#43 – Shannon Drake: Most Household Products Aren’t Serving Us

You are at the intersection of wealth, health, and happiness. Welcome to the Wealthy Wellthy Life.

Hello, and welcome to the Wealthy Wellthy Life, the show about becoming wealthy without sacrificing your healthy. Each week, I interview a counter-cultural thought leader to bring you a unique millionaire mindset. I’m Krisstina Wise, bestselling author, millionaire coach, and your personal guide to money, health, and happiness.

Today, I tackle health wealth with Shannon Drake. Shannon is the founder of “The Dirt”, a cool company focused on Paleo-friendly hygiene products. She is a leading voice in the Paleo community, that I actually met for the first time at the Paleo f(x) Conference. Her company offers super-healthy products, including MCT oil toothpaste, oil pulling mouthwash, lip balms, and skin serums just to name a few.

This is a super interesting episode that focuses on a missing health topic: oral health. If you’re ready to learn this week’s millionaire secret, you’ll want to listen to this episode. Enjoy.

Shannon, thank you for being on my podcast today. I’m so excited to have you here.

I’m so excited to talk with you today.

Well, I just fell in love with you. I met you at Paleo f(x), and I was attracted to your booth for several reasons. Number one, I’ve had so many oral health issues, so when I saw your product, and healthy toothpaste, and The Dirt, and the different things you were doing, I always am looking for like the best oral health products, basically. But then, you were just amazing. I mean, you’re such an artist, and this great personality, and you’re passionate about the products, and being natural in any way. You are just remarkable, so it’s an honor to get to chat with you outside of your booth and talking about toothpaste.

Where we can actually hear each other.

Exactly, yeah, and you don’t have 100 people behind me trying to grab your attention. Anyway, have you always been in the products business? How did you get from creating toothpaste and then selling your toothpaste, and other products? We’ll talk more about that, but tell us a little bit about your background.

Yeah, I’ve always made things. No matter what I’ve done, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve just liked making things and figuring out how to make things, and how to make things better, and how to make things prettier. It’s just kind of how my brain works. I’m constantly looking at a fork and I’m like, “How can I make this better?”

So, I went to college, I went to design school, and I did the whole art school thing. It was great, and I got my first job out of college, which was kind of an accident. I got into marketing working for a shoe company and learned how to do marketing, and it’s very much the same. It’s not a physical product, but you’re trying to come up with an end product which is how the customer feels about the company, which is an emotional product.

So, I was working for this company, and they blew up, and it was really fun and exciting, and it was in fashion, and they flew me to New York all the time to do fashion shows. It was really cool, but I just always kind of felt like I was doing somebody else’s dream job. It just wasn’t really doing it for me. While I was doing this, I was also freelancing in marketing, helping small businesses and my friends come up with social media plans, because this was very early in the social media marketing days when no one kind of really knew what to do, and I was sitting there figuring it out.

One of my girlfriends is a life coach, and she was having trouble with her marketing. She’s like, “Shannon, I love this. I love helping people, and I’m really good at the one-on-one conversation, figuring out what’s blocking people, but marketing is just so big. My brain isn’t exactly tailored to that huge idea. I’m better at small pieces. Can you help me come up with a really itemized plan?” I was like, “Sure Sally, that’s great. I’d love to help you.”

As I started to help her, I realized I don’t really know what life coaches do. I don’t understand the process. I didn’t understand what kind of person is looking for this help. So, I asked her, I’m like, “Sally, can you coach me so I get it so I can come up with this product for you?” She’s like, “Of course.” So, she starts coaching me and, simultaneously, my partner, Joe, is like, “You’re making products all the time. Why aren’t you making products for a living?” He’s an entrepreneur. He already saw the whole plan. He is a visionary, like, “You can make these products and you can sell them,” and I’m like, “No, you’re crazy, babe. I can’t do that.”

So, Sally’s coaching me, and halfway through the coaching, she’s backed up what Joe said, she talks me out of doing marketing consulting, and is like, “You need to make these products are great. You love it. Everybody loves them. Why aren’t you doing that? You’re not doing it because you’re afraid of failure of something you actually care about.” I was like, “This is why you’re a life coach. I get it, okay.”

So, that was kind of the start of making products as consumer products instead of just for myself. And from thereon, it was just going through the muck of learning how to run a business, learning how to do the paperwork, hiring people, doing the design, complying with laws, and learning that whole set of skills. It was quite something, but I really enjoy it. It really feels like I’m doing something that adds value to people.

Yeah, and you really are quite the entrepreneur. You’re so creative, and besides your passion behind really clean whole products and your mission with that, you have this artistic talent too, like your labeling, your branding, your product design. It’s beautiful and it stands out, and there’s almost this — you know, so many of the product business, I think, is created maybe more by mail, so there’s more in the Paleo space especially. The Paleo is very masculine, but you have these beautiful products that aren’t feminine by any means, but you can tell there’s some artistic female talent behind the creation of this.

Thank you. I feel very blessed. For a long time, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, and I was lucky and unlucky to be one of these people that was kind of good at anything I tried. I say unlucky in the fact it’s not really unlucky, but it’s a perspective, that some people really know what they’re going to do with their lives. I have friends that are like, “I’m a dancer. I dance, and I didn’t want to do anything else.”

For me, I was like, I can kind of do whatever I want, but I don’t really love anything. I’m not especially good at anything. But now, I realized this was training to be an entrepreneur, because I can kind of do everything, which allows me to find the people, and the places, and the things that their passion is actually mixing the product. They love the chemistry, and I kind of know how to do that, so I can help them, but I also am totally fine with letting them go and do the thing, and focusing on what I love, which is the design process of making the product and designing what they look like. So, thank you for loving the design so much. That’s like my baby.

Yeah, the design, it’s so well-done. I love it. A lot of entrepreneurship is the creative, and you are an artist and are able to tap into that, and it shows in everything that you do. So, let’s talk a little bit about products, because part of what I do through this podcast is I love to educate the listeners on things that they might not otherwise know, certainly that’s not part of conventional wisdom, and there’s a lot of misinformation about products, and a lot of things we’re told, or a lot of things that we buy with the lack of awareness of ingredients, of all sorts of stuff: marketing, good marketing, and labeling. So, I think, based on your marketing background, you can even share a little bit about that.

But, even in the Paleo health sort of natural space, it can be a little still misinformation, the way things could be labeled. So, how are some of these, maybe, product companies and good marketing, what might be some of the things they’re putting on labels or whatever that can be tricky?

I think the first thing that comes to my mind is there’s probably a term for this and I don’t know what it is, but there is marketing something that is never actually a problem and making it a problem, so you’ll see a lot of things saying, “Aluminum-free baking soda.” Baking soda never has aluminum in it. Baking powder has aluminum in it. So, this is a big problem I have to deal with because we get people writing in saying, “Does your baking soda have aluminum in it?” and then I have to write a nice little thing saying, “Well, if you look at the market today, baking soda doesn’t have aluminum in it, and this is just a marketing ploy started by a rather big natural company that it’s not exactly super honest.”

