Episode 399: Ben Greenfield on Biohacking vs. Simplicity: The Future of Longevity for Body, Mind and Spirit

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Habits and Hustle Podcast Episode 399 Summary

Episode Title Ben Greenfield on Biohacking vs. Simplicity: The Future of Longevity for Body, Mind and Spirit

Episode Description In this episode, host Jennifer Cohen interviews Ben Greenfield, a prominent health consultant and biohacker, discussing his transition from intensive biohacking to a more balanced approach to health. They explore various topics including dietary diversity, stem cell therapy, modern parenting, and the impact of simplicity on health and longevity.

Key Guest Ben Greenfield

Health consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author
Recognized as one of America's top personal trainers
Co-founder of KION, a nutritional supplements company

Episode Highlights

Impact of Dietary Diversity on Health (05:28)
Emphasis on eating a diverse range of foods to maintain a healthy microbiome.
The risks of restrictive diets leading to health issues due to lack of diversity.

Optimizing Nutrition with AI Technology (16:39)
Discussion on the use of AI technology for tracking and optimizing diet and nutrition.
Mention of advanced tools for calorie and nutrient tracking.

Ben's Journey (24:57)
Transition from a childhood in a strict homeschooling environment to becoming a top personal trainer.
His evolution from focusing on athletic performance to biohacking for longevity.

Supplementation Insights (39:26)
Discussion on NAD and creatine for improving sleep quality and overall health.

Stem Cell Therapy (44:33)
Examination of expanding options for stem cell therapies and their benefits.
Discussion of personal experiences with stem cell treatments for rejuvenation.

Modern Parenting (01:13:00)
Insights into rites of passage for children in today's society.
Discussion on the importance of educational approaches like unschooling and fostering mental resilience.

Spiritual and Mental Techniques (01:43:36)
How technology can enhance meditation practices.
Exploration of blood detoxification and its implications for spiritual growth.

Social Media and Fitness Strategies (02:03:26)
The influence of social media on health trends and personal fitness strategies.

Other Notable Discussions

Impact of simplicity on achieving optimal health.
The evolution of Ben's personal health philosophy from biohacking to a more holistic approach.
The role of technology in monitoring health and wellness.

Key Takeaways

Dietary Diversity: Essential for maintaining a healthy gut microbiome and overall health.
Biohacking Evolution: Transitioning from aggressive biohacking techniques to simpler, sustainable health practices can enhance well-being.
Mindfulness and Spirituality: Integrating spiritual practices into daily life can create a more balanced and fulfilling existence.
Technology in Health: New advancements allow for personalized nutrition and health strategies tailored to individual needs.

Conclusion Ben Greenfield shares a wealth of knowledge on optimizing health through a blend of simplicity and technology, emphasizing that while biohacking can offer benefits, a balanced approach often yields the best long-term results. The discussions on modern parenting and spirituality further highlight the interconnectedness of physical health, mental well-being, and overall life satisfaction.

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:01Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and hustle. Crush it. All right, you guys. We have the one and only Ben Greenfeld on. Feld, Feld, Feld. I think Feld does sound pretty cool. I need to go by that like a spy. I thought it was Greenfield. In World War II, going in to kill Hitler. Ben Greenfeld. Yeah, but you're not even Jewish. It's my new identity. That could be your alter ego. We could just do a whole podcast about how we would assassinate Hitler. I would love that. Well, he's not. Well, you know the whole theory about this. There's like a butterfly effect. And if somebody had killed him, somebody worse might have come up in his stead.

0:39Because there's a whole moral philosophical argument of like, is murder wrong? And if so, would you go back in time? And if you had the opportunity to kill Hitler when he was a baby. And there's a really weird way to start a podcast talking about how we would kill Hitler. But if my name was Greenfield, you have a lot of energy drinks here. I know. A lot of just drinks in general. Well, first of all, that's actually, I don't know where you got that one from. Your refrigerator. Oh, okay. I don't know what that is. We usually start this podcast with these magic mind shots, and I'm sure you've had a million of them before.

1:10Have you not? I always look at the ingredient label. Okay, look. Well, I got lots of stuff in front of me. No, it's okay. This is a protein drink. This is Slate protein drinks. Have you not? You don't know about this? No. I thought you know about everything, Ben. No, I live in a cave slash do have a lot of stuff in my mini fridge in the garage, but some of this stuff just slips me by. I always like to look at the ingredient label though, like this one, caramel latte, because a lot of people see the stuff that they're told is held. Hopefully I don't throw any of your sponsors under the bus talking about this stuff.

1:42No, you can't. Actually, this is one of these companies that I drink at least one a day and I like it. But so you tell me what you think. Okay, so this one, when you look at the ingredient label, it's brewed coffee, water and coffee. So the only thing I think about there when I'm looking at cans and ingredients. Do they filter the water? Do they look at the aluminum lining of the can? Have they assessed it for microplastics, et cetera? Yeah. And sometimes that's not on the label. Right. You literally have to ask. Like, you know that really popular company, Zevia? Yeah, of course. It does the, it's not artificially sweetened soda.

2:15Those soft drinks. Stevia sweetened soda. Mm-hmm. I interviewed their CEO years ago, and that was one of the first questions I asked was, do you guys pay attention to the cans? Yeah. Because you can have a super healthy drink and then just screw it up by putting it in the wrong delivery mechanism. He was like, yeah, we go aluminum free and we test it for metals. And I thought that was cool considering you can find it in like Safeway or Rosars or whatever. Yeah. Which a lot of times means they would be cutting corners. So you don't know about the can necessarily. But what did he say? He said he was good with it.

2:43Yeah, it was clean. Yeah, but it's an aluminum can. It is, but you can have some kind of like a liner inside the can that keeps the metals from leaching. Could you actually prove that they do that though? You could do a third-party independent test on the can itself if you wanted to. Right, but you never did that. I didn't do it. I did take him at his word, but I don't think he's a lie in a podcast that says he's a low, because that could blow up in your face if somebody actually does. If actually someone did it. Test it later on. So they've got brewed coffee, unfiltered skim milk, and when you look at, this is one of the terms that I sometimes don't like in the health industry, lean protein, right?

3:19Because you hear about eggs, for example, right? If you eat just egg whites, you get a huge dose of albumin, the protein in egg whites. And many people have an inflammatory response to just eating egg whites. When you look at eggs as nature's perfectly packaged protein that include the fat-soluble vitamins, which also can help out with the vitamin absorption, with the protein absorption, etc., then you've got a little bit more of a cleaner profile. So there's the idea of like in the health industry, right? Eat lean chicken breast. I'm like, no, like you get a lot of the fat, soluble vitamins and the good stuff and even more of the collagen from the gristle, from the bones, from the skin.

3:58So like if I make chicken, yeah, it's going to be more calories if you eat the skin and have the oils and everything on there. But you're arguably getting more nutrient density and better health long-term versus separating the proteins from the fats. Right. So this is why. Okay, wait, hold on. So again, this happened last time. So even we haven't even started. We're only two ingredients into the label of one drink. But I love this because we can rabbit hole as we go. It's crazy. Okay. So you're saying, let's get with, say with the egg. So then people, if they just eat the egg whites, they can have a bigger allergic reaction or an intolerance than if they have the egg whites and the yolk together.

