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Written by Mary Ladd & Joe Andre Alam

PLAYBOY ASIA - Mushroom powder by way of Four Sigmatic is the new health craze Food fads in the social media age are inevitable and this time it’s coffee’s turn to get a makeover. Thanks to a new superfood company called Four Sigmatic, everyone from athletes to models are all about adding a double-extracted mushroom powder to your brew. Sure, at first read, it might sound unbelievable that a food you’ve had access to all along has such power, but not when you look at the endless positive studies and how other societies have and continue use them: They’re used daily in Asia, and have been used for centuries in Slavic countries for their proven ability to increase energy, fight tumors and support immunity. Ancient Romans actually used to refer to them as the “Food of the Gods.”

The powders listed on Four Sigmatic’s website are divided into, you guessed it, four options: (1) Reishi for better sleep, relaxation and fighting sickness; (2) Chaga for skin, hair and stress management; (3) Lion’s Mane for memory, concentration and digestion; and (4) Cordyceps for athletic performance, energy, sexual performance and libido. “That said, proceed with caution,” Four Sigmatic founder, Tero Isokauppila, jokes. Isokauppila is a Finnish-born, LA-based 13th-generation farmer who grew up foraging with his mother and later studied plant-based nutrition and chemistry at Cornell University. He credits a steady diet of mushrooms for keeping him from being sick for over a decade and also mentions that he naps on a mat made from nails, a modern form of acupressure, that helps him stay energized. Just like his product, Isokauppila is eccentric, but that seems to be what today’s consumers are into — going beyond the normal prescription medications and doctor’s visits in hopes maintaining a their youth. That’s why Moon Juice is an entrepreneurial force and kombucha is in such high demand it is even available in some gas stations now. Really, it’s not much of a surprise that just four years after its launch, Four Sigmatic’s retail products have spread to 55 countries and currently beat out the cold brew category in Amazon sales.

Four Sigmatic has become so popular, that it now has a brick and mortar location in the pseudo-hippie haven known as Venice, CA. Nestled in the Abbott Kinney enclave—betweenice cream shops, clothing boutiques and artisanal stores—is the world’s first ever mushroom coffee shop, The Shroom Room. Packets of mushroom coffee can be ordered to go with mild Central American Arabica beans. There’s also mushroom hot cocoa and a mushroom smoothie enhancer said to better sleep and boost brainpower and energy. Ceramic mushroom mugs and ninja pants line the shelves atop mushroom stools. While it’s all a bit gimmicky to the naked eye, Isokauppila opened the shop in a sincere effort to promote community inspired by his forest-covered birthplace. The staff is friendly—like genuinely friendly—and eager to tell customers about how mushroom can alter their daily lives.

In case you can’t make it to southern California, Isokauppilia also has a book called Healing Mushrooms: A Practical and Culinary Guide to Using Mushrooms for Whole Body Health (Penguin Random House). It’s got an average of 5 stars from 145 customer reviews and yes, as the title suggests, it too is all about his favorite fungus, with tips and a guide to the ten specific types of mushrooms that enhance whole-body health and sustain wellness. It also includes 50 recipes for mushroom-heavy salads, soups, cake and even bacon.

Obviously, Isokauppilia is mushroom obsessed, and his staff is mushroom obsessed too. Some could say maybe a bit too obsessed, but talk to anyone of them and we dare you to not at least question why you haven’t invested in some Reishi powder sooner. At the very least, we suggest you don’t knock it until you try it. The results of fungi consumption just might astonish you.
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Written by Zachary Schwartz & Joe Andre Alam

PLAYBOY ASIA - Inside the philosophy of the most famous Asian pick-up artist in the world. I’m waiting in a Manhattan diner to eat lunch with the most famous Asian “pick-up artist”—a man whose craft is seducing women, and teaching other men how to do the same—in the world, when a chunky, 5’5” 33-year-old gentlemen with a Fu Manchu mustache sits down next to me. “I’m JT Tran,” he says, extending his hand.

A short Asian guy, Tran does not exactly fit Western society’s archetype of a ladies man. “I’ll never be tall, dark and handsome,” he admits. “No one looks at me at first sight and thinks, ‘He’s the one.” What Tran does have though, is “game,” a concept as universally understandable yet undefinable as the Taoist “Dao.” Like the “Dao,” it can be mastered with time—at least that’s what Tran claims.