So, there’s quite a few things like that out there where if you do a little research, you’ll find that some of the trends that just pop up are completely made up. So, I would say keep an eye out for that. If something seems, I’ve never heard of this before, and this ingredient is very common, so why, all of a sudden, are we worried about microtoxins in it? Do a little research and make sure it’s actually a problem.

Yeah, those are gimmicks that anybody that’s thinking, in the health space, “Oh, this must be good. It’s aluminum-free.” And what about things like the words “all-natural”.

Oh yeah, all-natural is a fun one. Especially in the personal products, like cosmetics industry, there’s no real regulation around languaging, so you can kind of say whatever you want. So, you’ll see a lot of products say all-natural, and that could mean that you started with a coconut, you ran it through a hexane process to reduce it down and take all the oils out, and then you blended it with soy byproduct and you put it through another chemical process, and you come out on the end with glycerin.

Well, is that natural? It’s gone through 15 processes. Just because it came from a coconut in the beginning, how natural is that? Would you put petroleum on your face? I mean, petroleum is natural. It comes out of the ground. It’s from bones. So, it’s a gray area, and the definitions aren’t really super solid. So, I tend to stick with a “if I can picture the ingredient in my mind, it’s probably okay”, but if I’m looking at in like polymethylehtyl-20 from coconuts, like, “Hmm, maybe not?”

Well, that’s a good point because there are a lot of products with these long words as ingredients. There’s either the idea of, “I should stay away from it,” or, “I don’t know what it is. It must be okay because it says all-natural.” So, is that a rule of thumb, even, that if they’re words that we’ve never heard before that it’s a flag of, “At least do the research on what that word is.”?

I would say at least Google it on your phone, because there are definitely natural products that we have to use a scientific name on labeling, and sometimes a scientific name sounds scary. So, I’ve seen a lot of products where I know, “Oh, this is MCT oil. It’s from coconuts, and they just spin it in a centrifuge, and it’s fine.” But, the scientific name is scary-looking. It’s like mono-etho blah-blah-blah.

So, I would just say we all have these crazy computers in our hand. Use them. Just Google it and see what the internet says. If your gut is kind of iffy, back yourself up with some knowledge.

That’s good. What got you into making some of these products? Was it your own dissatisfaction with the ingredients and a lot of these over-the-counter, maybe, even more natural products where you thought, “Uh-uh. I want to do something better,” or were you just sort of passionate about making your own products and wanted to do them naturally? Give us some background there.

Well, it was a little bit of both. I was always into natural products. My dad got lung cancer when I was 15, and it was the first time I really realized that our environment affects our health. I was pretty young, and you’re a teenager. You don’t care about anything. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, there’s consequences.” So, I started going and using more natural products. I started with the Burt’s Bees and all of those really awesome early companies.

But then, as I got into the Paleo Diet, I was lucky to get into it very early in junior college about 8 or 10 years ago, and I really didn’t want to take physics or chemistry, so I took biological anthropology. My professor ended up being this really cool dude. He was really into the evolution of the hominid species, and as we were learning about how we went from this hominid to this hominid, our diet shifted, and our jaw changed, and we lost a ridge in the top of our skull, and we don’t have to chew roots anymore, so our jaws became smaller. Seeing that physical change in the bone structure because of what we ate further influenced this idea that, “Wow, what we put into our body affects the very structure of our body. It’s very connected.”

Halfway through the semester, he’s talking about this connection between your diet, and your body, and your health, and the way that any animal’s body is built dictates their diet. Like, what do they eat? You can tell by how their bones are structured. And he just really off-handed, “Yeah, there’s this thing called the Paleo Diet, and it’s based on this idea that you eat more like our ancestors would eat without the industrial food system,” and then he just keeps lecturing on, but something in me was like, “Hold on. What was that? That sounds like some knowledge right there.” Eat like what we’re supposed to eat based on the animal that we are. This makes sense to me. I love animals. I get that. We put them in the zoo. They get unhealthy. When they’re in the wild, they’re really healthy. I’ve seen this.

So, I got into the Paleo Diet, and now when I started to look at these early-generation natural products, they weren’t really that super-natural. They were better, much better, but they weren’t as close to the plant as possible. They weren’t as close to that ingredient as possible, and they are often very ugly and smelt like hippie. I love the natural food industry, and I love music festivals, and I love that, but I’m not a crunchy hippie. I’m the fashion girl. I like leather jackets and going to cool things. I like nice dinners, so I was inspired to make products that I would want, that smelt great, that worked great, that looked great, that were natural. So, that’s kind of how I got into really iterating on these products I was making myself.

Well, and that’s many different things. So, there’s wanting to be natural and to be whole and real ingredients, but then there is the fragrance piece and how do you make that natural, because it’s easy to put a lot of chemicals in products to make them smell better. So, you’re trying to hit a lot of different components at the same time, a lot of different pieces of the puzzle versus just focusing on one element: just natural, or just smell good, or just looks good, or whatever.

Yeah, it’s difficult. It’s really difficult because a lot of the smells that we all love are artificial. It’s very hard to get that really nice, sexy amber smell from natural amber. It’s actually really kind of smoky-smelling. And sweet smell is very hard to do without artificial fragrance. So, it’s definitely a challenge.

What are companies doing when they’re putting in these artificial ingredients?

Well, multiple things. You can achieve things you cannot achieve with natural ingredients. So, getting sweet smell, getting certain textures is very hard to do with natural products. Natural products that are natural, what happens to your coconut oil when it gets cold? It gets solid. Not good if you have a coconut oil product in a tube and it gets solid, then people can’t use it. Also, they’re affordable. Artificial ingredients are also very much cheaper than natural ingredients. If I made my products with artificial ingredients, I’d be in every grocery store in the country right now because I can sell them for $2. Then, they’re highly available. You don’t run out of soy-based glycerin. Everybody makes it. It’s a byproduct of industrial soy. You never run out.

Last fall, this spring, twice, we ran out of organic rose oil. Like, there was no organic rose oil anywhere for us to buy, and one of our main products is rose oil toothpaste. So, we were freaking out. Like, we had orders coming in and we just can’t get it. We could get the stuff that’s extracted with chemicals, but I’m not going to put that in people’s mouths. So, it’s much more technically difficult to do natural products than artificial ingredients.

And what is your definition of natural products?