4:36Because you need that extra fat and whatever all the other minerals and nutrients to counterbalance the egg white. Yep. Yep. Because I was going to say that I feel like I've gathered or my body, I've been eating eggs every single day for 25 years, that I now feel like I become allergic or I have an intolerance, but I do eat the yolk. Now, it is true that when you get one of these food allergy tests, a lot of times foods that are staples in your diet can end up giving almost like a false positive that you're allergic to them. And it's because your body is doing a really good job creating antibodies to certain proteins in those foods.

5:12So it flags as a high antibody response, even though you're not actually allergic. So if I look at the results of somebody's food allergy test or food intolerance test, and it says, Hey, if like red on eggs, you must be allergic to eggs. I asked them, while you eating eggs every day, because a lot of times that can cause it to be elevated. That doesn't mean that if you're eating eggs every day and you feel like crap, you're not sleeping while you have gas or bloating or poor energy levels or whatever, and you cut the eggs out and those symptoms go away, maybe you actually were allergic to eggs.

5:43But anything that flags on a food allergy profile as an issue that is also a staple in your diet, first, make sure that it's not just because you've been having a lot of it. So. And then, so that, does that mean that you shouldn't be eating the same thing over and over and over again, just because it can act as an intolerance or an allergic reaction for you? That is something that would fall into the category of dietary diversity, meaning that the more myopic you are about eating just a select group of foods, the less dietary diversity you will have. So the less diverse your microbiome becomes, which can create this vicious feedback loop because by eliminating foods constantly and going gluten-free and lectin-free and then low fiber and then low FODMAP and beginning to get rid of all these foods, your biome becomes weaker and weaker and you paradoxically become less and less able to be able to digest a wide variety of foods.

6:47So the idea of eating the same thing day in and day out, if that also means that you've got low dietary diversity, then the answer is yes, that can create problems long-term because you're essentially starving off your bacteria. But if you were, say, eating eggs every day and you were also, like you hear a lot of these blue zones doing, eating a lot of different herbs and spices and plants and fruits and a wide variety of meats and eating seasonally, meaning there are certain periods of the year where you're not eating certain things, paying the jet fuel to fly the avocados and the coconuts in an environment where you normally wouldn't have access to that stuff, then that's where you can also create an issue, right?

7:28Low amount of seasonal eating, low amount of dietary diversity, eating the same things over and over again, which seems easy and convenient, but isn't great for keeping the biome healthy. That's so true. So basically because in the fitness world, right, it's all about like, if you stayed eating the same things that will, that will optimize your chance of like staying within a certain weight, you know, certain body composition, all the things. But it can actually work very much in reverse for your actual health and microbiome. It's true that if you have a predictable set of meals, I have my yogurt with my berries in the morning and I got my lean protein on my whole grain sandwich for lunch and I eat the same thing for dinner.

8:11If you're trying to count and control calories, that makes it very simple and also makes it more likely that you're going to have fewer types of foods around the house. Because one of the things that dietary diversity can cause is the more access to foods that you have, the more calories you're likely to eat. Like if you walk up to like a superfood salad bar and there's like 20 different things, walnuts and pecans and avocados and salsa and mushrooms and two different kinds of all, you're going to load up the plate in many cases and wind up with way more food than you normally eat, you know, is buffet syndrome.

8:44On the flip side, if you're limiting your dietary diversity so that you do a good job following a diet, yes, it could be good for weight loss and calorie control, but that is not synonymous with good health and high micronutrient and vitamin and mineral intake. So I think a part of it does come down to like self-control. If I'm going to have 20 different types of fermented foods and yogurts and superfoods and chlorella and bee pollen and dark chocolate and, you know, pastured eggs and three different kinds of meat and all this stuff in my pantry and my fridge, which I do because I love the idea of dietary diversity.

9:20It also means you're either injecting a GLP one. So you're controlling your appetite or you're actually just cognizant and aware, which isn't that like, if you're writing it down anyways, you're using a, an app like chronometer or some other calorie counting app to keep track, then it makes it a lot easier. So I think you can have your cake and eat it too. Cake in this case being dietary diversity combined with moderating the amount of calories that you consume. But it does take more mindfulness. It does. I think mindfulness is good. It is. But I do think self-control is the most difficult thing in the world, right?

9:52We can all know. I think most of us at this point in life, especially with all the information overload, we know what to do. We've heard it all. We just don't have the self-control and the discipline to actually execute on it. That's where we get stuck. Hence Ozempic. But you could look at it like with exercise, right? So let's take a trendy workout right now, like the 12-3-30, right? Walk at a 12 % incline on a treadmill and three miles per hour for 30 minutes, and you're going to see huge drops in weight loss or increases in aerobic fitness, et cetera, which is kind of true. But if similar to the diet, your exercise program consists of you doing the same thing every day because it just makes it easy for you and that's what you're most likely to do.

10:36Yeah, it's better than nothing, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to be more fit than the person who's like working with the trainer or doing their own research to switch things up, you know, every week and one week you're doing kettlebells and maybe the 12, three 30. And the next week you're doing a, you know, a high intensity interval training set on that airdyne and super slow training. And the next week you're traveling. So you're doing like BFR training and cold plunges. And the more you can mix it up, the more you throw at your body, the harder it becomes to kill or the more fitness you see.

11:07So you see the better microbial fitness or gut fitness by throwing a lot of different foods at your body. And if you look at things like an increase in the surge of gluten intolerance or so-called gluten allergies or peanut intolerance, a lot of that is due to heavy restriction of those compounds, especially to kids at an early age. So they don't build up the ability, the microbiome based ability to produce the enzymes that can help to digest those foods. So this is why if you go gluten-free for a really long time and then you have gluten, it's way worse than having gluten back when you weren't gluten-free.

11:45Or when you feed a kid who's never been exposed to peanuts at two years old, a bunch of peanuts or peanut butter, and they have this anaphylactic reaction, it's far less likely that they would have had that if they would have had mild exposure to peanuts. Totally agree. That makes, and by the way, I know we're only two ingredients in and we're not eating. Oh, we'll get there. I know it's going to be a long, I won't forget. I know you won't. Um, so what, what do you think about the fact of when you do high intensity workouts and exercise? I, when I do it anyway, my appetite goes through the roof.

12:13I eat five times the amount of calories because I'm ravenous and hungry. So isn't it a better strategy than to do like the 12-3-3 that we just said, or any kind of lower impact or lower intensity exercise, because then you're able to control your appetite just on a weight loss, fat loss level. Let's not talk about all the other things, but just on that, because that's what I find. I find cardio at a high intensity, you end up gaining weight because you're starving. There is what's called a compensatory mechanism that kicks in post-exercise. That compensatory mechanism is of exercise and I'm hungrier.

12:54And there's two reasons that that could happen. So there's two different things we need to consider here. The first is pretty straightforward. I've burnt more calories. I've been more glycolytic because I'm doing high intensity interval training or weight training, not just to walk on the beach. So I've subtracted more carbohydrates from my muscles or my liver. So my body's naturally going to tell me that those need to be refilled because carbohydrates are good for brain fuel and for thyroid activity and for the joints and for the endocrine system. There's all sorts of messages your body begins to tell you that are crave-like messages when you've depleted a bunch of carbohydrates from your body for a good reason.