Tran’s Facebook is bedazzled with photos of him kissing and holding tall, beautiful women at high-end clubs around the world. He officially defines himself as a “dating coach,” and pens advice columns for LA Weekly, speaks at Ivy League universities, and runs “Asian Dating Bootcamps.” These three-day retreats allow virginal Asian males to study Tran’s secret methodology, “The ABCs of Attraction,” after which they are taken “into the field”, to clubs and malls, to practice techniques under his supervision.

Tran wasn’t always like this. He remembers being a shy middle child of a Vietnamese immigrant who could barely make eye contact with others. “Like most Asian American males, I was a late bloomer,” he says. “I didn’t kiss my first girl or go on my first date until I was 20. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or how to make friends, so I mostly stayed home and read books.”

Photo of JT Tran, Courtesy of Levan TK for LA Weekly.

After college, Tran landed a job as a rocket scientist, literally, at NASA. At age 26, he had everything: a Mercedes, a six-figure salary, a seaside apartment on Hermosa Beach—and yet absolutely no one to share it with. No matter what he did, Tran couldn’t find a girlfriend. He recalls going to a speed dating event and saying ‘yes’ to all 60 girls he met with. “Not a single one said ‘yes’ back,” he says. “At that point, I realized that something wasn’t wrong with the 60 girls who turned me down, something was wrong with me. Somewhere along the line, maybe because of my Asian upbringing, I wasn’t taught the same social skills as everyone else.”

Tran, determined to lift the curse of his stereotype, attended a pick-up “bootcamp” run by pick-up artist Mystery. He then spent the next five years mired in the shadow world of night clubs and bars, applying, as he describes it, his “systems engineering” mind to his game. He started writing a blog, the “Asian Playboy Blog,” about his experiences. One of his readers was a Chinese-Canadian mother whose son, at 16, was so traumatized by bullies that he refused to make friends and had never been on a date. Desperate, she rang up Tran. “I told her, ‘Ma’am, I’m going to be the big brother he never had this weekend,” he remembers. And so the first “Asian dating bootcamp” was spoke into existence.

As a biracial first-generation Taiwanese kid from the Midwest, I understand the struggle. An Asian guy in America, among all demographics, can expect to have the lowest total average of sexual partners, three, in his lifetime. At the age of 18, nearly 75 percent of Asian-American guys are virgins, compared to 43 percent of other boys.

Any number of conspirators can be fingered for the emasculation of Asian men, but the media, which often portrays Asian men as weak, effeminate foreigners who rarely “get the girl,” plays a huge role. In the 1984 coming-of-age film Sixteen Candles, Asian student Long Duk Dong’s—whose every entrance is announced with a gong—romantic aspirations are seen as comic relief. Jet Li originally kissed Aaliyah at the end of Romeo Must Die—a 2000 action-film remake of “Romeo and Juliet”—but the scene tested so poorly with audiences that filmmakers were forced to remove it.

Racism comes from the outside, and after a while, from the inside. Growing up, I internalized stereotypes about who I was supposed to be: comic relief, academic co-conspirator, but never an American Romeo. By seventh grade, I was sitting in the back of my dad’s car, crying as I told him of my realization that “no girl will ever like me because I’m Asian.”

I eventually had positive experiences with romance and sex, but because they came so much later than that of my other friends, I always felt like I was playing catch-up on love. Many of my Asian friends still feel downright doomed. Their options are few: to accept a life of involuntary celibacy, embrace it, or—for those with money and a willingness to work with the dark arts—swallow the red pill and jump down the rabbit hole of pick-up artistry.

At the end of our meal, Tran invited me to attend one of his “Asian Dating Bootcamps,” which normally costs a little over $1500 to attend. He was eager to brag of its effectiveness. “I’ve had guys have their first kisses, I’ve had guys lose their virginities on this bootcamp,” he says. “People’s lives change in one weekend.”

Let’s face it—there are worse things than not getting laid. But the psychological effects of never having a mate, of never having anyone want you, can be devastating to any gender. Every yin needs a yang—that’s the essence of “Dao,” which literally translates to “the right way.” But for now, there was Tran.