For me, I want it to be as close to the origin as possible. So, if I’m going to use, let’s say, an oil, so if we’re going to use like sesame oil or coconut oil, I’m going to get the version that’s not deodorized. So, they’ve just extracted the oil through a non-chemical process, so a press, or a centrifuge, or CO2, and then they haven’t deodorized it. The way that they deodorize, usually, is using some sort of bleaching process to make it not smell like plant, which is great if you’re Lancôme or Estée Lauder. You don’t want your product to smell like a plant. I do, and I want all of those magical, natural ingredients that we don’t even know about yet that’s part of the smell profile to be in the end product.

Where does organic fit into this?

Well, technically, organic means that they don’t use artificial fertilizers or pesticides. It’s also kind of gray because they can use water left over from fracking to water the plants, and from oil production. So, it’s slippery, the technical term “organic”, and it varies by state. For me, organic means you’re not putting roundup on it, and you’re not using artificial fertilizer. That’s also an interesting thing for your readers to know is for products, there’s not really an organic seal for end products. Like, that’s not what the organic certification was made to do. It was made to be used on produce.

So, it’s tricky owning a products company. If I want to get my products labeled organic that’s like a seal of organic, all of the organic certifications I know about, and if somebody knows of a different one, please let me know, they’re made for food. They’re not made for cosmetics. So, it’s a gray area, but it’s better than going with just the normal chemical-filled stuff.

So, when people are buying their toothpaste, their shampoos, their moisturizers, more or less, over-the-counter. If it’s over-the-counter at the local Walgreens, or over-the-counter in Nordstrom, or wherever else there’s a bazillion type cosmetic products, how many of those are natural products, and what percentage do you think are mostly artificial, have gone through a lot of chemical process one way or another?

I think it’s getting better. I definitely have seen some natural companies getting into those mainstream stores, but the mainstream example of natural, probably 5 to 10 percent. My level of natural, none. But, the fact that there’s 5 to 10 percent, it’s better than there used to be. So, I have a lot of hope for the future. I think natural is very trendy right now.

Yeah, I agree with you. I’m glad you said that, because I think that can be a big a-ha, like really for the highest standards. Your standards, you’re not going to find them in your local pharmacy, or your grocery store, or over in any sort of department store. It’s just they’re not there.

Yeah, it’s even hard to find them at Whole Foods. There’s only a couple brands at Whole Foods that I really get excited about.

Again, important to know, because even sometimes we associate, let’s say, a store like that that they’re going to have all-natural products, and it’s not the case. Like on food, people are getting better at reading the labels, but we need to be equally diligent about reading the labels on all products, especially these cosmetic products. Would you agree?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think if you’re going from getting your cosmetics at Nordstrom’s to getting your cosmetics at Whole Foods, good step. You’re doing a great job. I don’t want to discourage people to think that it’s insurmountable. But, if you’re the kind of person who’s done that step and you want to get better, make sure you read the labels everywhere, because even at your most natural awesome little hippie store, every once in a while, there’s something in there that I’m like, “You guys probably shouldn’t carry this. You should let them know to use something else because castor oil is actually really toxic to the people who make it.” “I didn’t know.” I’m like, “Yeah, of course you don’t know because you’re not an ingredients nerd. That’s my job. My job is to research these things.”

Yeah, that’s really awesome. On the marketing front again, a lot of these products, let’s say high-end products that you would find at your Nordstrom, the marketing’s great: anti-aging, stem cell this, this percentage results in so many days, to fine-line reduction, or whatever. I know, before I got sick and before I really got into looking at every ingredient and being very diligent about what’s in every product I use, that’s where I shopped. I went to Nordstrom and bought the stuff that I thought was going to take years off my face and the rest of my body. So, it’s something to be aware of that a lot of this is really just good marketing, right?

Yeah, I mean, most of the ingredients in those products are just fillers. They’re oils and they’re moisturizers, but not special moisturizers, and they’ll have a couple ingredients in there that are like active ingredients, and they might work, and they could take away wrinkles, but at what cost?

Yeah, exactly. At what cost? So, what happens to most products? I mean, you’re producing these products, so there’s some sort of production cycle, and you alluded to it a little bit, but there’s the ingredients, but there’s actually the processing as well. So, what happens mostly, the majority of the time with most of these companies? What are a lot of these typical ingredients that could be toxic, these major ingredients, and then what sort of processing or processing stages are they typically going through before it ends up in an end product?

You mean more for like conventional products or for –?

Uh-huh, for conventional products.

Oh, conventional products. Well, most of the ingredients are ordered from a supplier already processed. It really depends on what products you’re looking. So, for some of the products like, let’s say, glycerin, glycerin, I think most people think glycerin’s pretty natural, and it can be. But, most glycerin is a byproduct of soy production. So, glycerin is a sugar that comes from, usually, GMO soy or corn. It can come from any plant, but we have a lot of the soy and corn.

So, after they process the soy and corn to be a different product, the leftover plant material is usually put through a chemical process that extracts the sugars out of it, and those sugars are then purified, and I don’t think anyone really, besides the people who do this, know what “purified” means. They don’t tell you a lot of the process because it’s proprietary. This is a big secret that companies can use to not tell you what they’re doing. It’s a proprietary process. It goes through this process for purification. They heat it, they cool it, they heat it, they cool it, and it comes out this nice, slippery liquid that doesn’t freeze and it’s always the same texture, and it’s, naturally, a little sweet.

So, that’s really useful if you’re trying to make a product with a nice, silky texture that’s moisturizing, and especially if you want it to taste sweet without having sugar in it. So, that is a product that is massively, massively processed, but it comes from a natural plant. Now, you can make glycerin from flax or from coconut, and I’m talking to a producer who’s trying to make this viable right now. I’m really excited about it, and you can process it by just using natural grape alcohol, and pressure, and heating cool, and get the same end product.

Now, it’s going to be more expensive just because the process is more expensive. Grape alcohol is really expensive, especially the stuff they use is bio-dynamic and organic. Crazy expensive. But, you end up with an end product that does all these great things. It’s still slippery, it’s still a little sweet, but without all the proprietary process that who knows what they’re putting in it.

So, you’ll get a lot of things that can go either way. They can be natural or hyper-processed, and the hyper-processed ones are always more affordable and they go into the mainstream products because to have a huge company like that, you have to have such a margin on everything, and you have to pay for all the employees, you have to pay for all the marketing, all the taxes, all the shipping, all the logistics, and this is why big companies, and all companies, really, but especially huge companies, they go towards these cheaper ingredients, I think, mostly because they have to to have those profits. Otherwise, a little jar of cream is going to be thousands of dollars. There’s just a lot of people along the way you have to take care of. So, it’s very complicated, but we can choose brands that will charge a little more, but you get better end product.

You’ve mentioned soy, corn a lot, most of these are GMO products, and they’re fillers. So, when you say they put so many fillers in their products and a lot of these fillers are a byproduct of leftover GMO soy, corn, and other ingredients, talk about fillers and why these are so bad.

