Episode 29: Mineral Balance, Nature’s Optimal Foods, and More Q&A with Morley Robbins
After our previous episode with the one and only Morley Robbins on the hot topic of iron, we knew we had to bring him back on the podcast to answer some of your questions! In this episode, we dive into how you can increase your intake of copper and retinol both through food and supplementation. Morley also sheds light on the far-reaching impacts of mineral imbalance on things like fertility, mental health, and autoimmunity. If you benefited from Morley’s wisdom about iron earlier in this season, you will definitely want to join us for this part two episode!
Join us as we discuss:
Foods you can include in your diet to increase copper and retinol
The difference between whole food vitamin C and ascorbic acid
The relationship between minerals, stress, and infertility
Cod liver oil as a rich source of retinol
How mineral imbalances impact our psychological state
How a body’s inability to produce energy contributes to emotional dysregulation
What can happen when we adopt labels over our health conditions
Shifting our focus to prioritize energy balance over genetic patterns
Why some people feel better when taking iron supplements
What factors are often playing in the background of autoimmune dysfunction
How gut health impacts the body’s ability to absorb iron
Optimal levels of ferritin in the body
Shifting focus away from iron and towards copper and retinol in babies
Finding the right copper supplement
ABOUT MORLEY
Morley Robbins is the creator and founder of The Root Cause Protocol and the Magnesium Advocacy Group. Morley received his BA in Biology from Denison University in Ohio and holds an MBA from George Washington University in healthcare administration. Morley has trained in wellness coaching, nutritional counseling, and functional diagnostic nutrition.
He is also known as the Magnesium Man due to his extensive research into and understanding of magnesium’s role in the body. Morley’s research saw him deciphering the intricate relationship between magnesium, iron, copper, and calcium as a way to free ourselves from illness and dis-ease. As a certified health coach with an expertise in Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA), Morley has performed thousands of RCP one-on-one consultations, helping people feel better by getting to the root cause of their symptoms.
Resources mentioned
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon Morell
Recuperate IQ Copper Supplement
Reverse Skin Aging Copper Cream
Sovereign Silver Copper Hydrosol
Connect
Morley Robbins | Website | Facebook Group
“The quiet mechanism that’s eroding humanity is lack of energy. What does stress need? It needs to be met with energy. Let’s make sure people understand what the nutrients are to ensure that energy and to ensure the ability to deal with the insanity of our stressful world.”
Transcript
Kori Meloy Welcome to The Freely Rooted Podcast where we are passionate about helping women reclaim their metabolisms, restore their youthful vitality, and rediscover God's original design for motherhood and wellness.
Fallon Lee We are your hosts, Fallon and Kori, and we're so glad you're joining us for season four. If you're new here, be sure to listen to our previous episodes where we talk through many of our favorite foundational topics. Now grab your favorite nourishing drink and join us as we continue discussing simple, attainable, and life-changing approaches to wellness.
Fallon Lee All right. Hi, guys. Welcome back. We are joined again by the one and only Morley Robbins today. We loved our first episode with him so much that we just had to have him back on, which really is perfect because we covered a lot of more in-depth topics in the first interview that we did with him. And so what we did this time was go ahead and open up the Q&A box on Kori's Instagram stories to see what kind of things we wanted to talk about, knowing the information that Morley had shared in the first time around. So we're going to jump right in today. There were some really, really good audience questions, I thought. And some of this will be kind of a more introductory conversation to minerals, which I think is perfect and obviously Morley is well equipped for that and more. And so I think we'll kind of see where the conversation goes. We might get into some more weedy topics as we go further along, but let's start with kind of some basic things. Morley, one of the questions that did come up was what are your favorite foods that are rich in copper and retinol?
Morley Robbins Yeah. It is a great question because it's decidedly missing in the American diet and actually, I would even venture to say is probably missing the worldwide diet. But let's deal with them in sequence. So what we typically talk about for good sources of copper are bee pollen. Again, organic. Try to get it as far away from glyphosate as you can, which is increasingly difficult, as you all know. But you can't pollinate a flower and you can't pollinate an animal unless you have copper. Any farmer who's having trouble breeding, there's only one thing they add to the feed, and that's copper. And like that, the animal gets pregnant. It is not complicated. You don't need to go to a fancy reproduction specialist. Like, oh my gosh. So bee pollen. Real vitamin C. So a lot of people don't know that ascorbic acid has been mislabeled as vitamin C, that it's a synthetic form of the antioxidant shell. It's actually a pro oxidant, but it's termed an antioxidant incorrectly. Not my idea. It's Gutteridge and Halliwell, who are preeminent biologists, made that assertion back in the 80s. The difference between whole food vitamin C and ascorbic acid is as follows: we all drive cars—or most of us do—and the car has an engine, has a steering wheel, has four wheels, and a cover. And that's the design of the whole food vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is the cover of the car and no moving parts. And what makes whole food vitamin C complex so important is that engine inside the complex is an enzyme. And that enzyme is called tyrosinase. A lot of people may have heard of it. They're not quite sure what it does. If you want to narrowcast it, it's what gives us our skin color, eye color, hair color. And if you think that's all it does—and I've got a used BMW and a bridge I'd love to sell you—because it's probably one of the most important enzymes in our body. But inside that enzyme are two atoms of copper. And that's a big deal. And so a lot of people have been trained to believe in copper toxicity. That knowing that the bloodwork is 1% of the copper in the body, and they're making sweeping assertions about their copper status based on a 1% sample. But the value of real vitamin C complex is that it will last so that copper, that "unbound copper", it should be not bound to ceruloplasmin copper. That's complicated to say. So what's labeled as unbound copper, the tyrosinase enzyme puts it back to work. That's a big deal. That's a really cool thing. And so there's different forms of it. My favorite is an Innate Response. They make a great product, but there are several others that are on our RCP website. And the real vitamin C was drummed out of the supplement industry back in the 1930s. So it's been missing for a long time. It's been M.I.A. for a long time. And of course, you can find it in fruit based forms, citrus fruits, things like that. The challenge you've got is that copper has been M.I.A. on the farm for 80 years. So people, they love to rely on their nutrient tables, and they're really fun to look at now. It's a lot of eye candy. It's really, really hip, but they don't know that those are based on data from the 1950s. And so it's very unsettling to learn. But the fact of the matter is there are supplemental forms of whole food vitamin C complex that are dramatically different than ascorbic acid. And why am I spending so much time on this? Because the Swedish physiologist who discovered the copper protein, ceruloplasmin, in their original publication in 1948 made a very bold assertion that ascorbic acid destabilizes ceruloplasmin and causes copper to come out of that protein. That's a big deal, especially in the post-COVID era. And there are 12 other scientists who have made that same assertion. From 1948 to the present day, a lot of people spend time talking about the difference between real vitamin C and ascorbic acid. And it's one of the hottest debates in the nutrient world, as you can well imagine. But Vitamin C is a really good source. And then we come to beef liver, everyone's favorite. I mean, all of your followers I know are running to the farmer's market to get their beef liver. My mom grew up in the country and I was raised on beef liver, so it's just never bothered me. But I've got a piece of paper— I've done like 7,000 consults. I've got a