The art of pick-up has been practiced for centuries, maybe forever. Seduction is a puzzle shared between species. Birds sing melodies, gorillas beat their chests, hooded seals blow huge red air sacs from their nostrils. Robert Greene writes about Ninon de Lenclos, the most infamous French courtesan of the 17th century, who advised a young Marquis to approach a certain countess with an “air of nonchalance” as to create a “state of emotional confusion that is a ‘prerequisite for successful seduction’”.

The modern pick-up community for men can be traced to Ross Jeffries, who wrote a 1992 book titled How To Get the Women You Desire Into Bed. Jeffries observed that the Sexual Revolution had liberated—for the first time in modern Western history—a massive, unmarried population of heterosexual women. While men watched their local Schwarzenneger effortlessly sleep with whomever he liked, the “AFC” —average frustrated chump—was left clueless as to how to compete in this new dating market, where traditional markers like religion and money mattered less and less.

Jeffries pinpointed traits like confidence, mystery, and the ability to make one feel safe—not just being a “nice guy”—as attractive to women, and taught associated conversational trees and body language to convey that. Empirical evidence shows that pick-up training does, in fact, improve men’s dating skills, though the dominant, aggressive approach practiced by many modern pick-up artists has been proven to work better on women with conservative views.

The internet is a sweltering jungle for subcultures, filled with life and shade, often evolving them into something more gigantic and dangerous. Much of the pick-up artist community today is made up of scummy white men who, among other transgressions, prey specifically on Asian women’s documented preference for white men, referring to them as a “cheat code.” Pick-up artists like Julian Blanc have bragged that a white man can do “whatever he wants” to Asian women, and films himself in Asia convincing girls to cheat on their boyfriends with him.

This makes Tran, as an Asian man teaching other Asian men, a unicorn in his field. He’ll willingly critique his peers while offering himself as their moderate alternative. “Ethics, unfortunately, is not a hallmark of our industry,” he says. “But, I think you can build up your confidence without tearing anyone down.”

I arrived one Friday afternoon to the Manhattan studio in which Tran would be conducting his three-day seminar. Each student was immediately given a thick, 300-page textbook: “The ABCs of Attraction by JT Tran.” In the book were jokes, conversation-starters, body-language diagrams, sine graphs illustrating the optimal flow of conversation when meeting a girl at the club, and so on.

The seven students stood up to introduce themselves. Mostly Asian, they ranged from 30-something entrepreneurs, to 20-something graduate students, to late-teens cooks. One was Will, a Chinese immigrant from Canada who had spiky hair, an eager face, and square-rimmed glasses that often flooded with fluorescent light. “God gave me so much talent in academics, but paralyzed me in social life,” he said in a heavy accent. The room murmured in solidarity.

For the next six hours, Tran went through the ABCs, starting with “A” for attraction, “B” for banter, going all the way to “F.” He taught the importance of posture, good eye contact, asking interesting questions, touch, and so forth. The students practiced introductions with the help of “Katie,” Tran’s 6-foot-tall assistant, and Jeff Khan, Tran’s Taiwanese apprentice.

After one particularly rough session in which Tran barked “Stop!” and proceeded to chew Will out on his total lack of a smile—“Don’t be creepy,” he admonished—he offered a story as encouragement to the group.

“I wasn’t always like this, guys,” Tran recalled. “Once, I was at the club, and I approached these four Asian girls and a blonde white girl. I thought that because she was with Asian girls, she would have liked Asian people, but as soon as I approached, she put her hand up. ‘Stop! We don’t like Asian guys,’ she said. So I walked away, whatever. Then I hit it off with this Latina girl. I brought her over to my friends, and my white friend puts his arm around me, looks at her and says: ‘What are you doing with this Asian guy! You know they have the smallest dicks in the world right!’ And, of course, it was all over from that.”

Tran paused. He wiped his forehead. “And you know what I did that night, guys? I went home and I cried. I cried and felt sorry for myself. But—and this is the important thing—I got up the next morning and I tried again.”

We met outside the club later that night and formed a huddle. Tran gave us last-minute advice: “Remember, we’re not here to get anyone drunk. You want to be sober, and you want them to be sober. And don’t form a sausage zone. Okay, go!” He yelled. As the group shuffled in, he remarked to me “When they clump together like that, I call it the Great Wall of Chinamen.”