Well, fillers are usually minimally active or inactive ingredients. So, they’re not doing too much for you. They’re creating volume. Usually, they have a moisturizing effect, so that’s doing something for you. But, the active ingredients are very minimal. So, you might be buying a bottle of lotion this big for $10, but the active ingredients is only 10% versus if you get a serum that’s like $50, but 90% of it’s active ingredients, and they use a little 10%, because otherwise it would be too strong.

This is part of marketing is the bigger a product is, the more perceived value it has, and a lot of companies — I mean, all companies know this, but they’ll add fillers to the product to make it look bigger so they can justify the price. Now, if you should be charging $50 for this little bottle of only active ingredients, people are going to think that’s really expensive. But, if you add a bunch of filler in your bottles this big now and it’s $50, people feel like, “Okay, it’s worth $50 because it’s bigger.” When, really, it’s the same amount of active ingredient. So, it’s really all about the ingredients when you’re evaluating products. It’s not so much how big it is or how much you’re getting. You want to read what’s in this, what’s actually going to affect my skin.

How would one ascertain that if they’re looking at a label or a product? How would they determine is this all active ingredients, is this mostly filler? Is there any way to deduce that?

I would say, without doing a lot of education, it is a little difficult. But, in general, in natural products, you want to look for essential oils that are always very active. Now, essential oils can’t be the whole thing because they are too strong. They are like the lemon versus the giant orange. You don’t want to just bite into a lemon. You want to dilute it with a little sweetness.

So, having a lot of essential oils is good. Having what I call the superstar oils that you’ve probably heard of, like coconut oil, argan oil, sea buckthorn, these kind of rock stars that come in and out of vogue, they’re awesome to have in products. Fillers, common fillers you’ll run into are soy oils. They don’t really do much. They’re usually from some sort of GMO crop unless they note otherwise. They’re cheap.

Having a lot of water. Water is useful is moisturizing, but if most of the ingredient is water, you don’t need all that water. That’s just making that bottle bigger. Having a lot of glycerin. So, glycerin is an effective product. It is moisturizing. But, if the whole bottle is glycerin, you’re just buying glycerin. You just buy some glycerin. That’s a big filler they’ll put in.

Usually, if the product is really watery, like really watery, and it’s not aloe, it’s mostly filler. Now, if a product is super solid and creamy, it’s not going to be as moisturizing. So, you want a little bit of movement in there if you’re looking for moisture. But, in general, you’re looking for those heavy-hitter superstar products to be the majority in the ingredients.

So, the fillers, obviously, like you said, you think it’s expensive to spend $50 on this small little bottle, but you’ll pay the same amount for the larger bottle thinking you’re getting $50’s worth. So, a lot of the fillers is just perception of value. But, are these fillers also dangerous? Are they toxic also? Is there a health impact?

In natural products, they tend not to really be. So, if you’re buying a product that’s mostly glycerin, it’s not going to kill you. But, if you’re buying a conventional product and they’re using polyethylene or some kind of weird SLS. They’re adding extra of it. They’re using a lot of buffers, like you’ll see any ingredients have something that says, after it, “pH balancer”. That means the product itself is too acidic or too alkaline to be used for a human.

So, they add this product to make it pH balance so it won’t burn you. That always gives me a little bit of a red flag because why not just make the product pH-friendly in the first place? Like, what is this crazy ingredient that you’re using that you have to then neutralize. And if you neutralize it, is it still effective? A lot of products, their acidity or alkalinity is why they’re effective. It’s like if you do a citrus peel, the whole reason why a citrus peel works is because it’s acidic. So, it’s really just about giving yourself a little bit of education in what you’re putting on your body.

In more conventional products, again, I think a lot of people listening might be thinking that they’re going to Nordstrom, they’re paying a lot of money for these high-end products, and so they must be good. They must be good for you, they must be healthy, they must be effective. Do you have, maybe, like a top 5 list or something of ingredients to stay away from, to really look into some of these products to see if they’re in there?

Yeah, I think there’s like the general hit list, parabens people are very unsure whether or not those are okay for humans to use. SLS, sodium lauryl sulfate, is very irritating. It makes things sudsy is why they use it. Sudsiness, actually, is a cosmetic thing. It doesn’t actually clean any better than not having suds, but it mentally tricks us into thinking it’s working. That’s a little tip.

I won’t use anything that has any sort of hexane extraction. Hexane extraction is an industrial way to get oils out of plants. I don’t use anything with soy in it. I just personally think that soy is a very hard one to get not GMO. It’s a huge monocrop that is very bad for the environment. Like, they plow forests down to grow this stuff. I’m so far out of the normal products that I don’t even think about this anymore. This is a good exercise.

Anything that is related to plastic. You would be amazed when you start looking in these conventional products how many of the ingredients are plastic. Like, Colgate toothpaste and some of these bigger brands, they actually put plastic in the paste. So, I would say that’s a filler. That’s probably not doing anything for you except for making more volume.

It’s funny. When I found that out, my partner, his family owns plumbing companies, and we were looking at the ingredients in these toothpastes, actually, during Paleo f(x) two years ago, and he goes, “This is a plastic tube.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a plastic tube. It’s toothpaste. It comes in a plastic tube.” He’s like, “No, no, no. The ingredient. That’s what they make plastic water tubes out of, like all the water pipes at Home Depot. It’s in the paste,” and it just blew my mind. I was like, “Plastic as an ingredient? That’s a whole ‘nother thing.” That’s microscopic plastic that you’re spitting into the water supply. That’s not even just affecting you. That’s affecting every creature that uses water.

But, it wouldn’t say plastic in the ingredients. These are all mystery words, basically.

Polyethyl blah-blah-blah. It’s crazy. If you Google “cosmetic ingredients banned in Europe, but allowed in the United States”, that’s a pretty good place to start.

Oh, that’s good. That’s a great tip. Well, let’s talk a little bit now about oral health, and I think that’s where you started with some of your products and have since expanded. Oral health is very close to me. 1, my mouth has always been my nemesis since the beginning of time. Even young age, young adulthood, whatever, I’ve always been healthy prior to going down in 2013, getting very sick, but I’ve always had mouth problems, and a lot of it is just because of the conventional wisdom and all that stuff I was doing.

But, this is where my illness really started was everything in my mouth: tons of root canals, cavities, gum disease, surgeries, everything. My entire life, outside of the sick part, but the rest of me, I never went through a doctor. Everything was in my mouth. Then, that’s part of the domino effect of what took me down was mercury poisoning after getting my amalgams taken out. Now, I go to a bio-dentist, and I learned so much, and that got me even into oral products, which took a while, because I was into clean products, household products, body products, and clean food, and all that. But still, even though this was my nemesis, my mouth, I still wasn’t connecting oral health to the products.

That came even later. After I got tinnitus, this final thing that had happened to me after some stuff, that got me very interested. Of course, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, of course, the toothpaste and the products we put in the mouth are mouth bacteria.” Our oral health is very connected to the rest of the health, but nobody’s talking about it. I was unaware, and I was really getting into all these natural products.