piece of paper with 13 names on it. 13 people got excited they could have beef liver. Most people have run the other way. But the liver as an organ is a source of copper. It's where the body stores copper and stores retinol. But in the modern era, in the last century, they've turned it into an iron depot. And maybe if we have time, we can get into why or how they did it. It's actually pretty simple. But the fact of the matter is cattle that are raised on grass—which is a novelty in many parts of the world—but the cattle that are raised on grass where the soil actually has copper, well, then the copper gets into the grass, both the vitamin C complex and beta carotene. And the beauty of these animals is that they turn that beta carotene into retinol. And it's one of the amazing transformations that takes place in the animal diet is their ability to turn the vitamin A from a vegetable form into an animal form so that we can actually use it. And why is retinol so important? Because it's what activates the pumps to put copper in the enzymes. So then we come very quickly on the heels of your question, Fallon, is what are good sources of retinol? Well, it's grass-fed heavy cream. Grass-fed butter. Grass-fed beef liver. Free range eggs. Eggs are supposed to eat bugs and grasses and weeds. And that's— the beta carotene in the grasses is what turns their egg yolks orange. They're not supposed to be yellow. They're supposed to be orange. And if you open up your egg and it looks yellow, give it to the neighbor you like the least because it's not a good egg. So orange yolks are really good. And then the fifth source of a really good retinol is grass-fed beef liver. And it's part of the ancestral diet. And I think Dr. Price was an absolute genius. I really admire the work that he and his wife did during the twenties to identify what is the ancestral diet before it got lost. And if people are familiar with Sally Fallon and the cookbook that she has called Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon is probably one of the preeminent authorities on retinol. She's just so gifted in her understanding. She's not as strong on copper, but she's coming up the curve. And she's very open to what I have to say, which I'm very grateful for. Again, people need to be eating not the latest fad diet. They need to go back in time and find out what their ancestors were eating, whether they were from Polynesia or Europe or wherever it was in the world. Eating those ancestral foods because food is genetic code and the genes recognize the ancestral food and they know what to do with it. They don't recognize the keto diet or the whatever the du jour diet is. And so you just have to be really careful about the conflict between what's new and what's enduring, and our tummy and our genes dig what's enduring. They understand that. So hopefully that gives people some options. Historically—to further answer your question—historically, nuts and seeds, oats, oysters, there are a lot of foods that were very high in copper, not so much in the modern era. Any food that is now treated with GMO—genetically modified organisms—any food today that's GMO like alfalfa, oats, sugar beets, corn, soy. All those were very copper rich foods. And now they've been neutered by the modern farming practices. That's important for people to understand that there has been a change in their lifetime in the access to these nutrient dense sources of food for us and for our metabolism, but especially for copper and retinol.
Fallon Lee I would love to ask you a couple of follow up questions, actually, Morley, and I imagine this is how the flow of this is going to go. As we hear you speak more, there's more things that come up. I'm going to fit a few questions into one, actually, so that I don't keep interrupting, and you can kind of take it away. So the first being you mentioned infertility in cattle toward the beginning and the connection to copper. I would love to hear your thoughts on that connection to human female infertility. And then my other couple of questions were, I would love to hear you touch on cod liver oil, because I know this is a big part of your protocol and that, in light of vitamin A, I would love to kind of add that to the conversation. Let's start with those, and then I'm sure we'll get into more. But I'd love to hear you touch on those, too, in light of what you'd said earlier.
Morley Robbins Yeah, the process of insemination creates a lot of oxidative stress, and there's all sorts of pH issues. But again, we're on a planet that has 21% poison in the air. It's called oxygen. And it's a very reactive substance. And it's particularly reactive in the process of reproduction. And there are critical antioxidant enzymes that are essential to neutralize that oxidative stress. Well, they're all run by copper. And the tragedy is— again, we're in this so-called modern era where we're really sophisticated, we know about genes and we know about transcription factors and we know about exons and codons. And we're so proud of ourselves with what we know, but we don't understand minerals. We don't understand how the body communicates. We don't understand how the body makes energy. And so people get spooked by the gene. They don't know that genetics is ruled by epigenetics, which is ruled by energetics. And energetics runs on magnesium and copper, and the folks who have trouble conceiving are stress cadets, both men and women. They're freaking out about— if they don't conceive right away, then they start to question their manhood and womanhood. Right? And I mean, I've been there. I used to wear—at the risk of giving too much information—I used to wear briefs. I didn't know that wasn't a good idea for a guy. And so my wife and I were not conceiving. So I went to see a urologist. Like what's wrong? And he laughed when I took my pants off. He said, "There's your problem right there." So I changed to boxers and within like two months we had a baby on the way. So I just I didn't know that because the scrotum is supposed to go down so that the testicles can stay cool. If they're too close to the body, the warm testicles don't work. And that's a good thing to know, right? I didn't know that. And the sperm needs to be able to neutralize the oxidative stress that the woman's putting out with the egg. So it's like, okay, that's pretty cool. And then we get to the egg itself. I just think women's physiology is— I mean, there's a reason why they say that the guys are on/off switch and women are the instrument panel of a 747. There's a reason for that because you guys are really physiologically more complex. And for the guys that might be listening, guess what? They're also smarter than we are. They're way smarter. But in order to run that cockpit, you got to be able to manage it. But the thing is, the mature egg in a woman's body has between 100,000 and 600,000 mitochondria. Not 600. 600,000. And the mitochondria are supposed to have 50,000 atoms of copper for each mitochondria. So real quick, you know, Fallon, in your head, what is 600,000 times 50,000? You can do that, right? It's a really big number. And so the more mitochondria, the more vital that egg is, the more it's going to be able to endure the oxidative stress. I would be willing to bet that a lot of women today—young women even—are producing weaker eggs. They don't have the copper that they need to make the energy to enable the union to take place to start life. And so I think there's a whole strata of knowledge that's missing in women's health because people don't know about minerals, they don't know about mitochondria, they don't know about magnesium, they don't know about copper. And when someone is stressing about getting pregnant, they're losing copious amounts of magnesium. And then if that becomes a chronic issue, a chronic stressful situation is going to trigger cortisol, and cortisol is going to trigger a protein called metallothionein. Cortisol produces five times more metallothionein than zinc does. And why is metallothionein a problem? Well, it binds up copper 1,000 times stronger than it binds up zinc? So the whole dynamic of fertility and vitality is dependent on energy production for both the man and the woman. And so the funny thing about the sperm is that there's only one or two mitochondria in sperm, but there's billions of them being released. So that's the trade off between the man and the woman. The woman's is all concentrated in the egg. The man's is distributed through the billions of sperm. So it's just a fundamental fact that farmers know that if they do have infertility, it's the easiest change to make in the feed for the animals to improve their vitality and to improve the likelihood that they're going to have offspring. Does that make sense? And you had a second part of the question. I can't remember what it was, but I know it was a goody.