13:30This is why a strict ketogenic diet could be good for managing epilepsy or Alzheimer's, but long-term can cause some issues to your testosterone, your estrogen, your thyroid, your joints, et cetera, because there's just not enough glucose to go around. And you can't make glucose out of fats. So when you finish a hard workout and you're getting these cravings to eat because A, you've burnt through a lot of calories and your body needs more calories, or you've burnt through a lot of carbohydrates and your body needs to refill those or both, that's a natural urge. And you shouldn't necessarily resist that urge because in my opinion, it's healthier to be strong and fast and have a high VO2 max and good grip strength and good lactic acid tolerance and lots of mitochondria and be eating more food to fuel all that goodness versus doing the same thing day in, day out because it doesn't make you hungry and eating less food.

14:22Right. I'd rather be strong and fast and fit and also eat more calories than do the same thing day in, day out and just restrict my calories. Right, but let's say running versus walking, running versus incline walking. Do you think that the walk, would you say that it's good to do a combination of both or that doing the incline walk is better? Because you're maintaining muscle mass, you're not breaking it down and all those things. One or the other. The idea of fitness does need to be considered in terms of kind of like a blueprint for the body. I'll explain what I mean by that. But before I do, I didn't address the second reason that you might get hungry after you do a hard workout.

15:07To me, that's the more concerning reason. It is the train to eat, eat to train type of phenomenon where either A, you're exercising so that you can stuff your face later, not so that you can get fitter. So the only goal of exercise is to burn as many calories as possible so you can enjoy your whatever$25 smoothie or pizza or whatever it is that makes you happy because you're addicted to food. And the only way that you can be addicted to food without becoming morbidly obese or having some metabolic disease is to exercise your butt off. Right. And so then we get into the whole realm of like exercise anorexia, which is a thing.

15:40It's a huge thing. And in a similar vein, we also will finish a hard workout many times and feel like we need a reward. Right. Right. And that reward is not necessarily due to the calorie burn because some people will just go face stuff on a huge breakfast after doing 50 burpees. I did the 50 and the 50 burpees doesn't burn a ton of calories. You have to walk like an hour to even burn, you know, a cookie. No. But people will say, hey, I did the hard thing. I'm going to reward myself with food. So using food as a reward or as something that allows you to get that dopaminergic rush and not as something that you'd be using to refill the body and restore nutrients and vitamins and minerals, that can be an issue.

16:19And that's a more concerning issue. And that's where we get into the willpower self-control component. And in my opinion, the best way to manage that is what gets measured gets managed, right? That's where you take photos of your food and upload them to the new GPT image recognition technology like GPT-40, where it'll just tell you, you know, on your own notes app or whatever, how many calories that you're eating based on image recognition of that food or using an app or website like a chronometer or macro factors to actually keep track. And some of my clients who I work with, they won't follow the diet adequately that I have written down for them based on their labs and their blood work and their activity levels and everything, unless they know I'm going to be looking at their diet at the end of the week.

17:03And if they write it down, then they adhere to that diet and they're less likely to do that second compensatory mechanism from exercise, which is just like eat a bunch of food just because you're rewarding yourself for having exercise and not necessarily considering the calorie intake versus the actual calorie burn. Right. So that GPT thing that you, well, not the GPT, what did you say that thing was that people can use to because i've been using or people i know the best one i've heard of is fitness pal to do all that stuff is this one better in terms of like like it's is it easier using gpt to to count your calories to tell you what it is that you're eating is not a diet or calorie counting app per se it's just you literally going into jeep so you if you want to get super fancy you could use something like fitness pal or something like that okay um some of them have image recognition technology built into them now to where you can photograph your food rather than because it is a pain to write it all down sometimes and go into the things like i had three ounces i had six ounces it's so front like eventually it's just like to do all the little nuanced things those are annoying so you're saying going to gpt now you can actually scan your food in the chat gpt gpt 4.0 is the new version that has image recognition capabilities meaning and And same thing with the Google notebook that like you were doing an Instagram story before we started recording.

18:27I told people, Hey, use the new Google notebook LM to take your notes. So a couple of cool things, like I was out hunting about three weeks ago. And before I went out, I found one of my water filters that I was going to take out there with me. And there were pieces missing. I'd tell there were pieces missing because there was like a tube that was supposed to come out of it. And then a clamp on the end of that. So I took a picture of it and I uploaded it to GPT40. I said, tell me what is missing from this water filter. tell me the brand tell me where I can go download the manual and tell me where I can get the missing pieces and I know people who are even doing things like working on their car engine and taking photographs using their phone and then uploading that to 4-0 and it's telling them what needs fixing or where they can get certain parts which is pretty cool so you could literally take a picture breakfast lunch and dinner and you could say like hey I want a protein carb fat ratio of 30%, 40%, 30%.

19:16And I want to know if this meal is hitting that. And I want to know what my total calorie count the rest of this day is going to be based on this photo I just sent you of the breakfast that I just ate. And it will tell you all of that stuff. The other one, the notebook, what that will do is you can feed any PDF, any texts, any, you know, I've even fed things like legal contracts into it. And here's an example. Let's say you have a big sticky legal contract or scientific document, and you just don't have the time to take the deep dive into it and roll up your sleeves and interpret it all and have smoke coming out your ears trying to read through this thing.

19:49You can upload the document into Notebook LM. And not only can you tell it to create like a user guide or a study summary or anything else that's super palatable for you based on what you uploaded, but there's even an audio function. And I can upload, and I did this a couple of weeks ago. I uploaded a DNA test that one of my clients got, and I told it to generate a discussion between two people about that person and what it is that they saw on that DNA test that could help that person improve. And it created like a mini podcast of two AI people who sounded very much like humans having a nice friendly chat about my client's gene results.

20:26And so if I'm going for a walk and I've got it, let's say a consultation call coming up with that client, I can listen to the AI talking about my client, filling me in on what was going on in a way that could be way easier to understand than digging through the whole gene test. And that's all just based on PDF or image recognition technology. It's pretty cool. Wow. We are living in convenient times. And I mean, don't get me wrong, you still got to double check and make sure AI didn't make mistakes, because occasionally it will still do things wrong, but it's still, it's pretty convenient. That's amazing.

20:57So like, you fascinate me, I tell you this. I keep on repeating myself. I know I sound like a broker record but you do like i you meet a lot of people in this world in this business but you always have fascinated me from the minute i even like knew who you were because of all the like because you're not a doctor you're not like you're just like you're just some guy who has an insane amount of memory and the ability to take information and retain literally everything that you've ever seen written like saw read like your brain is like it's like it's like a computer Like, how do you even keep all that information in there?

21:33I don't think it is like a computer. I think it's more like the Arthur Conan Doyle character, Sherlock Holmes, who says to Watson at one point early in the book when they first meet, he says something like after Watson tells him his name, Watson's name, he says, oh, I'm going to forget that. And Watson says, why? And he says, because the more things I have rolling around and clunking inside my head, the less I'm likely to be able to do a good job being a detective and sleuthing because I just want a clear mind. So I don't like to have my head jumbled around with facts. So there's two things that I do.

22:08The first is I keep a very clear head, meaning I will tend to ruminate on things, think about things, wake up at 2 a.m. I have notes apps all over my phone with all of the little notes that I take right away to get them off of my plate and out of my head. So it's basically the idea of an ever living journal that goes along with you wherever you go. For me all through college, it was like little paper journals that I keep in my pocket. Now it's just the notes app on my phone. So I'm constantly keeping a clear head. So I'm not sitting here during this podcast, trying to remember those three things that I promised, you know, three other people that I do later on today.