At the club—a thumping, multicolored rooftop affair—I took a seat and watched Will approach a few women. The first girl forcefully rebuffed him. “Excuse me, can you give us some space,” she hissed, and turned back around. Will scratched his head and moved on. He walked up to another girl. “Hey, I’m Will. It’s really nice to meet you,” he spat out breathlessly, before she rolled her eyes and walked away.

Meanwhile, Tran was swaggering around in a fiery beige-and-scarlet suit. He walked up to a group of women walking in. “Hey, our table’s having a birthday today, why don’t you come and celebrate it with us?” He said. He lifted one of their hands, kissed it, and led them to our table.

The table became a sight to behold—five awkward Asian males surrounded by a group of chattering, attractive women in a club. Will put his arm around one of them, and she kissed him on the cheek. Another student was sloppily making out.

Tran came up to me. “Fobby power!” He declared, shaking his fist. “We’ve had bootcamps where there’ve been 10 Asian guys and 10 white girls at the table,” he said. “And literally, a circle of white guys will form and stare at us looking pissed off. Asian guys aren’t supposed to do this.”

It can be tempting to think of this as a story of revenge: Asian women have a 36 percent rate of out-marriage, the second-highest rate in the United States, mostly to white men. Asian men dating white women might satisfy a lust for evening the score, but it doesn’t end the karmically damned cycle of internalized racism. “I make it a point to tell my students to be open to women of color,” Tran tells me, and over the course of the night, he also brings Asian, Latina and black women to the table. “We Asian men hate being discriminated against because of our race, and we should not impose that on women ourselves.”

At the end of the night, we reconvened at a late-night Manhattan diner. The students swapped stories of first kisses, slow dances and trading digits—like high school boys after the bowling alley, fist-bumping for just getting a number.

“This is just the beginning,” Tran told me. The next day, the group would cover “Future”, the surprisingly placid “F” in ABCs of Attraction. Tran would talk about becoming a person that’s easy to fall in love with—having a fulfilling career, picking up interesting hobbies, continuing self-education. In short, becoming self-actualized. “You’re here to be in love,” he instructed. “To love a lot, or to love one.”

After the bootcamp, there is the option to go all the way down the rabbit hole—to continue paying Tran and become his apprentice, traveling the world with him, seducing women on an international level. “That takes, frankly and realistically,” he says, “a massive amount of discipline, persistence, and the ability to just push yourself physically and emotionally, day after day, night after night.”

But, Tran admits, “Most of my students grow into what would be considered ‘a decently successful white guy who has a few girlfriends in his life before he gets married.’ They’re no longer Asian guys who feel totally emasculated and like they’re going to die alone. They’re getting to the point, where they can say, ‘Hey, I’m just as cool, attractive and successful as my peers now. I no longer have this unfulfilling love and sex life. I’m finally in the norm of American society.’” 
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Written by Comedian Rachel Wolfson & Joe Andre Alam

PLAYBOY ASIA - Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) released their policy on traveling with cannabis and it’s a little...cloudy. As cannabis remains in this weird limbo between state and federal law, places like the LAX are enforcing state law to cover their own ass, but don’t get it twisted: This does not mean you can pull up to the airport and walk through security like Snoop Dogg (although that would be dope). According to the airport’s official site, “In accordance with Proposition 64, the Los Angeles Airport Police Department will allow passengers to travel through LAX with up to 28.5 grams of marijuana and 8 grams of concentrated marijuana. However, passengers should be aware that marijuana laws vary state by state and they are encouraged to check the laws of the states in which they plan to travel.”

So what the heck does that really mean? Prop 64 allows you to possess a certain amount of the drug as a recreational or medical user. Private property owners can decide whether or not they will allow you to bring cannabis onto their premises, which is similar to a restaurant policy. Are cannabis users at risk if we decide to travel with our medicine? We can’t forget that just this year our very own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, doesn’t think good people smoke weed, but with all due respect Sesh, you can go fuck yourself. Half the country is getting high and the other half is watching us (while secretly getting high). That said, us cannabis users should be able to travel with our medicine without fear.