Fallon Lee That's okay. Thank you so much for expounding on that. That was very helpful. The follow-up that I had was just to hear you talk about cod liver oil in light of retinol, because I know that's just a big principle of Root Cause Protocol. So I'd love to hear it from the man himself, you know, to just talk about cod liver oil and how important that is.
Morley Robbins And think about— make a note: Morley talked about retinol and forgot cod liver oil. Yeah, cod liver oil is really, really important, and it's been around for several hundred years. My favorite is a physician in London, Theophilus Thompson in 1855 published an article where he used cod liver oil to cure anemia in his patients in London, his female patients in London. And if we had a couple of hours, I would tell you how retinol does that, because it really vitalizes iron metabolism. And maybe we will have time to talk about that. But cod liver oil is a very rich source of retinol, vitamin A—real vitamin A, not this frou-frou vitamin A that is in capsules. Because there's a big difference between retinol—spelled n-o-l—and retinyl palmitate—spelled n-y-l—that's very synthetic. It's not your friend, but it also has vitamin D. But the ratio is 10 to 1, A to D. And when we take that 10 to 1 ratio, our body turns it in—under ideal circumstances—turns it into a 3 to 1 ratio in our body. So when you do blood testing, you should have three parts vitamin A to one part vitamin D. And that's not seen very often. It's very rare that I see a 3 to 1 ratio. Typically what I'll see is a 1 to 1. Occasionally I'll see .25 to 1, which is kind of scary, but because people have been so dumbed down with hormone D, they don't realize what they're doing to their vitamin A metabolism. And vitamin D will block vitamin A uptake. And that's why the cod liver oil is so important. And there are only a few that we recommend within the RCP. We've got the Rosita, which is the— that's the Rolls-Royce of cod liver oil. It's a wonderful form. Jigsaw has a wonderful brand coming out of Alaska. And then I've now put my moniker on one called Formula IQ, and that's from— it's a Norwegian cod liver oil. And so the cod fish, for some reason, has a special affinity for producing cod liver oil. And it's been around, as I said, for several hundred years. And the challenge is there's a lot of different versions of it in the health food stores. You got to be really careful, and I would really encourage people to go to the RCP to find the brands that we recommend. Don't take Bob's cover oil. Don't take Sally's cod liver oil. You got to get the right one because it will make a difference, because it's a function of how much heat it is exposed to and what kind of deodorizing agents it's exposed to. So you just have to be very, very careful about the selection of that product.
Kori Meloy That was so great. Yeah, all of the foods— I mean, people listening might even be surprised to be like, "Oh, I'm already consuming a lot of these in my just normal day to day life," which is great. They just may not even realize, oh my gosh, it's because— or like, this is why this is so supportive of my body. And even going back to the copper thing, I've heard— I think it was Lauren de la Cruz who I'm sure you know that name, right? She was in the RCP program, I believe, and she has an Instagram post called like copper is the fertility mineral. And I just think that simplifies it so well. Wow, this is such a supportive mineral for our fertility as human females. And I would love to dive into minerals a little bit more because I had a couple audience members who had heard you on another podcast talk about how minerals and mineral imbalances will kind of dictate even our emotional and psychological well-being. I guess just break that down for us of how different mineral imbalances can even kind of spin us into a state of psychological distress.
Morley Robbins Right. Yeah. No. And it happens all the time. Right? So the earliest record I could find of stress and minerals being related was by a Viennese physician who published his work in 1899. So Dr. Fiedler was— he loved the heart. That was his focus. And he came up with this model that stress causes magnesium loss. Magnesium loss destabilizes the electrolytes. It's also the sodium, potassium, and calcium. Well, when the electrolytes get destabilized, then you have energy loss. And then the energy loss is met with a natural bodily process called inflammation. Again, we're talking about 1899, the modern era. They've turned inflammation into a disease. It's not. It's a natural response to energy loss. Another way to spell inflammation is H2O2. Because if you're not turning oxygen into two molecules of H2O, you'll turn it into H2O2. Well, H2O2, you can't do anything with that to make energy. Water enables the release of the energy precursor molecules, but once we have inflammation, then the body engages a natural bodily process of calcification to patch up the mess from the inflammation. And so, as it relates to emotional issues and behavioral health issues—we might have talked about this in the first session—but my favorite definition of stress is by Mark Hyman, who is a functional M.D. at Cleveland Clinic. And folks probably recognize that name. He's written like five or six books, but he came up with a wonderful definition of stress, which is stress is the body's inability to make energy for the mind to respond to its environment. And so what is stress? Inability to make energy. And so what are some classic conditions of emotional imbalance? Anxiety, depression, schizophrenia. I mean, there's a wide spectrum, obviously, of conditions. But what do they all connect to? The inability to make energy. Every one of them. Depression is not a behavioral state. It's an energetic state. And my dad was a manic depressive with schizophrenic tendencies. Trust me. I've studied this really carefully because I wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to happen to me. I was like, at some point, am I going to boink, you know, fritz out like he did when he was in his forties? And the thing is, as you get into it, it's absolutely fascinating that this whole dynamic of the body not able to make energy for the mind and the mind unable to make its own energy. And so you'll hear things about serotonin goes down and— at this meeting, Kelly Brogan, she's a Cornell trained physician— brilliant, very talented. And I had not known this, but she schooled us up, that the whole serotonin based model of depression, it's bogus. It's right up there with cholesterol causing heart disease. Low serotonin has nothing to do with depression. I'd never known that, but it makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I get it. But the real key is what happens—going back to Feidler—is that stress causes mineral dysregulation. And the mineral dysregulation causes metabolic dysfunction. And so what I did was I took Feidler's model and tried to simplify it into three steps instead of seven steps. And so the whole idea is getting people to realize that if you have stress in your world out here, well you're going to have oxidative stress inside your body, inside your metabolism, and when you have oxidative stress, it means that the oxygen is not being turned into water to release energy. So oxidative stress means