22:40You put it right down. All those little things start to gum up the subconscious. So I put, I write everything down. So I keep very good notes on everything. And then second, I focus a lot on my category, right? Which is health, fitness, longevity, biohacking, nutrition, whatever. And because I've been in this sector for like 20 years now, a big part of it too is just once you start seeing the same things over and over again, reading the same things over and over again. It's like grooving that part of your brain to where you asked me about politics or crypto or anything like that, I'm going to be a complete idiot.

23:15But because I spend a lot of time immersed in health and fitness, it's almost like osmosis, long-term osmosis. So there's something to be said for like, if you're a young person getting a career or something like really rolling up your sleeves and telling yourself, Hey, I'm going to be a pro in like 20 years. And I'm just going to stick at this every day and learn as much as I can. If you really want to become like an expert in your field. So a big part of just not jumping around too much. But I feel like it's evolved. When you first started 20 years ago, what were you doing? Were you a trainer, like a personal trainer?

23:46Were you a physical trainer? Is that what you did? What was the first thing you did? So I realized I still owe you an answer about the exercise blueprint piece, but I'll come back to that. Did you write it down in your Google notebook? No, I've got it in my head. Just don't let too many things train wreck in my head and I'll come But a few other things. You've got the exercise blueprint. We still got to finish these drinks. Yeah, the ingredients. But I'll tell you how I got into this first. I was not interested in exercise or fitness or physical sciences at all for the early majority of my life.

24:16I was homeschooled in North Idaho, K through 12, had very strict parents, didn't get out much, played violin for 13 years. I was president of the chess club. I like would sit in my room and read fantasy fiction and write tales about princesses and orcs and dragons. I was a total nerd. I got into tennis when I was 14. And I, for some reason, I was just really good with a racket in my hand and wound up playing for the local high school teams, playing for the USTA, the United States Tennis Association, got really good, got a really high ranking, wound up walking on to the college tennis team. Wow.

24:54And I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to major in at the time. Which college, by the way? LCSC, Lewis Clark State College, NAIA College in Lewson, Idaho. And I transferred up to University of Idaho. I had started eating healthy after being on a standard American diet most of my childhood, like fast food hamburgers and taking baked pizza and macaroni and cheese and just standard American diet. And I had gotten interested in fitness, like running up and down the hills behind my house. and I got my first little pair of 10 pound dumbbells from the sporting goods place down the road. So I'd also started training and paying more attention to my diet.

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25:27So I was getting somewhat interested in this whole realm. And then like, you know, three quarters of the student athletes at college, they were kinesiology or exercise science majors. So I was like, what the heck, I'll, I'll declare this as a major. And even though I got very little exposure to that during my largely classical Christian homeschooling education that didn't really have much of a focus in the physical sciences at all, I fell in love with all that stuff. Anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, biomechanics, organic chemistry, all of the science, like the hard science stuff, I loved it.

26:02And that surprised me, but I wound up getting so in love with that, that I went pre-med, I took the MCATs. I actually did get accepted to six different medical schools. and opted not to go to medical school. But all during college, I worked as a personal trainer. I worked as a nutritionist. I helped to manage the wellness center at University of Idaho. So I was immersed in this all through college. And then I got a job in hip and knee surgical sales after I got my master's degree in exercise physiology and biomechanics. So you have a master's. So you have an education backing. It wasn't just like a human.

26:36Oh, yeah. Yeah. A pretty large amount of education in this as a background. but the reason that I took that job in hip and knee surgical sales was there were two MD PhD programs one at Duke and one at UPenn that I did not get into that I really wanted to get into so I thought well I'm gonna go work in the private sector for a while and see if I can have a better resume for applying to medical school because my MCAT scores were good but I just you know I don't want to uh I don't want to say anything offensive but I guess as like a young white male at the time I had kind of an uphill battle to get into some of the schools that I really wanted that's not the only reason that I that does play a role so you didn't get into the school that you wanted so you went yeah that's why which school did you want Duke which one did you want Duke or UPenn yeah I was super interested in both of those because I wanted to do medicine and research okay and I got nine months into that job in hip and knee surgical sales and I hated it I hated being in hospitals none of the doctors seemed to enjoy their lives or their existence nobody told me it would be a good idea for me to go to medical school I missed fitness I missed nutrition I didn't like standing there with a laser pointer showing how an orthopedic surgeon had to like put$40 ,000 overpriced knee and hip implants and the people who would have been better served through exercise and dietary interventions.

27:51And one day I just quit and I walked into the gym across the street from the condo I was living in, in Liberty Lake, Washington and asked for a job at the Liberty Lake athletic club. And I got hired as the fitness manager there. And I had a good resume at the time just because I was loaded up with everything I'd done in college. And long story short, is a year into that and managing their fitness center, I met up with a doctor who was interested in creating a one-stop shop for sports medicine where we'd have like chiropractors and massage therapists and physical therapists. And I was going to be the director of sports performance, which I was super excited about.

28:26And so we opened this center and I operated that for five years. And during that time, I got voted as America's top personal trainer. This was in 2008. You did? Who even did that? The National Strength Conditioning Association, which is the Creme de la Creme Personal Training Search in the U.S. What's it called? NSCA. So how did they even know? How did they even know you existed? I was nominated by a bunch of the local physicians because of the work we were doing with the government's Exercises Medicine Initiative. So we were taking a lot of the patients and transforming them in our facility because we had the best of the best stuff.

29:01We were doing blood analysis, calorimetry analysis, VOT to max analysis, high speed video cameras, blood work, nutrition coaching, testing. Like I had like this was way before all these fancy biohacking facilities. But I was kind of like early adopter of a lot of that stuff. And so that's what kind of thrust me into the limelight, that 2008 nomination. And that's when I started doing more podcasting and writing and more online coaching and advising and investing in a lot of what I do now. But that's kind of like, long story short, my journey of nerded out homeschooler in the backwoods of Idaho to really starting a big health and fitness business.

29:41So basically 2008, when things started to really take off for you, when did Instagram start? When did social media become something? What year? No clue. I mean, when I started my podcast, there was maybe 100 podcast tops and like five in the health and fitness category. It was like you had to like code your RSS feed and submit it to Apple and wait two weeks. And if it was over like 100 megabytes or something like that, it would break. And it was wild, wild west of podcasting. That's crazy. And then now, okay, are you shocked? Like in the area of biohacking, I feel like you're most known for the biohacking stuff, right?

30:15Like, are you shocked at like how popular you became in that world? or you're not really shocked? The majority of my following for years was the triathlon and endurance sports world. I raced Ironman. I did the world championships in Hawaii six times. I coached. I had clients all over the world. I was repped by or I repped a wetsuit company and a shoe company and a bike company and race for Team Timex. So I was actually kind of like a big name in the triathlon world. Like endurance and like high performance. So I wrote like marathoning manuals and a lot of my early books were about triathlon training.

30:50And when I got out of triathlon, just because I got burnt out on that sport, I kind of just started to shift into what got me out of triathlon in the first place, right? Like burnt out, working out the wrong way, healthy on the outside, but not healthy on the inside, started doing blood work and biomarker evaluations and realized, Hey, there's a lot more to being healthy and living a long time than just like exercising your butt off and eating lean protein and egg whites. Right, exactly. So that's what kind of like got me down the road of like looking into what functional medicine is and naturopathic medicine and biohacking and recovery modalities and self quantification and all the things that I think now, if you piece them all together, can allow you to be a really well-functioning person without just, you know, taking the exercise and the nutrition box.

