in my thinking, when that came up as decentralized money, it made sense that I should probably look into that. So I actually though I wasn't ready for it until I read I'm like, I need to understand this. I don't understand Bitcoin. But once I read more, and then over time, like I've, I've read all of like, safety and stuff, and, you know, just tried to really understand it to me. Then it became a no brainer, the decentralized money. I was already really understanding decentralized health. It was such a natural just transition for me. Now. I was also thinking, because it was 2020 like, what if everything blows up in America? Like, what the heck am I going to do here? And it was November 2020 that my husband, I were like, You know what this we don't really have a choice here. Like, this is, this is our natural intuition. We just need to start buying some bitcoin, seeing how that plays out. And what do we have to lose? We need to diversify. And, you know, 2021 was a lot about just kind of feeling okay with that. And we didn't really. We just kept buying and taking some of our fiat money, because then I really learned about fiat money, and then that just,

Mike Peterson:

I didn't, you mentioned you sold your house during that time. So, so then,

Alison Monette:

you know, 2021 happened, and then I really started thinking. We really started thinking, I don't like we got to get out of everything here, like here, it's just not going well, right? So in our heads, we thought, Maybe we need a plan B. But we we didn't know what that was now, because I do follow Jack Cruz, you know, he started coming to El Salvador, speaking very highly of El Salvador, like it, you know, just a lot about it being a great spot for decentralized health. But then also, you know, freedom, freedom decentralized money. So he was, you know, kind of warning, maybe this is not a place, because this is 2021, he's like, I don't know if you want to take your family here. Your family here yet. And so we were kind of paying attention, you know, we've got a daughter, and we we don't want to leave her at home, like we want to bring her where we're going. So thankfully, 2022 we kind of put it out there to the universe, like we need to keep we were decentralizing everything we we sell the CrossFit gym. I got rid of all my doctors that weren't in the same decentralized mindset of me. I simplified. We're like, we're just going to simplify disconnect. If we need to disconnect, then we can do that easily. We were really fortunate that we. I was at nature, made the decision for us. Somebody came to us through a realtor we worked with who essentially, like, begged us to sell her our house. And that was the last thing we were really centralized in. And it was kind of, I guess, what we thought would be our forever home on a lake, five acres, beautiful property. You know, we could do all of these decentralized health things outside, but it did also keep us really plugged in to the centralized money. She wouldn't say no, and essentially she said, Just tell me what you want for it. We kind of gave her a crazy offer, and we said, if we if this happens, we're going to invest somewhere else, because I want more the American ideals. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the United States. So then early 2023 we sold this house. I have a little two bedroom, 600 square foot apartment above my medical office, and we went from 5000 square feet to 600 freed up our ability, though, to travel. So by that point, we're feeling a little more confident about what we're hearing from El Salvador, like it's safe. We can bring Gemma with us. So we booked our trip in july 2023 as a family. Now, you know, it's a little uncomfortable, because we're just used to America, yeah, but every interaction we have is with phenomenal people, full of optimism. We can barely speak Spanish. We're but we're there. We're getting by. We're trying really hard. We didn't realize. We should have realized, like less people would speak English than than did, but we we made it, and then we realized, after the week of being here, how amazing the opportunity was, and how optimistic every one of the local people we met was. We didn't we met only one group of, like, husband and wife Americans. We actually met a lot of people from different countries, and we realized, huh, like, this could never happen, really, anywhere else that that we've gone, like, we've traveled a lot of places. We never met people from six different countries, in in in El zonte, like it was a really weird moment, and we, we kind of have, like, we were like, I think we need to invest in what's happening here. This feels like probably America, you know, when it was being created, you know that the feeling of just opportunity and hope and and everyone's so they're happy. Yeah, they're actually happy. And, I mean, when you're in New England, people aren't really happy, like, we're happy, but we're like, oh my god. Like, no one even says, How do you in the street sometime, and you're walking down the path that you see the same people here. Everyone's saying, when its diaspora days, it's It's wild. So we actually were not risk takers, but we saw one of the properties being built on the beach here had, you know, real estate sign, and we had this money that we sold our house house with. And then, you know, the monies were like, Oh my gosh, the money's so terrible, we can't invest that money in traditional investments. So we actually said we're going to just invest in what El Salvador is providing for people we want to, if I want to invest my money, it's going to be in that country. So we had contacted the real real estate company here, and, you know, shout out the good life. Yes, Ramon Lexi and chimbara Roman were amazing. They made everything really comfortable. You know, it certainly helped for us that Lexi could speak English and she, you know, she's from the US, so that also was really easy, and we just kind of put it out there. We said, you know, I don't know what this will be. This feels really not on the track we were on, but, but nothing's been on the track that we were on. So they were great. They took us to they did some tour, like virtual tours with us, and and then, long story short, the they're so, like, nicely connected with the community that they were able, they were selling one of the projects that's being built on the beach, and we were kind of on their list. And, you know, they reach out and say, Hey, here's an opportunity. Maybe that makes sense, because you're not planning to move here full time, you know, it's now, it's a condo, so you don't have to worry about management. And then Lexi was really sweet, because she's like, this is gonna sound like American like, real estate pressure here, but you gotta make a decision really quickly, because this is gonna sell out. And I think in like, the first day, she kept sending the prize list and like, they're they're selling out, yeah?

Mike Peterson:

Like, they sold out very quick, yeah. So, so like, day.