So, that was another thing, and it’s been hard I was looking for once I realized this. I was making some of my own toothpaste at home and things, but I’m not like you. I’m not good at making things, so everything would be horrible, but it was the only thing I could find. Really, there was a couple pastes out there I finally found, but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon your product that I really fell in love with toothpaste again, because it is so good, and all your products are.

Talk about toothpaste. Most, I think, when we’re looking at the Colgates of the world, or whatever, we’re putting toxins in our mouth, and we don’t even realize it. You just pick up your Colgate, or your Crest, or whatever at the Walgreen’s and do brushing, and we’ve been using this product since we could brush our teeth, whatever age our teeth come in. So, give a little education on toothpaste and oral health.

Yeah, toothpaste is really crazy when you start looking at the ingredients. I think we are all, especially women, we’re already tuned into our skincare, what are we putting onto our skin, and your skin absorbs things, and you shouldn’t put toxins on our skin. The same people will brush their teeth with a paste twice a day that you definitely swallow some of it – even if you spit it all out, it’s still coating your mouth – that has like these nuclear bomb antibacterial agents in it that should be a prescription, they’re so strong.

So, normal toothpastes, they have about three things that I’m concerned about. They are overkill on the antibacterial. They use antibacterial agents that just nuke all bacteria, and as you know, and your listeners probably know, not all bacteria is bad. Some bacteria, you have to have or you’ll die. It’s like all the nice bacteria in your gut that help you digest food, you have the same thing, it starts in your mouth.

Because, what people don’t realize is your gut is one long tube that goes through your whole body. It doesn’t stop and there’s a clean break and it’s a new system. There’s valves that open and close, but it’s one system. The bacteria starts in your mouth, your bacteria helps you break down the food, it helps get nutrients out, it helps tell your body, “Oh, she’s eating an apple,” and then it goes down your system.

So, when you’re using these toothpastes that just kill bacteria, you’re killing those guys too. It’s like bombing the battlefield with both sides in one place. So, you got to watch out for those in the mainstream toothpaste. They have weird filler ingredients, like this plastic I was telling you about, and then they have strange active ingredients they’ll use: sorbitols, and they’ll use aspartames, and all these xylitol from GMO corn, because not all xylitol’s from birch. Everyone wishes it was.

So, you’re basically taking this cocktail of chemicals, coating your teeth with them, swallowing some of it twice a day, and that stuff you’re swallowing is going — all those antibacterial agents that kill plaque, because they do kill plaque, you’re swallowing it, and it’s going through your bacterial system of your digestive system. So, you’re killing all of the bacteria through your digestive tract too, and nobody’s really putting these two things together yet.

I have a lot of friends that are into digestive health, and it just struck me one day, I was like, “People are swallowing toothpaste. No wonder their gut biome is messed up. It’s basically the nuclear bomb down your gut.” Here’s another thing to be considered. When they put all these fillers, they tell you to use like an inch of toothpaste. My product uses a pea-size, because I don’t have any fillers. So, you’re buying this giant tube where only half of it is active ingredient, and then you’re throwing away this giant tube, and it only lasts you a month because you have to use so much. So, in the grand scheme of the Earth, we’re taking care of it all. You’re not only affecting yourself. You’re affecting the planet by making more trash.

Toothpaste, everybody uses it. It’s such a way to help save ourselves and the planet by making better choices for it. So, that’s my big toothpaste rant.

I love it. Then, on top of the toothpaste, many people are using Listerine. Mouthwash, just another blast of antibacterial killing everything and swallowing some of that as well. I’m guessing it has many harmful ingredients as well in many of these mouthwashes.

Yeah, well it’s straight alcohol. So, you’re coating your mouth with alcohol, killing all the bacteria. It’s also very drying. So, a lot of people have dry throats, dry gums, they have problem making saliva. Alcohol, we all know, evaporates things, and alcohol’s really tough on your skin. I don’t know if, when you were in college, you every accidentally laughed beer into your nose, and it hurts, right? It’s very strong.

So, you’re putting this straight alcohol onto your gums, which are a very sensitive piece of your skin. People don’t realize this that your mouth is skin also. It’s not this other thing. Gums are gums, but they’re skin. It’s skin cells. So, you have to think about it like you would your face. Like, you wouldn’t just splash your face with alcohol. No one does that. You’d be like, “Oh no, it will dry my skin out.” Exactly! So, you have to think about our body is this one whole organism, and you have to treat the whole thing like you would your favorite parts, your face.

Why is this so important? Well, your mouth being the beginning of your digestive system, your digestive system being your health system, it’s the gateway. You always want the gate to the city to be beautiful and well-defended. What people don’t realize is your teeth are the only bones that are both inside and outside of your body at the same time. Teeth are bones, and look at the rest of your body. My bones aren’t sticking out anywhere except for here. So, your teeth are a gateway, literally, into your blood system.

So, when you get tooth infections, or root canals, or dental work done, it’s the one of the very few ways that those bacterias can get directly into your blood without going through the filter system of your digestive tract. So, oral health is very important. This is why you’ll see, if you Google “history of oral health”, people used to die from tooth infections quite regularly, because it goes right into your blood. So, it’s very important to take care of your mouth.

Yeah, no kidding. I think a lot of people are concerned if they’re not mouthwashing, for example, they’ll have bad breath and these different things. What do you have to say about that?

Use a tongue scraper. Tongue scrapers are really cool. They’re these little metal horseshoe-looking things. You place them in the back of your tongue, put a little pressure down, and you pull forward, and it scrapes all that gunk off your tongue. I call it sweater tongue. It takes the sweater off your tongue. You just rinse it off. You can do it three or four times. After you do that regularly, you’ll find that your breath is just fresher.

Because, the smell is usually coming from your tongue and between your teeth. So, when you’re getting rid of those little stinky bacterias on your tongue, it freshens your breath as a whole, and then flossing helps, too, get all that stuff that’s between your teeth out. You’ll find that you don’t have to use those mouthwashes quite as much, and if you’re still really self-conscious, get yourself a natural breath spray, so that way, when you’re going to actually talk to somebody, you can give yourself a little “ah-ah” and be ready to go. You don’t have to nuclear bomb your mouth all the time when you’re just going to go to work and sit in your cubicle and not talk to anyone anyways.

That’s so great. It is like a nuclear bomb that we don’t realize. I did an interview with the Mother Dirt people, and they’re into good probiotic healthy bacteria, and it was a great educational conversation, because I think we associate that we should be killing all bacteria, and all this antibiotics, and antiseptics, and everything in our mouth, and our skin, in our household, everything, and we’re just killing our poor bacteria, the good bacteria, and that’s why we’re so out-of-balance. But, you make a great point. It starts here. Like, we don’t want to kill the good guys in our mouth. They have a job to do.