low energy production. And when you have low energy production, you're going to have emotional response. And depending upon the mineral gyrations that are taking place in your body will dictate whether it goes one way or another or yet a third or fourth. And so at the center of it all, though, is oxidative stress. And what was really galvanizing for me— my dad left home when I was six years old in 1958. He was scheduled to go back to have an electric shock therapy. And he's like, "That's not going to happen." And for anyone who's seen Cuckoo's Nest with Jack Nicholson, you know what drove his decision not to do that and never to return home. So what do you think a little six-year-old boy thought when his dad ran away from home? I had done something wrong. I had caused this to happen because when you're six years old, the world revolves around you, right? And it's like, that's just the way we process. And so I only carried that wound for 55 years. And so there was emotional freedom technique. I think this is so funny. EFT versus EST—electric shock therapy. But EFT. And it didn't change the history. My dad left home, but it has no energetic hold over me now. It's just like I released that boogie man. It was an amazing experience where my life went from black and white to Kodachrome. But imagine my surprise a few years ago when I came across a very famous study by Dr. Martins from Tulane University—1959—where he with some colleagues from Harvard, and they had 34 patients with schizophrenia, and they wanted to do something that no one had ever done before to treat schizophrenia. They gave them a shot of ceruloplasmin. One shot of ceruloplasmin, the copper protein. How many of the 34 patients were cured with one shot?
Kori Meloy Oh, I was going to say— I want to guess a high number now.
Morley Robbins Yeah, 30 of 34. And today I'll give you $1,000 for every doctor you can find that even knows what ceruloplasmin is. And back in the 50s, it was being used in many different forms and for many different conditions, and now it's completely expunged from the clinical record. So again, why is that significant? It's significant because ceruloplasmin neutralizes oxidative stress. It's the master antioxidant in our body. So we've got ceruloplasmin, master antioxidant for the body. Glutathione, master antioxidant for the cell. And then we have melatonin, master antioxidant for the mitochondria. And guess what? All three of them require copper. What a surprise. So I don't have a spectrum of if your magnesium or copper is this, well then you're likely to get that particular condition. It's just your propensity to not be able to produce energy is going to confound your ability to respond to the stress you're under. And there's so many variables here that will dictate where the person will run in terms of their reaction to their situation. But I think the two easiest things to do are to increase magnesium and increase copper to give people the capacity to produce energy to respond to their environment. So hopefully that gives you more to work with.
Kori Meloy Yeah. And I think that this just echoes this idea of where our culture is with outsourcing things and believing that life just happens to them and things just happen to them. And it's also the medical model that we've been taught as you fear this and this and this, and then once you get sick, you come and these doctors help you. And the idea of tuning back in and realizing that we really can help ourselves so much, and even with the generational thing, because we talk about epigenetics and I know many people think, "Well, this runs in my family. Depression runs in my family. Anxiety runs in my family, so I'm just waiting for this to happen to me." And yet when we look at it in more of a physiological sense, in a bio energetic sense, it could be that these deficiencies have been passed down and these imbalances have been passed down, but we still get to take ownership of how our genes and our bodies express themselves. And that's why we just love your work so much, because you're like, "Hey, the body's incredible, and these things don't just happen to us. It's actually pretty formulated at this point. We can see how we get into these imbalances." So I just love that perspective so much because it takes fear out of it. I know you love the fe—
Morley Robbins F e - a r.
Kori Meloy Yeah.
Morley Robbins People don't know that fear attracts iron. They don't know that. And what they don't know beyond that is that iron activates the fear sensor, the cell. And it's just an insidious loop. And one of the more provocative presentations at the conference this weekend was by Tom Cowan. A lot of people know that name. He's now I think he's retired, but he was a very active internist in the Bay Area. He really challenged the audience because people—to your point, Kori—they're looking for, "Well, how do I deal with this condition?" And he said, "The first thing you got to do is let go of the label." And it was a really— people just kind of let it sink in. That's half the battle. He says he thinks the label is a hex. It's like a curse. And people run to the Internet and say, "Oh, well, what do people who are depressed— how do they think and how do they act?" Then they say, "Well, that's exactly how I feel. Well, I must be depressed." And it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy because someone gave them a label and then it gets tattooed on their forehead and they don't know that it's just an energetic dynamic that can be corrected. And I'm not trying to— and again, for people who are practitioners out there. They're like, I'm sure rolling their eyes like it's a snap of a finger. It's not. But it isn't this monolithic hurdle that has to be overcome. We've got to change your genes. And so I think where a lot of people get caught up is— I think the way a geneticist approaches a light going out in your house is they say, "Oh, we've got to rewire the whole house." Whereas what does the electrician do? He changes the light bulb. That's all we're trying to do is change the light bulb, and we don't need to rewire the house. And I think people are being misled and misfed about genes, how they work. And I think it's important for people to know there's a famous study done by a metabiologist. His name is Greg Gregoriotis. He was Greek. In 1968, he did a study of liver cells. And he wanted to know— he was studying the concentration of copper in liver cells. It's a reasonable thing to study. But what shocked him was to find out that there was more copper in the nucleus of the cell than there were in the mitochondria of the cells. And for those that don't know, there's 2,000 mitochondria in the average liver cell. And there's only one nucleus. And people don't know that copper is running gene transcription. Copper running histone metabolism. The guanine nucleotide has a preference for copper. I mean, it's really unfortunate that the geneticists in the modern era don't know about minerals. And they don't—in any way—appreciate how important conference for proper genetics. So it's just— there's all sorts of missing information. And as we discussed in the first conversation, missing information equals missing truth. If you don't have all the information, then you're not going to have a full command of the situation.