31:37Right. So basically how it, now I understand more. So you kind of were really into the high performance fitness world. And then as you kind of got older and as your career kind of evolved, you kind of then got into more of the longevity stuff or like from. No, because actually went from high performance, how to train really hard, how to train really, how to perfect the training. Then you got into like a lot of the crazy stuff. Like that's when I kind of recognized who you were. You were like trying out all sorts of wackadoo things. Methylene blue and laser lights and coffee enemas. All the things.

32:11And part of it too is like you just learn. And you tried everything. My podcast for the longest time was strictly a Q &A podcast. So I went from answering questions about like how do I bench press or how do I run a 5K to, well, I've already answered those questions in episode number 82 or 83. So I'm going to answer this question about which side do you lay on when you do a coffee enema. And I've never done one, so I better go do these and figure out and apply to the question because it's almost like my audience kept me evolving by asking all these weird questions. And as podcasts got bigger and bigger and the information era blew in, now there's all these different biohackers and fitness enthusiasts.

32:47And I still would get and do get asked, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? So it's like a constant evolution of not really trying to be weird or attention grabbing, but almost winding up doing that organically by replying to a bunch of weird viral questions like the 12, 3, 30 treadmill workout or whatever. and it's funny though but then i feel like you kind of like hit like you were doing a lot of that for a while and then like you kind of like leveled out and now talking to you even recently you see much more and don't don't be offended by this i mean this is in a nice way but more normal like you're more of a normal guy who does normal like you are really fit but you're not like as intensely crazy about all the extreme extreme as you were maybe three or four years ago is that accurate depends on your definition of extreme i'm definitely not like as i was racing spartan races and doing ironmans the bodybuilding that's true that's kind of all that crazy extreme stuff i don't do that anymore i think probably though you know because i still get you know hired to shoot videos for people or you know to whatever you know do methylene blue tongue sticking out shots or whatever and so there is a certain extent where like if you're an influencer if you're in social media or if you're trying to be a pattern interrupt you do have to step outside the box a little bit not totally like a talking head totally and you do all that but what i mean is like there was not a time there was a big chunk of time where like i would scroll and see like you would never be just like i don't it would always be something and like unusual and then i think i think i met you really in at the biohacking conference in london do you remember when that And I remember when you weren't talking to people, I was like, oh, where's Ben?

34:30I wanted to ask you a question. You were behind the stage. You had your legs up. You had this thing on your head. Do you remember? You were getting into everything. I felt like every second of your day was accounted for doing something that would be beneficial to your - I don't like to waste time. Yeah. I like that Oliver Berkman book, 4 ,000 Weeks. You have 4 ,000 Weeks to Live. Yeah. I don't grasp at straws. I mean, I just told you I'm a Christian. I believe I'm going to live forever and eternity. And so I'm not trying to do it all in this life. But I also don't like to waste time. I can't even sit through a movie.

35:04Right. You're not interested in small talk. Everything with you is like every moment is accounted for. Even right now, I'm self-conscious that I just opened the kimono. Two minutes ago, I started thinking, have I told the audience anything in the past five minutes besides talking about myself? And so I'll start thinking that way because I'm like, I don't want to waste their time. You know, I didn't talk about sitting in his bed in Idaho reading fantasy fiction. No, but I actually don't think it's I think people would be curious, like how how you became so intensely, like just knowledgeable to like such a crazy level.

35:41Like, I know if I ask you, there's nothing really under the sun of health or fitness. You may not you always give an answer that is way more detailed than anybody I've ever talked to in my life. ever it's i that's why i and you may be it's maybe your opinion me but people don't agree with you but at least like there's like i know that it was there's something that you either read about it thought about it tried like you have like experience with it yeah so like and by the way you've given everybody i'm still taking my notes okay so now i understand how the evolution is these guys came to give us an iv by the way so let them like put us into like have you ever gotten hooked up to an iv while you're recording no podcasts no try to keep conversation flow No, this should be interesting.

36:21I've done it before. The only part that sucks is if they miss a vein or something and then they start poking you. That'll be really uncomfortable. Let's hope they're good. Yeah. Should we usher them in? Yeah, let's try. I mean, this is because of you, by the way. We're going to be getting the, I think we're getting the NR-niagen IV, which is vitro-niagen. Have you had it before? Yeah. Long story short is you and I were both at an event for founders and executives and entrepreneurs called Founderland. And they were doing IVs there. and I met one of the doctors at the after party. And I told her at some point we were doing this podcast.

36:57I said, we should get an IV during the show. And then it just happened. And next thing you know, I've actually, I think I, well, I got this IV one time before. It's like the NAD IV, but it's like NAD, but easier. It's nicotinamide riboside to get less of like a flushing reaction. And your gut doesn't flip and it's better absorption. And it's shorter with arguably very similar effects on things like sleep deprivation. and energy and mitochondrial health. Wow, you should be a spokesperson. I know. I am now. How long does it actually last in your body, though, to get an NR? I don't know what the half-life NR is.

37:31Do you believe in, like, do you get a lot of IVs? Are you like an IV person? Are they coming in or? Okay, cool. Yeah, I got a stem cell IV yesterday. Yesterday? Yeah. Where, at here? At Joy Kong's office up in Malibu. Really? Are you able to get this many IVs and be okay? We'll find out. If any veins bust open. Oh my God. I think I'll be okay. Excess IVs can cause scarring of the vasculature if the needles are repeatedly placed in the same location over and over again. But the idea of like if you're using a different delivery portal, there's no reason you can't get like stem cells one day and NAD one day and a multivitamin cocktail the next day.

38:11So isn't also, aren't these IVs really good for brain, like cognition and focus and brain fog? NR ones. Yeah. Yeah. And also for the mitochondrial health. Yeah. As a matter of fact, my favorite stack for sleep deprivation is NR, NAD, or NMN, which are all just like NAD precursors, and creatine. Because when you're sleep deprived, two things happen. You get less ATP in the brain and creatine. The phosphagen and creatine can help to replenish that. And then the NAD assists with the cellular repair mechanisms that should have occurred when you're sleep deprived. And so, yeah, I mean, coffee and energy drinks and all that stuff and kind of band-aid sleep deprivation.

38:47but using about 10, higher than what you use for strength and power, like 10 to 20 grams of creatine a day. And that will give you disaster pants if you take it all at once. So you can do like four or five gram portions spread throughout the day if you're sleep deprived. You don't need to do this every day. And then NAD, IV patch, oral capsule, whatever. Okay, wait, so that's actually a good clip. Fantastic for sleep deprivation. Okay, so say that one more time because I want to make sure people get that. So if you are sleep deprived, here is a cocktail that you should do that's very effective.

39:17Go ahead. Say it again. If you're sleep deprived, then coffee, five-hour energy, green tea, all these central nervous system stimulants can kind of short-term jack you up, but NAD combined with creatine, that stack is incredible because it helps to simulate a lot of what you would have gotten during sleep, ATP restoration in the brain and cellular repair mechanisms. Okay, this is my question. Can you take NAD, if I just took like a truniogen supplement and a creatine scoop, that would work? A couple capsules, although I recommend more than you'd usually take. So you take like four capsules of like the truniogen and then you do 20 grams of the creatine, but you split that into four or five gram portions throughout the day.