Yeah, they’re the watchers on the wall waiting, they’re like, “Ah, so the bad’s coming. We got to stop it now.”

What about fluoride? We’ve been taught and convinced fluoride’s good, and you want fluoride in our water, in our toothpaste, and it prevents tooth decay.

I have a different opinion on fluoride than most people in the natural products industry, I think. I think fluoride is like Western medicine. If you break your leg, you want to go to the doctor and get a cast versus Eastern medicine. If you’re feeling a little funky and off-balanced, you can take some herbs and they’ll get you on balance. So, if something disastrous happens, Western medicine is great, and it’s very useful. We’ve all had to use it in our lives. If something is a little off, Eastern medicine is great. You can just tweak a little thing here, you tweak a little thing there. You’re back on balance. You didn’t have to like totally reboot your system.

I feel like fluoride’s the same way, because fluoride does make your teeth harder, but hard is not necessarily what you want. Because, growing up in California, I learned the way that you prevent a tall building from falling over in an earthquake is not that it’s stiff. It’s that it moves, right? So, you want to have a little bit of flexibility for the whole structure to maintain one piece, maintain strength. But, if you’ve had a horrible diet your whole life, you’ve had diabetes, just your system is falling apart, and your teeth are crumbling, fluoride can be helpful, because it can help stop your teeth from crumbling. It’s the Western medicine. It stops the disaster from happening.

Now, most of us are not in such dire straits. Most of us are pretty healthy, most of us are really healthy. We don’t need that. That’s like using the nuclear bomb on the ant hill. The ant hill just needs a little sprinkle of the right herbs to maintain balance and not get overblown. So, why are we putting a poison into our system just to fix a tiny, little problem, because fluoride is poisonous to the system, and the fluoride that they use in most products is a byproduct of industrial process. It’s not natural fluoride.

So, this is another thing is there’s fluoride that occurs in rocks, and dirt, and soil, and it’s everywhere. So, you’ll see natural clay has fluoride in it, very small amounts, because it’s part of the rock. But then, there’s another type of fluoride that’s created through industrial process, and it’s a byproduct of that process. It’s trash. But, these companies want to figure out a way to make money, so they sell the fluoride to be put in the water, and to be put in products, and it makes our teeth stronger, and it’s not natural. It’s really toxic. So, unless you absolutely need it, you shouldn’t use it.

That’s great, thank you. And what about there’s a lot like in toothpaste and the labeling, “teeth whiteners”. We all want white teeth. Who wants these coffee-stained teeth? They even go to your conventional dentist and they do teeth whitening.

Well, teeth whitening, we all want white teeth. So, it’s just a matter of finding ways that cause the least amount of damage to get your teeth white, because any amount of teeth whitening is causing slight damage to your teeth, because you’re abrading the front of your tooth, or you’re putting it through a chemical process that lightens the enamel of your teeth.

Activated charcoal is a great way to go for natural tooth whitening. You can use a little lemon juice, but you want to be careful because lemon’s very acidic, and it starts to eat away at the enamel of your teeth. So, just very, very tiny bit. Dilute it a lot. Some of the processes you go through at the dentist, they use hydrogen peroxide, which is really effective, but it’s very hard on your gums. So, that’s like you don’t want to do it very often. The tooth whiteners in toothpaste, there’s millions of them and they vary on what they are.

In my opinion, again, it’s Western medicine. You don’t want to be whitening your teeth every day, because it’s hard on your teeth. You want to whiten as necessary. You don’t need to have the supermodel gleaming photoshopped white teeth. It’s not natural. Your teeth are going to be a little bit of a shade of off white, because they’re bones. Bones aren’t pure white unless they’re bleached by the sun for years, and years, and years. Bones are eggshell, like eggs. It’s calcium.

So, if you have a naturally white smile, and it’s a beautiful ivory, that’s beautiful. It’s great. That’s how you’re supposed to be. That’s how you’re designed. If you’re smoking your whole life, and drinking coffee, and you just quit, and you’re like embarrassed, go for the most natural teeth whitening you can once. Get your results you want and then maintain it. You don’t need to be doing it every day.

That’s great advice. This isn’t well-known, but I think it is a little bit in the more natural circles, but talk about oil pulling. What is it and why would people want to do it?

Oil pulling is really cool. So, part of Ayurvedic health practices, which is from India, it’s kind of their version of Chinese medicine. Some people are going to probably get upset that I said that, but I think people know Chinese medicine more than Ayurvedic right now. One of the biggest practices that they say you should do, that everyone should do is oil pulling. So, what oil pulling is, traditionally, you take sesame oil, or ghee, which is clarified butter, put it in your mouth, and you either hold it, or you swish it around for up to 20 minutes.

What they say it does is all kinds of magical things. It balances doshas, it extracts bacteria, it takes impurities out, it helps your voice. There’s one really fun one that I really like. It helps with your attitude, and it’s good for your gums and your tongue. I actually can see how all of this is true. Like removes like. So, if you’re using an oil in your mouth, most of the plaques in your mouth are fat-based. So, when you’re agitating oil through your mouth, you’re removing fat-based things. So, you’re taking plaque off your teeth and bacteria. Oil is also anaerobic. There’s no oxygen in it. So, if you have any oxygen-loving bacterias in your mouth, it kills them.

The act of swishing uses all these muscles in your face that we really don’t use very much. We’re all sitting in front of the computer not making faces all day. So, it does help the muscles in your throat which can affect your voice. It gives you like a mini face lift, which is an awesome bonus people don’t really talk about. All these little back muscles here get strong. And it’s an oil going over skin, so you’re moisturizing. I love oil pulling. I think it’s one of the greatest things you can do, especially if people don’t really like to floss. It’s one of the few things that will get between your teeth. Because, if you’re doing it for 10 minutes, it’s really getting in there. No one swishes their mouthwash for 10 minutes.

Then, with our product, I wanted to optimize it. So, we added essential oils, a little bit of hexane-free stevia, and what the essential oils do is they help aid with killing the bad bacteria, helping sooth any cuts you have in your mouth when you have canker sores or any sort of thing like that, sore throat. It tastes really good. We made it taste really good. Our oil blend, I wanted to make an oil blend that was really pleasurable to use. A lot of people use straight coconut oil, and what happens is after you swish coconut oil for a couple minutes, it’s foamy, it’s yucky. I have a high tolerance for doing really weird things, and I couldn’t even do coconut oil pulling for five minutes. I was like, “This is disgusting.”

So, we did a blend of different oils that it doesn’t get foamy, it’s nice and liquid the whole time, and it tastes great.