We’ve all heard stories of friends of friends traveling with ounces and never getting caught. A buddy recently told me that he traveled through the LAX and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) even went through his bag right in front of him—even joking about the potent smell—and let him go on his merry way. Then again, there are reality shows like Locked Up Abroad that feature people being caught commuting to other countries with illegal substances that capture what a horrifying experience it is. As soon as I posted LAX’s view on this on social media, I had friends warning me about being arrested in certain parts of the country. My response: Let’s be real, if law enforcement is using taxpayers money on cannabis dogs, then they aren’t taking crime seriously.

Since most people don’t just chill at LAX, this means you can basically travel through the airport, but once you hit security you are out of their jurisdiction. Now you are dealing with TSA—which is under the Department of Homeland Security and under federal rule. According to TSA’s website, “TSA security officers do not search for marijuana or other illegal drugs, but in the event a substance that appears to be marijuana or a cannabis infused product is observed during security screening, TSA will refer the matter to a law enforcement officer.” It’s kind of like being pulled over on the road: are you going to get a friendly officer or one that hates life? The policy of the agency doesn’t change, but it’s up to the officers discretion.

People might misinterpret this as LAX allowing users to travel with cannabis so I asked my lawyer friend Alexa Steinberg, Esq. of Manzuri Law, a prominent cannabis attorney, to clarify what’s allowed and what isn’t. For one, cannabis laws still vary drastically from cigarettes, meaning you’re not legally allowed to indulge in a bit of indica in designated smoking areas. “The statement released says nothing about consumption. In fact, Prop 64 does not allow for consumption in public.” Steinberg explains. “[You] can't walk down the street smoking marijuana the same way you can't walk down the street drinking a margarita.”

Basically, Steinberg’s point is that while attitudes about cannabis are constantly changing, despite these new rules, you could be putting yourself legally at risk. As long as federal law rules against cannabis consumption, legal states must abide by regulations at the same time as they bend to acknowledge a state's loosened boundaries. In 2016, cannabis-related arrests outnumbered violent crimes according to the New York Times. Still, more changes are happening on the west coast. For example, in Seattle, Washington judges recently voted to vacate prior cannabis convictions for those charged between the years of 1996-2010 which widely affected people of color. Over half of these cases, 46 percent to be exact, involved Black people. The charges will be cleared in November and is another step in the right direction for the war on drugs—and hopefully the rest of the country will take notice or be left behind in the legalization movement.

And at McCarran International in Las Vegas, they now have leftover cannabis bins installed so people can dispose of their unsmoked cannabis before they go through security. “Although both medical and recreational marijuana is legal in Nevada, it’s still illegal on the federal level, and therefore, illegal to bring along with you on a plane. So to help travelers dispose of their weed before heading out of Sin City, there are large green bins—called amnesty boxes—set up outside”, Newsweek reports.

But before you think about bringing that ounce of weed through the airport, ask yourself if it’s worth the risk. If you are traveling to other legal states, it’s better to just purchase when you arrive. Until federal legalization passes, you are still breaking federal law once you get passed airport security. Odds are, they aren’t trying to ruin your life or make an example out of you, but you just never know. You could end up with the TSA officer who worships Jeff Sessions or one who truly doesn’t give a fuck that you’re trying to get your Grandma, who has colon cancer, high when you get to Boca Raton, Florida.

For now, I’ll stick to getting stoned at home, before I get to the airport.

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Written by Susan Shain & Joe Andre Alam

PLAYBOY ASIA - One afternoon in late 2014, Jordan Milne’s phone rang. Not his cell phone, but the phone on the wall of his Midtown apartment—which he says “no one ever called.” It was the doorman. He asked Milne, “Do you guys have water leaking?” No. “Are you running the dishwasher?” No again. “Well, the people downstairs are complaining there’s water leaking through the ceiling,” he said. “I’ve gotta come up and take a look.”Milne and his wife, Lindsay, sprung into action. They weren’t using the dishwasher; they were distilling alcohol—which, unlike homebrewing, is against the law. “I was elbow deep in an illegal batch of whiskey,” recalls Milne. “I thought, holy shit, we’re about to get evicted.” They grabbed the still, searing hot at 206 degrees, and scooted it into a closet. They had just disconnected and hidden the hoses when they heard a knock at the door. “We got away by the skin of our teeth,” says Milne. “At that point, I was like: ‘We need a better place to do this.’”