40:02Can't that bloat you to take that much creatine? That's why you wouldn't want to do it every day, but you also shouldn't be sleep deprived every day. That's true. Deeper issues to address. Are you not wearing any trackers anymore because of all the EMFs? I wear this ring. Oh, you do? Yeah. I wear a ring. Rings don't produce an appreciable amount of EMF. Yeah. Like a class three Bluetooth signal is not a big, like maybe if you had it next to your head, like an AirPod inside your ear all the time, some people say it affects red blood cell flow and can cause clumping or heating of tissue. But Bluetooth is way less important of a fish to fry compared to like Wi-Fi and radio frequencies from phones.

40:40etc so i use a cheapo actually just replaced it my last one pooped out after six years but i use a cheapo like 30 timex watch and a ring and a blood glucose monitor oh so you do wear the blood glucose monitor why not because i don't know by this point after using one for two years what does and does not spike my blood glucose but just because what gets measured gets managed i'm less likely to like blow through a bunch of dark chocolate trail mix on an airplane if i know i gotta look at the levels later on. I love that line, by the way. Or drink a 100-calorie cane sugar-infused caramel latte, high-protein iced coffee.

41:13This one made me hate. Slay's going to hate me. With false advertising on the front of it. Why? It says lactose-free energy, but it's got skim milk in it. However, they added lactase enzymes, so the lactase enzymes digest the skim milk. Oh my God, I'm going to get fired. I'm just kidding. It's not that bad of a... That's good that they put lactase in there along with the skim milk. I would rather... Look at this one. If I can wave a magic wand, I'd rather they be using regular milk because all the studies on the benefits of dairy tend to be much stronger with full fat dairy compared to low fat or fat free dairy.

41:47Right. Full fat is better. The fats in dairy, especially for the metabolic function, for the satiety, for brain function and for bone health. If you go with full fat instead of low fat or fat free. So it's kind of like back to eggs. I'd rather you eat eggs with the egg yolk rather than egg whites. I'd rather you have chicken with the chicken skin and the gristle and the bone than have just pure skim milk. It's more than just calories. And obviously we're talking about calories. Yeah, it's skim milk, but there is a hundred calories in this. And they do use low calorie sweeteners. Looks like stevia.

42:21And yeah. So if I'm looking at ingredient label, I do like to see stevia or allulose or D-ribose or erythritol. if people's guts can handle a sugar alcohol, then like acetyl sulfamide potassium or sucralose. But when I'm looking at an ingredient label, this is actually pretty clean. I would give this like an eight on a one to 10 scale. But I would say if you're concerned about like fat-free milk and isolating the proteins from the fats, you know, like either a nut milk, like an almond milk or a coconut milk or an oat milk without the cane sugar added, or just like using whole milk would be a little bit better.

42:56But isn't that better than having, so by the way, Slate, Ben said eight out of 10 so that's still very good yeah it is it is good and for the average joe who's not ben who is a fitness fanatic health you know health phenom it's a really good thing to have because at least it's getting 20 grams of protein into somebody who otherwise would not be having that yeah and it's better than having you know a milkshake at mcdonald's right i would drink this honestly if I weren't myself a little bit lactose intolerant and I know what if I can have dairy if it's fermented and this is the case for many people if you ferment the dairy if you do like a good fermented yogurt or a kefir or those really be the two primary delivery mechanisms for fermented yogurt you can do better if you're lactose intolerant you can also do better on milks that have lower amounts of lactose sugar like goat milk camel milk etc but what did you say goat milk like a lot of i raise goats so i we do have goat milk and how about camel you said camel milk it's a thing you can find it yeah stop it yeah okay okay yak milk where do you buy camel milk uh the camel milk company out of california is where i've gotten it in the past from a camel yeah it's from a camel yeah surprising do you drink it goes from a camel i have but it's also really expensive.

44:19I wouldn't. How much is a, how much is a liter of milk? I don't know because I don't really buy it anymore, but it is better for the body. Why? Cow's milk because of a few reasons, lower amounts of lactose, a smaller protein that's more bioavailable than the larger protein found in cow's milk. And also a lot of cows are bred now for A1 protein instead of A2 protein. So when you see at the grocery store that you can buy A2 milk, that is milk that tends to produce a little bit less of an immune response in the body. And camel's milk and goat's milk are naturally more like an A2 or they have less of the A1-based protein.

44:53Because goat's milk, goat milk, I see all the time. So are you suggesting to people that they should maybe switch from maybe even their almond milk or their oat milk to a goat milk? Would that be healthier? Well, the nice thing about nut milks, again, if you are adding a bunch of, you know, cane sugar to them and thickeners and fillers, is that a lot of people who just don't do well with milk in general do better with that and they're lower calorie in most cases. There's some that are higher calorie, like I think macadamia nut milk is the highest. But one issue is if you want to be careful with your calorie count, a nut milk is a better substitute compared to a dairy milk.

45:30But how about the carrageens in them and all that stuff like that? Yeah. And you can see on this can, they say no carrageenan, right? That is a filler that can upset a lot of people's stomachs. So yeah. And it says lactose-free, sucralose-free, erythritol free but i i don't want to throw them under the bus when i said false advertising it's technically they have an enzyme in their lactase that allows you to digest the lactose so it's not lactose free right but it's more like they have the carrier agent in there that helps you digest lactose so so technically by the time it gets into your stomach it is lactose free okay that okay theoretically thank you they're gonna they're gonna hate me now for even bringing that podcast that i don't care about but this one is about but this one has erythritol in it which can be a little bit like if people have like small intestine bacterial overgrowth from my free i don't know i don't know it's not bad though it's oxygenated yeah okay this is the next one this is magic mind i love hydrogen infused water that's good that's good i got that for you okay and then these magic minds i want you i i'm blind so i can't even read the ingredients i do know there's amazing stuff in there my carrots let me see it okay good see all your pretty small so magic mind Nulixer, matcha green tea, agave.

46:40And it's a very small bottle. So a lot of people see agave and they'll be like, oh, that's just a - 100%. A man for a sweetener. And agave does have a higher amount of fructose in it. The thing with fructose, fruit juices, fruit sugars, et cetera, is a lot of people have vilified them. The idea that fructose is a poison. I think Dr. Robert Lustig introduced that concept in his book about calories. Do you believe that though? So it is true that fructose can elevate triglycerides and contribute to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but only in a case in which the liver and muscle glycogen stores are already topped off.

47:15That's at which point fructose starts to spill over and cause issues. So if I'm burning 2000 calories a day and I'm drinking 2000 calories a day of Coke, and that's all that I'm drinking, I would theoretically not elevate my triglycerides or get a lot of the issues associated with fructose because I'm at a net calorie balance. I wouldn't advise it because you're also going to be like, you're going to have low nutrient density and you're not getting enough protein, et cetera, if you're just drinking Coke. But if people see agave or fructose or high fructose corn syrup, sometimes there's some harsh chemicals and things like that used to make that.