It does, because I actually have to brag about your product because I’ve tried oil pulling for those reasons you just specified for my own oral health, obviously, since my mouth has been my nemesis. But, I couldn’t do the coconut oil pulling, like I just couldn’t make myself do it. So, I already thought, “That’s just not for me. I can’t do it,” and then when I came to your store, your booth, there was an oil pulling product, and I think one of your people had said, “Oh, you should try this.” I’m like, “Oh god, no. I can’t do it. I don’t like it.” He’s like, “No, really, give it a try,” and I did and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, it’s delicious, really.” I mean, it’s not distasteful at all. It was quite pleasurable, and it actually was even enjoyable, really, because the flavors were nice, you can really taste the essential oils, and I’m swishing and swishing. I mean, you did an incredible job with that product.

Thank you, thank you.

Yeah, and it is, I think, such a healthy practice, but we just aren’t going to do things that taste like crap or that are nasty.

No. Pleasure is a big motivator. So, I always try to make my products pleasurable to use, because then people want to do it. It’s a treat.

Well, you’ve done an incredible job at that. I use your toothpaste. This is the tube, the paste. I actually love the powder, so I use mostly the powder every day, and then I carry the paste for travel and running around different places or whatever. I don’t carry my jar of powder. But, I use your products, my entire family uses your products, and I just want to compliment you, well done. To be able to trust a product and they’re amazing, delicious, and my kids, my teenage kids love them, and it’s hard — when you can please the teenagers, you know you’re doing something right.

The great thing is, too, now, even with the kids getting used to some of these products, they’re so used to these products because that’s what we use, and that’s what I send them, and if they try regular products now, like the toothpaste like a Colgate, they can’t even do it. So, now that’s tough. These were hard to get used to for them at first, like, “Oh my god, mother, I’m not so sure,” but now they go back to those more conventional products and they’re like, “Oh my god, they’re disgusting.”

So, when you get used to natural, you can go back and realize how nasty that other stuff is. Like I said, it takes a while. It’s very different to get used to. Not that long, but a little bit. But, you’ll know that you’ll never go back to those conventional products again, because you do realize the difference, and your body knows the difference.

Oh yeah, I love my little thing I always tell my friends who are doing healthy food, and they’ll have a little like slip or something and like, “Go drink a Dr. Pepper and you’ll be reminded why you’re doing what you’re doing.” Because, once you do anything natural for six months and you go back to your old ways, you have new eyes and you just see how bad it is for you. You can taste how weird it is. It’s like your system is just like, “What is this? This isn’t food. This isn’t — no, what is this?”

I think it’s the same with cosmetics and personal care products. You put that in your mouth and the flavor, you can taste the chemicals. This is dangerous. This tastes dangerous. What am I doing?

Yeah, it’s even with our animals, they’ll spit stuff out that doesn’t taste right, or whatever. Same thing, when you go back to these, and when you’re used to the natural products, it’s like, “Ugh, oh my god, what is that? Get that out of my mouth.”

Yeah, it’s funny.

Well, my entire family uses your toothpaste, your tooth powder, your oil pulling, your breath spray. What else do you have on there?

We have lip balms. Do you have a lip balm?

I don’t have a lip balm.

Oh, I need to send you a lip balm.

Yeah, I don’t have a lip balm. I don’t have any of your skin stuff. I think you’re now expanded in some of that. I just have the oral care, and I have your tongue scraper. I love the tongue scraper. That’s another thing. At first I was like, “Oh, this is kind of disgusting.” But now, if I don’t use it on a day, I’m like, “Oh now, that’s disgusting.”

It’s funny. The tongue scraper, that’s what I give people as gifts, because it’s kind of like the one you would expect the least to make such difference, and then once you do it, you’re like, “How did I live without doing this?” It’s the best. I love seeing people be like, “The tongue scraper changed my life.”

Yeah, it really does, exactly. The other ones I’ve seen were like plastic and weird, and I didn’t right get them. Yours is what? Made of copper or something? It’s just a great little thing. It’s well-made, and it looks nice, and it does the job, and I don’t know. It feels like this is something I should be doing every day.

Thank you. My goal for the company is we have to brush our teeth and take care of ourselves twice a day, and my whole life, it’s been such a routine, like, “Okay, I’m going to brush my teeth, I’m going to floss, and I have to do it.” But, I had this realization that we have all these tiny opportunities in our day to feel better and to love ourselves, and we have to brush our teeth twice a day.

So, how can I make products that change that from a routine into a ritual of self-care where you get to really feel good about what you’re doing, and to enjoy it, and to be like, “Ah, I have the best breath, and this is going to make me sexier, and more confident! I’m going to rock today because I used this cool toothpaste, and I feel good right now. It looks good on my shelf, and I’m proud of my bathroom,” and it starts with that little thing and it just expands through your whole life. So, I’m really happy to hear that your family is enjoying it so much in all those little points that I’m trying to hit my mind are communicating.

Yeah, they so are, and that’s why I really wanted to have you on my podcast to introduce you to all of my listeners, and I’m full endorsement of your products, everything you’re doing. What I love about all your work too, you’re just this fun entrepreneur, an artist, you’re having fun, and you’re doing great things. But, I love how you’re also connected. I mean, you want your products to be natural, good, healthy, but you’re also looking at the bigger picture too. How do these things affect our environment and how are we all connected? So, your mission through these products really is how do we make the world a better place?

One tube of toothpaste at a time.

Exactly. In all the businesses that I have, the entrepreneurs, and businesses, and products that I have on this show, the only ones that I interview and talk to, almost everyone on this show are people that are products and businesses I actually use and work with. I love featuring them because I’m so passionate about these amazing products and producers, and entrepreneurs, and owners, the creators of these amazing products, and all of them are what I call conscious business. It’s like there’s a consciousness to this.

I’m a money person. I teach money. I teach people how to build their financial wealth. But, part of those I teach, your body is your number one asset, so that’s why I’m so passionate about the health piece after being very sick. But, as a money person, I’m all about profit. I mean, we can’t do these great things if we can’t create a profit.

But, conscious business means it’s about impact. It’s about making the world a better place where our work is our life’s work, our life’s work is this contribution, and the profit is the exchange for that, but the profit or the money isn’t the focus. And I’m a money person saying this. It’s not the profit, actually. We have to be profitable, but how do we do this consciously? How do we make profit and be good business with a conscious by making our work and our contribution that everyone’s better off.

I have a lot of pride in being able to interview and introduce my listeners to conscious business owners like you, and you’re just starting with this. I’m looking forward to seeing where you go.

Yeah, I’m really excited because the business has just turned the corner where now I’m not so much working on the day-to-day and making sure things are running. Now, I’m starting to be able to step back and look in the big picture and say, “Okay, we have great products, great packaging, we’re thinking about everything that we’re doing. What can I do that’s a value add to add to the ethos of the company? How can I make content or put an insert in the box or do something that’s going to affect the customer’s soul, not just their body?” We got the body part down.