Kori Meloy It reminds me of— because we were talking about genetics. One thing we have not covered on our podcast, but a question that both Fallon and I get a lot is, "Well, I have the MTHFR mutations, and I have this one and this one and this one. And so I can't eat this, I can't eat this. I have to supplement this." And if we just go back to the whole label profound statement that you just made, that Tom Cowan had made at the Weston A. Price conference. That is, I think, something that I've watched happen in the most well-meaning families that come in and they're really trying to holistically change their lifestyle. But these labels that they've been taught—that we've been taught—to hold on to and believe that your body is broken in a sense of like, well, it's always going to be this way. And I've heard you talk about MTHFR before, and I would love for you to discuss this idea of that realm of genetics and the fact that simply it still comes back to the root and it still comes back to minerals. And yeah, I would love to hear you touch on MTHFR.
Morley Robbins Yeah. Now the thing is that the average practitioner today—especially the conventional practitioners—their training is built around the paradigm of the patient is defective. What the root cause is built around is the patient— actually it's not a patient; it's the individual—is deficient. Big difference between being defective and deficient. And as I regularly tell clients that I work with, I said, "You're not broken, but you are out of balance. It's a big difference. Huge difference." And so if you're ever on a boogie board trying to stay in balance, it takes a lot of energy in your legs to stay in balance. Right? But if you go this way or you go that way, doesn't require any energy because it's static. But stay here. And that's our body. Homeostasis requires lots and lots of energy. And so the MTHFR dynamic, the imbroglio of MTHFR is people don't know that the copper, for the most part, runs methylation. And if you don't know that the methionine synthase enzyme—which is at the head of the pack—is a copper dependent enzyme, well, then again, missing information. And the increased production of homocysteine is a clinical sign of copper deficiency. Not my idea. It's the pioneering work of Leslie Clave, who's a guy. He's an M.D., Ph.D., now retired, but he's written extensively about, well, if homocysteine is rising, it means that copper's defective because the homocysteine is supposed to be recycled back into the methylation pathway. And when it doesn't get recycled back in— any time there's a glitch in recycling, I guarantee you copper is missing. That's the part that people don't realize is that humans—and any animal—we're just giant recycling machines. And we're constantly recycling. And what I just learned this morning— blown away by this— again, we were talking about tyrosinase before. Well, there's something in our cells called a lysosome. It's the stomach of the cell. It's the recycling center of the cell. And tyrosinase is one of the most important enzymes in the lysosome. I never knew that. Well, that tells me that recycling is run by copper is what it tells me. And again, I know people kick at me and say, "Well, you're making sweeping assumptions." I'm like, "Well, it's based on intuition and a lot of reading." But once I read that, I was like, okay, that makes sense now. They just gave a Nobel Prize—was it in 2016?—for autophagy? Like, are you kidding me? Really? Just like in 1934, they gave three physicians a Nobel Prize for curing anemia and pernicious anemia, B12 anemia. And they used the same product: beef liver. And we're giving out a Nobel because this guy—I can't think of his name—I think he's from Japan. But he didn't solve autophagy. He just enlightened us about it. It's like, well, let's solve it. And let's not give awards for I understand it better than you do. I solved it. And so I think that the methylation issue— I've got clients who are hardcore I've got to take these methylated Bs. I said, "Why don't you just try bee pollen? Why don't you just try grass-fed beef liver?" And much to their surprise, they were fine. The Mother Nature seems to have a way of producing these nutrients in a form— and people we've been seduced into getting our nutrients in a bottle, not from food. That's a big, big difference. And most B vitamins are made from coal tar derivatives. Maybe you guys know that. And if you want an entertaining afternoon, look up coal tar derivatives. And what you'll find out is that they've identified that there's 10,000 different components, but they've only named 5,000. They know there's 10,000. They've named 5,000. There's 5,000 they haven't named. I mean, it's just like— when I read that, I thought, this is insane. And this is a by product of Rockefeller's takeover of medicine back in 1912-13 when the Flexner report came out. It's like, okay, so medicine was hijacked. We all know that story. But the world was hijacked a couple of years ago, and we all are living that story. And so the methylation, there's no question there's a gene component to it. But is it permanent? I don't believe it's permanent. In fact, I refuse to believe it's permanent. And there are people who think I'm a Luddite because I take that stance. But one of my mentors met with Dr. Watson of Watson and Crick. And so Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick got the Nobel back in the 60s for their work on the double helix of the DNA. And this practitioner was getting his M.D., Ph.D. and NIH. Dr. Watson was coming through. He went in to have a meeting with him, and so they had this private audience, and Dr. Watson said, "So what do you want to know, Russ?" And Russ said, "Well, I want to know about the immutable, the concrete like nature, the immutable nature of genes." To which Dr. Watson burst into laughter and said, "Oh, Russ, that's for the little people. They're changing all the time. They're changing all the time." That's the guy that got the Nobel who studied the helix. So if he thinks they're changing all the time, wouldn't it be reasonable for us to think they're changing all the time? And what do genes respond to? Genes, epigenetics, energetics, as if the energy production is not right, it's going to influence the requirement for methylation. And that's then going to alter the function of the genes. Again, let's ignore the enemies. Let's ignite the energy. It's a completely different way of thinking about getting back into balance.
Fallon Lee I think that's such an empowering conversation, too, because, I mean, I personally am someone who very much got caught up in 23 and Me and genetic testing and very much felt pigeonholed by my results. And so I think stepping into this space where the focus is the energy balance over the genetic pattern, I mean, I think that brings a lot of freedom. And the wording that you used for it, Morley, was just so succinct, this idea of deficient and not defective. I think that's beautifully worded and I love that you touched on that. Genuinely, I feel like I probably could have picked up about five different things from this whole conversation and run with them. I guess I'll go back to our audience Q&A, though, and then hopefully, we'll circle back to some of this because I have so many questions that I want to add in based on some things we've talked about. But one of the things that did come up in our audience was why do some people feel better when they supplement with iron?