47:47So that's a whole separate side issue. But the idea of fructose in general is that if you're a physically active person and you're not overeating and you're having fruit juices, fruit in a blender, agave in a drink or whatever, it's usually not an issue unless you're eating too many calories, at which point fructose can become an issue. Right. I mean, this is the whole conversation about like people are like, fruit does not get you fat, please. I mean, this nonsense. No. Fruit's not going to get you fat. Yeah, if you eat like everything else, plus you eat nine pounds of grapes, like maybe I do sometimes, that can be not the greatest.

48:21Right. And if the fruit is sweet and has a high glycemic index, which grapes do, long term, you're getting so many insulin surges due to that high sugar content that you could create a long term state of insulin insensitivity. And then you get some appetite control issues. You get some metabolic issues that long term could cause problems. Even if you're not overeating the grapes or fruit, you're just eating enough to spike your blood sugar repeatedly throughout the day. How long did the stem cell one take yesterday? Like an hour. And what kind of stem cells were they? The first thing she did was remove a bunch of my blood and ozonate it and then inject that ozonated blood back into my body.

49:01What? Which is kind of like an antiviral, antibacterial, oxygenates the blood. Then she did laser lights, which sounds kind of funky and weird. This is the stuff I was telling you. The light helps to direct the stem cells or activate the stem cells using photonic absorption of the light so they're more efficacious. Then after all that and a few other little things like hydrogen water and some peptides, et cetera, then she did the stem cells as the icing on the cake. Okay, so how was that different than our friend Dr. Kahn's stem cells back in? Well, if you get stem cells in the U.S., they're usually not expanded.

49:41So that means that they haven't grown them to increase the amount of mesenchymal stem cells, which are the active stem cells that would theoretically be rejuvenative or have some type of anti-aging qualities. And if you go overseas, muse stem cells, I don't know if those fall into the category of expanded cells, but that's a brand new form of stem cells that not a lot of people know about. It's a multi-lineage undifferentiated stem cell extract is what I believe MUSE stands for. Multi-lineage undifferentiated stem cell extract. And the reason that that's interesting is because normally stem cells called ISPC stem cells have a high mesenchymal stem cell count, but they also have very low histocompatibility.

50:30histocompatibility, meaning a lot of people have an inflammatory or an immune response that can be unhealthy or dangerous or very uncomfortable for people. And the immune cells do have a high amount of histocompatibility, meaning if you were to get an infusion with them or an injection into a joint, there's a very low likelihood that you're going to feel crappy afterwards, but they have a very high amount of healing capacity. Issue is you do have to travel internationally and they're expensive. However, from what I understand, they require fewer expansions than a normal expanded stem cell. And every time you expand the stem cell lineage, you run the risk of mutations, you run the risk of impurities, and you run the risk of them causing issues in a patient in which they're injected.

51:15So if you get stem cells in the US, they're unexpanded, but they're also arguably a little bit safer unless you're getting something like, let's say, amuse cell. You're talking about it's safer internationally or safer? Domestically, if you're concerned about histocompatibility, because the FDA is pretty strict about how stem cells are regulated. Actually, I don't think they're technically regulated by the FDA, but they're considered to be almost like a pharmaceutical drug or they're treated a little bit like one. They're not quite classified as a drug, even though they're trying to classify them as a drug.

51:49But there's so much regulation in the U.S. that you do have a lower risk of side effect issues, but also a lower stem cell count. So you're getting less of the good stuff. Arguably the question is how much less of the good stuff for it to be an issue. Now, what I did was simply a stem cell infusion. This is an anti-aging or longevity or brain health play, right? Stem cells straight into the bloodstream. They go throughout the body. It's like a shotgun approach. If you were to go to, let's say, doctor, like you just mentioned, Dr. Khan, like he has clinics in Cabo and Dubai and Toronto, he will do stem cell infusions, but he also does injections into different joints using ultrasound guided imaging.

52:29And this is something you can do for like back treatment or a knee treatment or shoulder treatment. And even though you can also do that in the U.S., the idea of regenerative medicine using safe expanded stem cells overseas is a good idea, but it's going to be a lot more expensive and inconvenient than doing it in the U.S. So there's benefits to both. And I bounce back and forth. I've done international stem cell treatments. I've done domestic. If you're literally just in it for anti-aging and you want to do like, you know, like the doctor I was with yesterday, Dr. Joy Kong, she's like 53 years old and she looks like she's 40 and she's been doing quarterly stem cell infusions.

53:06So every three months for like eight years or something like that. And that's, you know, that's not something out of the reach of someone who just wanted to go to a clinic and get a stem cell infusion every quarter. How much is it? I don't know. Of course not. Yeah. Yeah. I know if you were to go overseas and do the full meal deal, like the super duper fancy stuff and you were to get like gene therapy and T cell therapy and stem cell therapy, that's the whole anti-aging package that a deal does. And I think that's 50K. But it gets these IVs though, right? You get the IVs with that. If you're doing stem cells, you want them to go into a really stress-free, low inflammation environment.

53:43So everything from like eating a really clean diet, avoiding alcohol, grounding and earthing and exercise, but not too much. And, you know, avoiding toxins in your food. And, you know, like really babying your body before and after is better because essentially if you think about it, you just injected a whole bunch of fragile new baby cells into your body. And so you don't want to go like have a couple of old fashions afterwards or something like that. Right. So basically you can't drink, but you said also like easy exercise. You don't want to stress your body is basically your point. right? Yeah.

54:11And this kind of harkens back to the idea of like the Goldilocks zone of exercise, right? There's a researcher named Dr. James O 'Keefe, and he's identified that if you exceed about 75 minutes per week of vigorous intensity exercise, 150 per week of moderate intensity exercise, the potential for plaque accumulation, atherosclerosis, and inflammation begins to exceed the benefits of the exercise. And there's a lot of people, like people who are doing CrossFit every day or training for an Ironman or a marathon or whatever, who are definitely exceeding those numbers. So you wouldn't want to be over-training.

54:43You wouldn't want to be over-drinking. You wouldn't want to have tons of exposure to like, you know, EMF and Wi-Fi and stress and, you know, all these unhealthy things, especially if you're focusing on stem cell therapy. So do you, have you seen any kind of benefit by you doing this? How often are you doing these types of, this is not stem cells. This is not, it's an NR, Niagen IV. We can pretend they're stem cells just to be cool. That's to be cool. Yeah. How often have you done the stem cells? And do you see any benefit? Have you seen any benefit? I have probably done like 20 stem cell therapies, everything from joints to infusions.

55:19And I don't know what 42-year-old Ben would be like not having done those. So I don't really have a good comparison. Yeah. But I can tell you that I feel really good. I don't have a lot of like the aging issues that it seems like a lot of my friends are having to deal with. I feel like I've maintained a great amount of youthfulness and I would attribute some of that to the stem cells. I've been able to fix some worn and torn joints like a knee with stem cells. And I mean, I feel like I'm 18 years old, so I feel pretty good. You know, it's funny. I would I'm going to say that you look younger now than you did when I first met you even.

55:53There you go. But I don't know why that is. It's like I think it's a it's everything or maybe it's just genetics. I think a lot of this stuff, just like anything in the biohacking or the health, it stacks, right? Like I go on the sunshine, but not too much UVA. And I put on good, clean sunscreen if I'm going to do that. I use red light therapy. I do if I'm going to have a high UVA exposure. And now I recently did a podcast about this. Toxins, poor air, bright overhead lights, airline radiation, sunlight coming in through a window where it's blocking some of the UVB. All of these things dictate that a small amount of low SPF sunscreen is not a bad idea.