What I realized was I really care about the Earth, and the Earth as a whole. We’re all part of this creature that we live on. We’re little cells that we’re like the gardeners of Earth, and how can I help impact, positively, this planet, and it used to be such an overwhelming thought. Like, how do I educate people, what do I do? How do I know I’m right? What makes me think I know everything, and I had this insight because of my Jambo products, which we can talk about some other time. I had this insight that if the individual human doesn’t feel good about themselves, they don’t care about anything around them.

You have to care about everything around you in order to want it to be a nice place, to want the Earth to be a nice place. I lived for five years next to Skid Row in Downtown L.A. Those poor people, they don’t care about the Earth. They’re living on the street, they don’t have shoes, they have horrible health problems. They just can’t even be bothered by thinking about anything else. So, how do we affect the individual to love themselves and to see that they’re this beautiful little creature on this big planet to be able to have a larger view?

It seems so silly to think that these toothpastes are going to do it, but I realize that if I can imbue these tiny little drops of self-love into something you’re doing twice a day, twice a day, you’re feeling good about yourself, which is a lot more than not having those things. So, now this year, I’m excited to work on different ways I can help people see how using these natural products that are fun, and sexy, and add to their lives add to their self-confidence and their self-love.

We’re coming up with some blog content about taking your routine into a ritual, like what you can do while you’re brushing your teeth, what mental exercises you can do that will create more self-love and more confidence.

That’s so awesome. That’s really, really cool.

I’m really excited about it.

Yeah, I love that. Oh, that’s so good. Alright, we’re approaching the end of our time together. There’s a couple more questions I’d love to ask you, and obviously, you’re very holistic, natural, connected to the universe, the planet, humanity, betterment, and you’re a business person, and many times, people think of those as mutually exclusive things. That’s why we like saying conscious business actually brings these two pieces together. What is your philosophy on business and money?

Business and money, it’s interesting because I did not come from a business background. My parents were both pretty normal. My dad was a carpenter, my mom ran an OBGYN office. Great people, but not business people. I’ve learned everything I know about business from my partner, Joe, whose family are business people. I’ve been very fortunate because he’s very philosophical, very into Zen Buddhism, has a very unique view of things.

So, I’ve taken my background from not being in business and his very beautiful fortunate conscious business background, and I understand that everything is energy. Money is energy, business is energy. It’s all just a way that we focus human attention, and human attention is the most powerful energy on the planet. Whatever you put your attention on, it changes. And what a business is, is it’s a conglomeration of human attention. You’re getting multiple people to focus on one thing, and that’s how you get big things done. Like, a government is a conglomeration of human attention. A non-profit is a conglomeration of human attention, a club, a sports team.

Business is a way to organize humans to achieve something. You can achieve anything good or bad, and so if we can use the business to achieve something really good using consumerism, which is the model of the universe we’re in right now, we have huge outcomes rather than fighting a system, and it took me a long time to realize that business and money are not inherently bad. It’s how you use them, and that’s everything in the universe. Nothing is really super inherently bad. It’s how you use it.

So, you can use money as a tool to achieve great things really quickly. Money is a shortcut to physical effort. If I have a lot of money, I can hire a graphic designer to just focus on graphic design rather than me doing graphic design, and podcasts, and cleaning the bathroom, and getting new packaging, and doing all these things. So, money is a conduit to creating more energy, and money is also a conduit to having a nice vacation, and relaxing, and recharging yourself. That’s not bad either.

It’s just what is the larger picture you’re going for? Is it towards your personal greatest good, and as many people as you can affect? So, that’s kind of my business philosophy is.

I love that, and I totally agree with you. I teach money as energy, and health as an energy. Like, where energy is cellular health, and money, it continues the flow out there. So, I love that answer. Alright, one final question I ask all of my guests, and Wealthy Wellthy podcasts just does a little bit of myth busting. Well, we do a lot of myth busting, but other than what we’ve maybe talked about already, is there really a myth out there that you bump up against all the time where you just hear people say it, or believe it, or organize their life around it, and you just want to scream from the mountaintop, “That’s not true! Let me bust that and tell you what the truth is!” Is there anything that drives you a little crazy, like a belief out there that you just want to bust?

Yeah, I think helplessness drives me a little crazy, because I’ve felt helpless in my life. When my dad was dying of cancer over five years, I was a teenager, and it was really difficult because my dad was like the caretaker: very masculine, made sure everything was okay. And all of a sudden, I was the most masculine one in the family, because my mom is this beautiful caretaker, very feminine woman, and I love her. She’s taught me so many things.

But, I didn’t know how to do anything. I was so young, and I felt so helpless. So, for like eight years, I was just flailing in this, “How do I adult?” I don’t even know. It’s just like so crazy. I fell into the hole a victim. My dad died, my life is hard, we don’t have any money now. Everything’s different. We don’t have health insurance. I think that is an important thing to go through because you learn a lot. I’m very grateful for that part of my life, but it took me a long time to realize that I still had power, and I still could create actions, however small they were, for myself, that would make my life better. I can get up and go for a walk. I can get up and go to the gym. I can eat good food.

Those little teeny tiny building blocks have such an effect on your bigger picture over time that whenever people are feeling helpless around me, I just want to be like, “Just go dance, go do something, just move your body. This helplessness feeling is temporary. Don’t let it own you. Don’t let it own you,” because if helplessness owns you, then you’re screwed. Helplessness is just a momentary reaction to something that’s happened to you. It’s not a real thing. It’s just a phase. So, when people are falling into being a slave to helplessness, I just want to be like, “Don’t give up. Just don’t give up.”

That’s so awesome. You are remarkable, Shannon. Thank you so much. You speak from your heart. You have, like I said, just so much love, and self-love, and love of the planet, the Earth, and your environment, the people around you, and your work is magical, and it’s going to make so many people healthier and happier. So, thank you very much for your time today.

Thank you for talking with me. This is a really fun talk. Thank you. You’re a very good conversationalist.

Thank you. Well, you are too, so thank you. Alright, well I look forward to our next encounter.

Yeah, me too.

And so ends another episode of the Wealthy Wellthy Life. This was one more millionaire strategy that will make you wealthy while keeping you healthy. Before you leave, remember that if you want to get it all together, then make sure to sign up for a free online training session at howto.money. You will learn my signature formula for transforming your life from debt to multi-millionaire. It’s already helped thousands of others, and it can help you too, and it’s the only moneymaking system that makes your health your number one asset. So, if you’re curious how it all works, visit howto.money and sign up today. Remember, it’s free, so why not invest some time in learning “how to money”. Again, that’s howto.money. H-O-W-T-O dot M-O-N-E-Y. As always, be sure to subscribe to this podcast to make sure that you catch next week’s millionaire strategy. Signing off, this is Krisstina Wise, your personal guide to having it all. Here’s to living a Wealthy Wellthy Life. I’ll see you next time.