Milne is handsome, with cerulean eyes that dance as he talks, and an affable, charismatic and tirelessly passionate manner. He grew up on a 1,500-acre farm in Bouckville, New York, a town of around 500 people 30 miles east of the state’s geographical center. “I grew up in a small part of the world,” he says. “I knew that when I eventually got to see a bigger part of it, I was going to learn a lot —and the path I was going to take would change.”

That path began to veer when Milne’s high school guidance counselor saw his PSAT scores. She told him: “We’re going to get you into a place where no one has gotten in before.” That place ended up being Dartmouth College. “She took a decent test score—and got me into a school that was a huge reach,” says Milne. “It changed my life.” When he got to school he considered the foreign service, and studied Russian and Arabic, but he ultimately found his way to finance, and began working at a Connecticut hedge fund in 2007.

Wanting to emulate his grandfather Ray, a Washington fruit farmer, Milne tried to “get into scotch.” He hated the taste, however, and developed a love for bourbon instead. He and his roommates bought different kinds, holding taste tests in their house. Milne, ever ambitious, wasn’t satisfied with sampling other people’s creations—and started distilling whiskey illegally in his garage. “At first it was extremely bad,” he says. “Like beyond bad. But then I started visiting craft distilleries and asking questions, and it started to get a little better. At parties, we’d take out the stuff I’d made, and people would actually like it.”

By 2012, Milne was engaged to his college friend-turned-lover, Lindsay Zahradka. They were thinking about starting a family, and also about leaving New York. When Hurricane Sandy hit, they drove to Portland, Maine, to visit his fiancée’s brother. At dinner one night, they sat by the window; outside, snow fell under the glow of a street lamp. They looked at each other and instantly decided this was where they’d start their new lives.

In Maine, his partner could continue her career as a lawyer, which she loved—but Milne was eager to leave finance. “I had become a one-dimensional person; whether I was at work or not, my mind was always there,” he remembers. So after returning home, Milne brainstormed what he could do for work. “I was sitting there, Googling major employers and industries,” he says. “I got up and poured myself another glass of gin. And then I looked over at the still.”

Over the next two and a half years, Milne maintained a full-time job while planning his distillery on the side. He made budgets, courted investors, talked to other distillers—and in a “brutal trial and error process,” perfected his gin recipe. His mission? To get people to “think about gin differently.” To do that, he couldn’t create a juniper-forward spirit, like the majority of gins on the shelf. “I had to find a new flavor profile to be our frontman,” he says. “Juniper was going to be the bass player.” He made batch after batch after batch, experimenting with ingredients and quantities. The winning combination: fresh rosemary and mint in the lead, backed by orris root (from the iris flower), coriander and Tuscan juniper.

“I have a shelf in my distillery with the hundreds of test batches we made over the years,” says Milne. “Some are good but not perfect, and some are terrible.” His now-wife was often the initial tester, and Milne admits: “My wife had to try some pretty lousy gin to get here.” Yet even once he’d found his recipe, Milne hadn’t fully committed. The pair had great jobs in New York, causing them to constantly second-guess their plan. “We had a really good thing going,” says Milne. “But comfort can be bad, right? It can kind of lull you to sleep.”

So Milne searched for a “ripcord” to pull, saying: “You don’t know whether it’s going to work—and the prospect of failure looms extremely large—but at some point you just have to say ‘Cannonball, I’m going in.’” For Milne, the custom still was going to be his largest investment; his ripcord, his cannonball. So in the spring of 2015, several months after the doorman incident, he ordered it. Then they moved to Maine. “At that point,” he says, “we were on the hook.”
In October 2016, Hardshore Distilling Company opened its doors. The following year, USA Today readers named it the best craft gin distillery in the country. While Milne says “the impulse to tinker, to conform, is always intense,” winning that award convinced him to keep doing it the Hardshore way. “We convert so many non-gin enthusiasts because we’ve taken such a different approach,” he says. “We’re really trying to show people this category has breadth and latitude.”
Hardshore does everything itself, including making its own neutral spirit with wheat from Milne’s family farm. “If we put it into a bottle, we could easily call it vodka,” notes Milne. “But I think that’s a huge waste of gin.” By controlling its neutral base, Hardshore can end the fermentation process early, leaving some sugar unconverted to alcohol. This softens the flavor, and adds thickness and weight—which, according to Milne, “allows the botanical to unfurl a little more slowly on your tongue, as opposed to dropping like a bomb.” When drinking Hardshore’s gin, he calls its texture “half the experience.”