Morley Robbins This is when I want to go to a whiteboard and be able to draw something, but I won't do that. What I would encourage people to do is keep an open mind. And it's important to know that any heavy metal—iron, arsenic, you know, doesn't matter what it is, lead, any heavy metal—will force the body to make red blood cells. And I don't know the exact mechanism. I actually should take the time to figure it out because it is well identified in the literature, but the heavy metals force red blood cell production. So there was a very famous study done by Dr. Robert Hodges in 1978, and he was studying the use of retinol and beta carotene to correct anemia. And it was a— I think it was almost a three year long study with human subjects— wasn't rodents, wasn't rabbits, wasn't cell cultures, it was humans. And so they denied people any form of vitamin A, whether it was pre-formed or precursor. So pre-formed as retinol; precursor as beta carotene. It's important for your listeners to know that in order to turn beta carotene into retinol, this requires an enzyme called BCMO, beta carotene monooxygenase. Guess what the battery pack is to run BCMO? It's copper. Not a lot of people know that. So Dr. Hodges denied people vitamin A and watched their hemoglobin collapse, but he also watched their vitamin A collapse. And then he wanted to honor the question that you just asked, Fallon. He said, "Gee, what happens if we goose the system with medicinal levels of iron?" I can't remember now what the amount was, but I'm sure it was a bolus of iron. And there was this immediate spike of hemoglobin that lasted for a whopping six weeks. And then it came right back down to where it was to sync up with the declining retinol status. And what was fascinating was to see how retinol was continuing to drop while there was a spike of hemoglobin that then came back down. And then the time came in the study to put medicine on its ear. And so he introduced retinol into the diet. And there was this meteoric rise in hemoglobin synthesis. And then on the heels of it, it took several weeks later, the vitamin A and the blood gradually started to come back up to physiological levels. But the body used that retinol immediately to make red blood cells, to bring these human subjects out of a state of anemia and get them back into the game. And unfortunately, the three of us are the only ones who know about that study. Except the people who go through my training. It's not taught in doctor school. And so what I think is an important statistic for people to understand is that everybody that I went to college with who ended up going to medical school—and there were dozens of people—they all got A's in calculus. Calculus is really complicated, right? We can all agree on that. First time I took it, I failed. I came back the next semester and got an A, but I was like— the dye had been cast. I was never destined to go to medical school because of that. And that's okay. I think as Dr. Ben Edwards says, "Morley, it's a good thing you didn't go to medical school." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because you didn't get indoctrinated!" And so I was able to stay outside the system. But everyone I know that went to medical school got an A calculus, so these are really bright people. And they have been reduced to monkeys working with rulers because they're measuring iron stats with a ruler when it requires an understanding of calculus. The mechanisms of iron metabolism are many and varied. But it's totally dependent on copper status. I call it copper calculus. And you cannot solve a calculus problem with a ruler. It just is not going to work. And I think that's one of the greatest tragedies in modern medicine is believing that iron is a high/low nutrient when, in fact, it really involves calculus. And if you don't understand iron recycling, if you don't understand a myeloid differentiation, if you don't understand the importance of releasing iron to enable the use of iron in the bone marrow, if you don't know that 47% of copper in our body is found in the bone marrow—47% out of 100 milligrams, so that's 47 out of 100 milligrams—that's a big deal. That's almost half the copper is in the bone marrow. And the cells that are involved in this are called nurse cells. And they have to decide, are we going to make bone or are we going to make blood? Which way are we going to go today? Which way? And they're doing it at a rate of two and a half million red blood cells a second. So we've been talking now for 60 minutes times 60 seconds times two and a half million. And what's amazing is it only takes a little bit of iron and a big chunk of copper, but that's not how it's taught in doctor school. Oh, we need buckets of iron, and we don't need any copper. It's completely the opposite of that. So the bump in feeling better, Fallon, is real. It's true. It's not lasting. And what people don't understand is the price they pay for that feeling better for six weeks. And it's a massive influx of iron. It creates a lot of oxidative stress. The body doesn't know what to do with all that iron. It sequesters it in. Where does it sequester it? In the tissue. In the cells. Oh, wow. In the lysosome. What a coincidence. And the ferritin that's supposedly broken down in the lysosome can't be broken down. And then it starts to become denatured, and it becomes something called hemosiderin. People have never heard of hemosiderin. It's where iron goes to die in the cell. And what would be fun for your listeners to know— because I'm sure many of them have what are called autoimmune conditions. There's about 100 of them now. But they have three things in common. All autoimmune conditions have three things in common. One, there's an emotional issue playing in the background 100% of the time. It doesn't matter what the emotion. I mean, it ties to different parts of the body. But emotional issue. Second is hemosiderin laden macrophages. Well, macrophages are this critical Pac-Man in the body that gobbles up the bad guys and it starts to get full of iron. Full of hemosiderin iron. And then the third whammy is parasites living on that iron. And people don't know that that's playing in the background, whether it's Hashi's or Raynaud's or Vitiligo or diabetes or whatever. Whatever your version of the autoimmune is, it's all the same three things playing in the background. And so people just need to know that missing in that dynamic is if you have parasites, you're copper deficient. If you're copper deficient, you're going to get parasites. How did the iron get out of whack? Because there's no copper to recycle it. And what are these emotions doing? Just we were talking about with Kori just a few minutes ago, they're going to destabilize the energy production and then you can't respond to the stress. And again, it's just this very different way. It's a different paradigm of thinking about the imbalance. Not being broken. It's an imbalance, and it just needs to be brought back into balance through the protocol and the nutrients that we focus on in the protocol.
Kori Meloy That's such a great full picture because I think that when people look at— I mean, even going back to the parasite thing. I don't even know how many years ago I saw that become the thing. Would you say, Fallon, it was like six years ago or something? I'm thinking of the wave on social media of the fear of parasites. Again, that word fear in there is interestingly placed. But the parasite thing of like, oh, these shouldn't be in my body. What if our body was so intelligent, so innately intelligent, that they are there for a reason and serving a certain purpose? And I love that you brought up the emotional side of the autoimmune dis-ease, because when we talked about the emotional, the psychological state earlier, I wonder if because people are re-mineralizing, then they're able to get to a place where they can even address the emotional side of things and then be able to work through that with EFT or therapy or whatever that looks like. So that was a great full picture.
Morley Robbins Really, really key. And a lot of people have thyroid issues. Well, again, playing in the background is the failure to communicate or inability to communicate or not feeling safe to communicate. But there are other nutrients that we can talk about. But again, a lot of those thyroid issues are rooted in a communication conflict, and not everyone knows that. It's very important to understand the emotional dimension of the physical condition.
Kori Meloy Can we go back to the iron conversation in terms of absorption? Because we had a lot of questions about if our gut health can dictate the way that we're actually able to absorb iron. But you might have a different perspective of the minerals being in place for us to be able to use them in the iron recycling system. I would love to hear you talk about where gut health is in that picture.