Alison Monette:

One, you know, I think, you know, three or four gone. Day two, a few more are gone. And then we, kind of, like, we are just going to do this. This might sound crazy. We didn't even tell people, like, even people close to us right away, because it kind of felt really crazy. And then we, I think I don't know, we were, we were early adopters. We were because we wanted a certain unit, a certain number. And my daughter wanted, like, her birthday reversed in Spanish. And we're like, we gotta, we gotta do this now. So we did it. And, I mean, then it sold out in, like, I don't know, a couple weeks, and I know they had some transition, but it was for real like, Lexi was not trying to be high pressure American real estate, which, once you meet her, you know that, right? So, that was, you know, fall 2023, and then, you know, we, they ground broken the project in April. So we came back in April, you know, we brought my parents, because I wanted them to experience El Salvador. We came back last November, brought some, you know, friends. We're back here because it's my daughter's birthday week, so we're here celebrating her birthday week. Kind of wanted to see the progress in the condo, kind of thing. But also mostly because, you know, we're, we're plugging into our health, like we came in November for two weeks to really tank up. We're here, kind of tanking up for spring. And it's, it's so amazing what's happening here on Bitcoin beach. Like every time we come, there's, there's progress, but it still feels very elzonte, yeah, and yeah, and real, like it's not, it's not what happens in America. I hate to say it in America, but like, you know, everything kind of gets ruined there when there's too much progress, like here, everyone still says buenos dias to you, and there's still the local people, and they're, you know, cleaning up the streets, and they're just doing their thing. And the the tiendas are great. They're not overrun with, you know, Americanized. It's simple. I mean, you can buy garbage here too. There's a lot of garbage. The one worry I have is local garbage, yeah. I'm like, are they? Are they doing this, just like, sending garbage here? Because I don't know. They're not thinking about it. I'm like, Why? Why does this have red dye number 40. It's like an ice cream bar. But maybe that we can clean that up, hopefully. But at the end of the day, you still, it's not overrun, yeah? Like you're, you're basically, we come here, it's easy to eat local food. The restaurants are phenomenal. Like, they're really killing it, and they want you to be genuinely, like happy in their country. And there's, you know, we, I love that. There's just still so many local people, you know, there's, there's way more tourists than the first time we came here. I mean, I think every picture I took the first time we came here, there's, like, one person on the beach. You know, it's a little bit busier, but it's still nothing like being on the beach in in New England in the summer. I mean, I go to the Cape in the summer and, I mean, you're basically, like, stacked up next to everyone here. It's so much space, but it still feels very real, and probably because of really good influences, you know. I mean, you've been here for so long, and, you know, it's, it's really building out something that's, that's freedom and decentralized, which I think is the root of where we all need to go in our thinking. And when you decentralize every aspect of your life, you kind of end up in El Salvador.

Mike Peterson:

I think that's a perfect note to end on, but I want to make sure people know where they can follow you. I know that you do a weekly podcast, Paco. Do we have a screenshot that we can put up there? And you're a health podcast every week. So tell us a little bit about that, right? Yeah. So, like I can find there. I mean,

Alison Monette:

my, you know, my medical practice. So, you know, day to day, I'm seeing patients one on one, so So I've done that for almost 20 years, and then I've recently joined a health podcast. So it's heal squad by with Maria Menounos. She's had this health podcast for quite a number of years, but her and her husband convinced me to jump into a weekly round table to actually kind of have these conversations, really breaking down the health at the kind of deeper foundational level. But we'll just do like one topic. So we'll dive into one topic, try to break that down, and then if there's questions from from anyone, they'll question people will DM whatever, and then we'll kind of regroup around things too. So that's every Monday on the heel squad. I think we have six weeks back or so, so it's now our plan to we're again. We're doing these weekly. So I even did one here. We're trying to stay relevant, so we don't want to. Taped too far ahead so we're able to talk about relevant things. But what, what they found is that, unfortunately, many people are just going to Google for their health. They're going to influencers for their health. And Maria is is very spot on where she realized, like, I'm influencing a lot of people with health, like more than a lot of doctors, I need to provide my anyone listening with legit information about health. So we've gotten really good feedback. That's kind of where I am now in I don't I'm not like a social media person, like I'm a ghost otherwise. So that could be good or bad, it's just not my thing. So I'm there, which is strategic. And then hopefully, you know, I'm going to reinvent, you know, field lab for that being an educational space. So there's some stuff coming down the pike, but then I'll have El Salvador. So hopefully, the long term, is helping patients to rebuild their health foundation wherever they are at. And then I've already started sending patients here. I tell them to come here. I give them ideas for Airbnbs, and I map out their month of of living in a healthy way. And they come here, they plug into this great environment, and they go back home, and their health is starting to get recharged. So that's the long term plan. Is maybe using Bitcoin beach here as a kind of retreat spot where we can bring people who are looking to decentralize their health and plugging them into a really awesome community. I love that.

Mike Peterson:

And then what, uh, what about if they happen to be in Connecticut, and they're looking for a,

Alison Monette:

yeah, I mean, I do telehealth. So, I mean, currently I have patients from all over, you know, now, now, sometimes from outside of the US. You know, that is the good thing about technology, is that I can see patients from wherever. I love, meeting people in person, so there is nothing like that, but sometimes that doesn't happen, and that's okay, and we can always do telehealth, too. And so how can people get a hold of you then, yeah, so my medical practice is called Avena a v e n a, integrative Medical Center. Avena medical.com you know, just simple website, but really giving the office a call. My mom is my practice manager, and Michaela, who I already mentioned, they're they're the who you speak to. They know everything will guide patients through. And that's always a one on one option.

Mike Peterson:

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you coming in and spending your time in the blue light here,

Alison Monette:

I told you, I said I was out all morning getting my right signal, and I'm wearing my blue blockers, so we're cool.

Mike Peterson:

All right. Well, we'll follow up with you next year. Thank you

Unknown:

so much. You.