Although the distillery is also aging bourbon, it won’t hit shelves until it meets Milne’s exacting standards. Which might be never. “There’s a very decent chance we never put out a bourbon,” he says. “When we put forward a product, we don’t want to be good from a craft perspective; we want to be the best from a category perspective.”

Hardshore’s Original Gin is now available in 12 eastern states and California, and the company is on track to triple its sales from last year. When asked about his success, Milne is humble, yet invigorated, saying: “I started this journey because I wanted to make the best negroni I could—and I ended up building a distillery.”

“Be careful what your hobbies are,” he adds. “You never know when they’re going to become your life’s work.”
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Written by Susan Shain & Joe Andre Alam

PLAYBOY ASIA - “Lie back and start breathing in and out of your mouth,” commanded a golden-tinged man with silver hair, draped in head-to-toe white linen. “You may feel joy, you may feel pain. You may feel a series of sensations from tingling to whole body orgasm. You may cry, you may laugh, you may feel your body tense. If your fists clench, ask yourself what you’re holding on to.”

I looked around, confused and nervous. I was in Ubud, Bali, attending what I thought was a breath-focused yoga class—and unless Balinese yoga involved some unexpectedly kinky stuff, this wasn’t what I’d signed up for. I asked the woman sitting next to me, “Isn’t this a yoga class?” Her bangles clanked as she pulled a lock of hair from behind her ear. “Um, not exactly,” she laughed.

The man began talking again: “Make sure your breath stays seamless and connected. Let go of the words; there’s so much to notice in between this string of thoughts we have. And remember: It’s safe to breathe and it’s safe to feel.” Since the dozens of other people surrounding me seemed unfazed, I followed their lead and lay on my back. Sun drifted through the windows, sprinkling the room in light. I closed my eyes, and did my best to relax. “It’s just breathing,” I figured. “I do that all the time.”

As it turns out, I'd stumbled onto a session of “conscious breathing,” an ancient practice that has grown in popularity in recent years. “People have been using breathwork—movement and sound to connect to something higher or to heal—since the dawn of man,” explains Lauren Chelec Cafritz, the U.S. national representative for the International Breathwork Foundation (IBF).

Chelec Cafritz goes on to point out modern breathwork pioneers like Leonard Orr and Stanislav and Christina Grof. Mr. Grof, a Czech psychiatrist, was a leading LSD researcher in the ‘50s and ‘60s. When the U.S. government made LSD illegal in 1968, he and his wife began looking for alternate ways to access the outer reaches of the mind. The result? Holotropic Breathwork, which uses rapid breathing, evocative music and bodywork as “a powerful approach to self-exploration and healing that integrates insights from modern consciousness research, anthropology, various depth psychologies, transpersonal psychology, Eastern spiritual practices, and mystical traditions of the world.”

Since its introduction, dozens of offshoots have been developed, with names like transformational, integrative, liberation and clarity. “Breathwork is the next wave after yoga,” predicts Chelec Cafritz. “People are starting to take responsibility for healing their bodies; they’re understanding they have that capacity. Meditation gets you one place, yoga takes you to another—and by the time you do breathwork, it’s like… ‘wow.’”

I found out later that the glistening man leading my class was named Anthony Abbagnano, a serene and charismatic half-Italian, half-Englishman who chooses words with intention and smiles as he speaks. The founder of Alchemy of Breath and a practice he calls holobirthing, breath has fascinated him since a young age. He believes it improves every aspect of life, including mental and physical health, as well as more nebulous concepts like creativity, compassion and self-love. “If you were given the most wondrous gift for Christmas, and you didn’t unwrap it, it would be of no value to you,” he says. “The breath is given to us—but we don’t unwrap it, we don’t explore it.”

Back in Bali, the music intensified: heavy percussion, chanting in languages I couldn’t understand. I took heavy breaths in and out of my diaphragm, gradually increasing their speed and force. Abbagnano’s voice rang out across the room: “Claim the wholeness and richness of the life you want. What can you let go of with that exhale? As the music builds, let your determination build.”