Morley Robbins Yeah, so I've dealt with a lot of people with gut issues, as you can imagine. 100%, 100% have an emotional issue they can't stomach. And in every case, they've been able to tell me what it was. Okay. So that's playing in the background. So let's pretend that my two hands are enterocytes. And these are the villi, right? Not villains; they're the villi. And what's in between the villi is mucous, mucous lining made by mucin proteins. Guess what the battery pack is from mucin? Copper. So we've got food here. The villi here, food's up here. Here is the enterocyte, the body of the enterocyte. And then down here is the circulatory system, the artery, arterial, whatever. So what keeps the enterocyte together? What prevents leaky gut? Well, it's the ability of the enterocyte to make energy. They have an energetic attraction for each other. And it's really important for the enterocyte to be able to make energy and to get the nutrients through the villi into the body of the cell and then get it into the bloodstream. And when it relates to iron— this is really important. I'm really glad your listeners asked this question. Absorption in the gut is a two-step process. Step number one is getting the iron from the food into the cell, into the enterocyte. The second step is get the iron out of the enterocyte into the bloodstream. Absorption does not occur until iron gets into the bloodstream. What is critically important is to understand that the body needs to be able to bring the iron in. It seems to happen— what's really important for people to realize is that there's seven doorways into the cell for iron. Seven doorways. But there's only one doorway out. And the doorway out it's called ferroportin iron doorway. Ferro, iron. Portin, port, door. Ferroportin doorway has a copper doorman. And if the copper doorman is not there to open up the doorway, the iron can't get out of the enterocyte and it gets stuck there and doesn't get absorbed. Now, does that mean that the iron is not building inside the enterocyte? You better believe it's building in the enterocyte. Absolutely building in the enterocyte. What do you think colitis and Crohn's and IBS and SIBO is all about? Iron is building inside the enterocytes. It can't be properly stored, and it can't be released. Why? Because that requires copper. And so everything hinges on, "I can't absorb my iron." I'm like, "Yeah. You are absorbing it. There's seven doorways in. Trust me. You're getting it. It's getting in your front line tissue. It's not getting into your bloodstream because you're missing copper." And we're back to the study by Hodges in 1978 because, again, it isn't just copper acting alone. It's copper working with retinol to make it bioavailable because the actual copper doorman is an enzyme called— well, it's a protein. Excuse me. A protein called hephaestin. After Hephaestus, famous fable. Mythology. But hephaestin protein running on copper empowered by retinol expresses an enzyme called ferroxidase. And what happens is the iron up here can be plus two or plus three. When it's inside the cell, it's plus two. I wouldn't have designed it this way. So, I mean, I'm just telling you what actually happens. But then in order to get it out of the cell and get hooked on to transferrin, which is a transport protein to get iron to the bone marrow where it can be made into red blood cells. That process of turning iron two into iron three requires what's called oxidation. It's a chemical term. And copper is what enables that to happen. The ferroxidase enzyme function of hephaestin turns plus two into plus three. And it accelerates the release of iron from the enterocyte by two and a half fold. So that when hephaestin is at the doorway, iron is going right into the bloodstream. And I'm not absorbing my iron because I have very little copper in my diet and very little copper in my body. But no one has told me that. Everyone's telling me I need to take more iron, which is only going to build up more iron here. Not down here where it's needed.
Fallon Lee Okay. So we have had such a good conversation, and truly we're going to have to do this again. But in respect of everyone's time, we're going to do kind of a rapid fire movement through the rest of the audience questions that we got. And certainly we will have to come back. But starting with the next question that we received, is your thoughts on the optimal ranges of especially ferritin levels? What would you say we should be looking for there?
Morley Robbins Yeah, the range that we work with within the RCP is 20 to 50, and I know that there are practitioners that think it needs to be at least 100. What the practitioners don't understand is that there's actually four different types of ferritin in the body. So there's what's called ferritin light chain and ferritin heavy chain. Heavy chain requires the ferroxidase enzyme function we were talking about just a minute ago. There's a third form called mitochondrial ferritin. That's also a heavy chain form, but it's storing the iron in the mitochondria. But then we have this fourth kind. It's called serum ferritin, and it's empty shotgun shells. There's no iron in serum ferritin. And so doctors have been trained to think that that number needs to be 100. What that's really telling us— what serum ferritin means is iron has been discharged into the liver tissue because it can't be recycled properly. So it's been dumped into the lysosome— back to our friend the lysosome. So it's been dumped into the lysosome, and the protein, the ferritin protein has been secreted into the bloodstream because the body doesn't know what to do with it. And so doctors are taught that that number needs to be at least 100 to get your thyroid medications to work. What? Oh, to deal with your hair loss, you got to get up to 100. So what you're telling me, Doctor, is I've got to get my— I've got to have liver disease in order to get my thyroid meds to work. Is that what you're telling me? It's like, makes no sense. So 20 to 50 over— the high side is easy to talk about. So over 150 for a woman is significant, over 300 for a man, notable and significant, and it can go into the thousands. I had a client just recently whose ferritin was like 5,000. It was like— it's the other side where everyone gets freaked out, especially in pregnancy. I think it is absolutely unconscionable to be using ferritin as a marker for iron in pregnancy. It's all about hemoglobin, not about ferritin. And when it gets below 20, people's tongues curl and it's like, relax. What we've got to do is the high side of ferritin is a liver issue. The low side of ferritin is a spleen issue. That's where the recycling is taking place. But decisions by birthing practitioners should never be made on ferritin alone. It should always be made on hemoglobin, serum iron, and ferritin, and a much better understanding of the recycling system. But when it gets below 20, what I've come to realize, Fallon, is it's typically a sign of parasites, especially in the spleen. And again, back to what Kori was saying earlier, we don't need to freak out about it. They're there for a reason, and it's all about keeping them in balance. But people need to understand that the 20 to 50 is a real sweet spot, and it's a very healthy physiological range for people to perform their physiological functions.
Kori Meloy That was great. Thank you. Our next really common question is about babies. And I guess traditionally or I guess historically—not that historically, but historically in the last 50 years or so—people have been taught that after six months, you got to load up the iron rich foods for babies. Then after that, it's like there's this huge focus on, oh, are they iron deficient? That's why they're having all of these issues. And a lot of people were asking, "Okay, well, if it's not iron deficiency, then what is it?" And I mean, just to insert my opinion, I think this is the classic example of people searching for a label that will be simplifying all of the issues that a child might be presenting. But pediatricians or other practitioners that are checking for iron are not checking for like oral airway function. That's a classic in my mind. Like that would be one of the most classic reasons that a child is waking up all throughout the night is because they're trying to breathe, which would be less about iron, but a multitude of other layers and dynamics. And so I'm curious what you— yeah, like what kind of findings you've found with babies and just this idea of pumping them with iron after six months.
Morley Robbins Again, all the optics are on iron and vitamin D. Where are the practitioners who focus on magnesium, copper, and retinol? And when you really get into neonatal health or even fetal health and then neonatal health, man you better be focusing on magnesium, copper, and retinol. Brain health, brain development? Oh, my gosh. To me, it's just sinful that there isn't more attention. And the issue of, oh, we've got to bulk up. You know, kind of like Arnold Schwarzenegger. We're going to pump you up with iron. That makes no sense at all, because I would— I think it's the Weston A. Price chapter out of the Bay Area has a little cookbook for newborns. It's really, really cool, and I don't have a link for it, but if people are enterprising, they'll find it. But the thing is, what's missing in the equation is copper and retinol especially. And we talked about it in the first conversation, there's three proteins in the placenta. So there's ceruloplasmin, there's hephaestin—there's that hephaestin thing, again—that it's in the gut, but it's also in the placenta. And then there's something called zyklopen for Cyclops in that famed mythology. So we've got three proteins—copper dependent proteins—that are regulating copper and iron between mom and baby. Boy, I think we should have a Manhattan project on those three proteins and figure out what the optimal levels are. Because if there's a perception that the child doesn't have enough iron, they're getting the iron. You can't be on this planet and not get iron. You can't be dealing with an iron deficiency if you're living in America or North America or Europe or Australia. There's so much iron in the food system now. Is it being metabolized? Ah, there's the rub. We're back to copper again. We're back to the recycling system, and so does the iron get stuck? You bet your bippy it does. It gets stuck all the time because that iron doorman isn't available enough to let the iron out so it can recycle. And so if the child is perceived as being iron poor, iron deficient, well, then they are copper depleted. And so, again, the same way that I say we don't have defects, we're deficient. When it comes to iron. It is not iron deficiency, it's iron dysregulation. And what keeps iron in regulation is bioavailable copper. Copper working with retinol to run the enzymes to make sure that that recycling system is working. So I would go to copper and retinol a thousand times before I would dare put iron into it, into a newborn or a pediatric aged child.
Fallon Lee Let's do one final audience question here, because I know we're kind of approaching the end of our time together. Morley, something that we get asked frequently and I'm sure that you do as well, with all this discussion around copper, what would you say in terms of supplementation of copper in isolation? So I don't mean beef liver capsules or something like that in isolation. Copper supplementation. We'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Morley Robbins Yeah, I think it's best that copper be with food. You know, ideally our ancestors had it at an advantage. My solution was to create a product called Recuperate and it has copper bisglycinate with desiccated beef liver, with spirulina, with some turmeric. But that's not the only one I recommend. There is a copper cream that's made by Reverse Skin Aging out of Seattle, Washington. It's a wonderful product, and it's based on the copper peptide, the GHK copper peptide that Dr. Loren Pickart discovered back in the 70s. Transdermal, very effective. And it's a wonderful way to get copper in the body. And then there's copper water. You can get copper hydrosol from the people that make the Sovereign Silver. Or there's one that we were talking about just the other day in our alumni group. It's called Organa, and that's a colloidal form of copper. So I think that we live in very stressful times. We live in very perilous times, and I think we need more energy to deal with that. And I can guarantee you that there are forms of supplemental copper that are very safe, that are very bioavailable, and I don't think your listeners need to worry about that. I don't endorse all forms of copper supplements, but the ones that I just mentioned are the ones that I stand behind as viable ways, and I recommend those to my clients all the time.
Kori Meloy I think just to wrap things up, the number one question I could see coming up is how to check your copper status. And would you recommend Full Monty? HTMA? Do you have one or the other? Or do you like to use both together in tandem?
Morley Robbins Well, I think what we need to do is we need to do hair tests and blood tests for the two of you. And go through them for your followers. Just so they can see it in vivo. Oh, wow. I mean, I've done that with a number of the folks that I've done podcasts with because it's very galvanizing for the listeners to see it in action and see how the stress of your lives have affected your minerals. And I'm not diagnosing anything. I'm not treating anything. I'm using the testing to learn your stress profile. And once I understand your stress profile, I can connect you back to your symptoms. That there's no middleman, there's no disease process. It's missing minerals that's causing the symptoms. And I think it would be very empowering. I think Fallon's picking up this empowering theme. That's really what this is all about. RCP is really designed to democratize healing. And in some respects transcend the need for practitioners. You know, our ancestors didn't have an -ologist for every part of their body. They grew their own food. There were occasions when they got injured, but for the most part, they didn't have the metabolic breakdown that we have. Well, now 40% of the Earth's population has metabolic syndrome. That's 3 billion people, folks. And I think it's a condemnation of the farming system, the food processing, and the pharmaceutical system, and the practitioner training is 40% of people on the planet can't produce enough energy to get through the day. I just— something is really wrong. And to me, that's the true pandemic that's decimating humanity. Not this foo-foo thing on TV. That's just a freak show. But the quiet mechanism that's eroding humanity is lack of energy. And whatever we can do to increase that especially for women who are trying to raise families or produce families, it's like there's no more stressful event on the planet. And what does stress need? It needs to be met with energy. So let's bring it on and let's make sure people understand what the nutrients are to ensure that energy and ensure the ability to deal with the insanity of our stressful world.
Kori Meloy This was so great. And just to echo again— like you guys listening, just reminding yourself and your mind being that powerful to dictate even the way that your cells— it's all just so connected and being able to start with the mind and believing like, I'm not broken. I'm not defective. How can I support my body best to be able to thrive? This is all that we're talking about. And Morley, we just so appreciate your work. Thank you so much for coming on a second time. And I know our audience was so excited to have you back on. So yeah, thank you for coming on.
Morley Robbins Sure. And if you guys want to do that mineral testing, we'll do that in a subsequent session. And I think you'll find it to be an electric conversation that comes from that. So that I think that might be a fun third conversation to build around.
Kori Meloy Totally. Yes. Well, thank you guys for listening. And we will see you guys in the next episode.