My limbs began to tingle. Thoughts and images swirled through my mind: I thought of a long-term relationship that just ended, I thought of a friend who recently lost her life.

Their faces materialized before me, and guilt billowed through my body. I realized my hands were clenched so hard they were going numb. As the emotions and physical sensations spiked, I experienced a moment of panic; it felt like the onset of a bad trip. But then I reminded myself I hadn’t taken any drugs—that was just breathing, that I was completely in control. “Let go of whatever tension or stress you’re holding.” I heard Abbagnano’s voice drift into my consciousness: “Make space for something new. Anything that comes up, be ready for it.” I slowed my breathing, and felt my body loosen. My angst evaporated, accompanied by the sobs, yelps and ecstatic moans of the people around me.

Scientific explanations for the benefits of breath are abundant. “Of all the automatic functions in the body, there's one we can control quite easily—and that is breathing,” says Dr. Patricia L. Gerbarg, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and co-author of The Healing Power of the Breath. “When we change the pattern of breathing, we change the millions of messages the respiratory system is sending to the brain.”

Since breathing is our body’s top priority, Gerbarg says the brain listens to messages from our respiratory system above all else. “These messages go to the centers that regulate the way we perceive the world, the way we think about things, the way we regulate emotion,” she says. Certain breathing patterns, for example, can quiet the amygdala, which controls our emotions, and the sympathetic nervous system, which makes us feel unsafe and defensive (Both of these are often overactive in people with anxiety, depression and PTSD.).

Breathing can also stimulate oxytocin, a hormone that helps us bond with others, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms us down and enhances our ability to have loving relationships. “A lot of of psychotherapy is what we call ‘top-down’; you’re reasoning with the person,” explains Gerbarg. “But with breathing, you activate a bottom-up response from the nervous system that works no matter what you’re thinking. It calms you down because we’re using your body’s own internal communication network.”Rapid breathing acts like a stimulant; it activates your sympathetic nervous system and reduces the carbon dioxide in your blood, which can cause tingling and clenched muscles. The altered blood gases might also be why people experience altered states of consciousness. (Due to these effects, Gerbarg warns rapid breathwork isn’t safe for everyone, including people with severe anxiety, bipolar disorder, seizures, schizophrenia, hypertension or respiratory illnesses.)

Gentler breathing, on the other hand, activates the love-y, calm parasympathetic nervous system—and is what Gerbarg focuses on with her patients. “We’ve taken these ancient practices, which are thousands of years old and found in almost every culture throughout the world,” she says, “and we’re looking at them through a modern scientific lens.”

After 30 minutes of intense breath, the music became slow, soothing—as did Abbagnano’s voice. “Breathe into that feeling, whatever it is,” he said. “Let each breath be a wave of love, a wave of care. Let us be in here in all our truth, our strength, our vulnerability.”

My breath lengthened and deepened. I unfurled in my newfound appreciation, my newfound understanding, of what it really means to breathe. As we entered the final stretch, a mystical voice repeated the mantra: “You are loved.” In my raw state, it was hard not to absorb the song’s message. I soon began crying, my voice joining the tearful harmony around me. “Whatever I want to do in the world starts right here, right now with this breath,” said Abbagnano in a near-whisper. “This blessed breath.”

When the music stopped, I laid there for a few moments before sitting up: bewildered, yet refreshed. Abbagnano asked us to share our experiences, and a frizzy-haired woman in her 60s stood up. “I have a younger friend I feel deeply connected to,” she said, her voice heavy with emotion. “And I finally realized why we’re so drawn to each other: She was my daughter in a past life.”

Abbagnano smiled and thanked her, as though this were a quotidian observation, then pointed to a stout younger man. He revealed he’d recently retired from the Royal Air Force, and has had trouble finding himself amidst his post-war demons. “I feel a bit loony saying this,” he stammered, “but I feel reborn.”

Though I hadn’t found a long-lost child or a new version of myself, I did feel a release of guilt I hadn’t known I was holding. The pain hadn’t disappeared, but I felt more at peace with my recent losses—like I was finally able to bid farewell to my relationship, and to my friend. My body was buzzy and buoyant, energized by the natural high. For the rest of the day, I was like a balloon on a breeze.

“There’s a miraculous quality to this work,” says Abbagnano. “And the paradox is it’s right under your nose.” (Playboy)
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