56:27a lot of the time, especially for fragile thin skin, like the face. So I've been using, so I have sunscreen on right now. Like I've been using a lot more of it and I use the Young Goose products. Basically every two months I use their anti-aging package. It's like six different bottles plus sunscreen. So it's like a cleanser, moisturizer, serum, and those are all based on peptides. They've got a bunch of transdermally bioavailable peptides. And that's probably, I would say the, it's made the biggest impact on my skin health is when I started using those products. Well, you look really good. Thanks.

56:57So what other things would you say is good for your overall youthfulness skin? Well, I do. How about this? Do you mean brothers and sisters? Yeah. Do they look like you? Two brothers and two sisters. Do they have your skin? I would say I'm self-conscious, like comparing myself to my brothers and sisters. I think my skin has aged less than theirs possibly, but I don't know. Have you gotten stem cells in your thorough analysis of side-by-side analysis. Well, maybe you should. Yeah. I have had my skin treated with stem cells also. Yeah. Has that worked? I think it does make a difference. I think that if you're looking at beauty using good, clean skincare products and taking advantage of the newer developments and things like peptide absorption for skin health is a good idea.

57:40So I like that the company, for example, Young Goose is one that I use. Although I found out from Joy Kong last night that she's now making a skin cream. I've got a couple in my backpack that she puts umbilical stem cells and peptides into. I even ask her how much it costs. It's probably like the world's most expensive skin cream. Can I have one of them? But I have it. And she's just up the road. I would give it to you, but she told me that I'm supposed to do like a before after and use the two different bottles for a month. Well, you can't look any younger now. Your name could actually be Benjamin Button because you literally look like you're like 22.

58:14Benjamin Greenfeld or Benjamin Button. And then a clay mask once a week combined with red light therapy daily. I think red light therapy for collagen and elastin for the face is fantastic. The clay mask helps to draw out toxins, moisturizes. I do a derma roller before I do the clay mask. So I'm getting some of that dermal abrasion. I think if I were to go to a beauty clinic and do a microneedling protocol, that would be better than derma rolling. But I don't really have the time or the desire to do that. So wait, hold on. You're way too fast. God, I got to get my bat. Okay. So you're telling me you do a clay mask how often?

58:45Once a week. Okay. Which brand are you using that? OliTora. All the way down to like, it's got like six day old baby goat derived colostrum in it. Like you read the ingredient label and you're like, are you kidding me? Like just crazy stuff. Colostrum and all these different like antioxidants and nutrients, like face food. How much is that? I don't know. I think it's probably like around 50 bucks for like a little. Think of it. Can of it. Yeah. Okay. So wait, you put the clay mask on and then you put the red light on top for how long? 20 minutes. Okay. And then I actually walk around for a little while longer and just let the clay dry just while I'm doing my thing.

59:20And I go shower it off. And that's once. Okay. Yep. Okay. Give me some other stuff you do for your skin. In addition to the clay mask, I do a scrub once a week. So twice per week, my skin is getting abrased. Once with the derma roller, plus the clay mask, once with the scrub. You wouldn't want to get skin turnover all the time because then you're just going to wear away the skin layers too quickly and have a very, very fragile face. But scrub once a week, clay mask once a week with the derma roller. Young Goose products, the moisturizer, toner, serum, their whole suite, once in the morning, once in the evening.

59:51And then I probably had stem cells on my face three times. Three times? Did Dr. Kahn do it to you? Everything I'm saying is nowhere near what, you know, there's like biohackers like freaking Brian Johnson who are doing a full laser resurfacing crazy. I was going to ask you about him, though. Yeah. Finish what you're going to say, then I'm going to ask you about him. So did you do with Dr. Kahn the stem cells on your face? No, I did that with Dr. Adelson. I did Dr. Adelson's full body stem cell procedure. I've done that twice in Park City, Utah. And they go toe to head. They do literally hair, skin, nails, genitals, every joint up and down the back.

1:00:24And I mean, you're like, you're literally under anesthetic induced surgery for like four hours. And they do everything. I remember you were talking to that Dr. Adelson at the biohacking conference in London about this whole stem cell. That was in 2020 or something you did that, right? Yeah. And you did that again? I've done it twice. Yep. Why? Why do you need to do it twice? Well, as you age, you do decrease your bioavailable stem cell pool. The first time that I did it, he used my own stem cells. He tapped my hips and used my own bone marrow and made like a bone marrow soup with stem cells and then injected that into all my joints, skin, everything.

1:01:03And then he came out with a new protocol in which he uses umbilical stem cells. and because of the reasons I was talking about earlier, you get a little bit less of like an immune response, cytokine inflammatory response to those who recover faster. And I wanted to see what that second protocol that he does was like. So I went down there and did it again, both times that I've done it, like you feel kind of like you got hit by a truck for a few days because you're kind of sore and you got everything injected. And then within a couple of weeks, you start to feel like Superman, you recover faster.

1:01:33Uh, your erections are better. Your skin looks better. Like your hair, skin, nails, everything grows faster. So it definitely turns back the clock. And how much is that? Like if you're getting full head to toe? That I think is 70 ,000 to do. Yeah. It's a pretty big procedure. And how long does it last? I know you did it twice, but how long does it do you have? I mean, theoretically, the benefits would last for your life. But I would say, you know, if you were doing this a full on anti-aging play, this would be something you could do like every four or five years. You don't have to do it. I mean, if you If you did it just once, you'd see huge benefits in turning back the clock.

1:02:06So how long apart did you do both treatments? About five years. Five years. Does Dr. Kahn do that one too? He doesn't do the full body one. Dr. Allison's one of the only guys I know of in the world who specializes in, because it's a pretty intensive procedure and there's two doctors working on you at the same time. And it's kind of one of those things where, hey, let's just shotgun everything. And not a lot of doctors will do that. But Dr. Kahn is very good at joints. He's very good at back. He also does, like I said, gene therapy, T killer cell therapy. What is gene therapy, really? He does like a vagal nerve block where he resets your nervous system with an injection to the vagus nerve.

1:02:40Like he has some cool tricks up to his sleeve that you can't do in the States. So you can travel internationally and get some crazy stuff. What does that do, though, what you just said? Which one? The one where you like the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the nerve that kind of snakes through your whole body, innervates the pacemaker cells of your heart. It helps you to manage stress if it's well-toned. There are things like chanting, singing, humming, gargling, cold water face dunks, even electrical vagus nerve stimulators you can hold up to your neck, all of which work to specifically increase your heart rate variability, like lower stress by toning the vagus nerve and increasing your ability to have good balance between your fight or flight nervous system and your rest or digest nervous system.

1:03:23That's basically how addressing your vagus nerve can have benefit. lower stress, improves digestion, improves cardiovascular function, improves focus, et cetera. Like that's the benefits of the vagus nerve. The more stress that you're under, the more likely it is that you have poor vagal nerve tone or poor nervous system balance. Now, if you wanted to just say, okay, I'm going to roll up my sleeves and use the big guns on this thing. That's where you could literally go to a doctor. And this would be normally something for extreme PTSD or trauma or just stress that someone cannot manage at all.

1:03:53That won't go away, that you would do this. You wouldn't normally just like wander into a doctor and have them jam a needle right behind your carotid artery. Right. Because it's a delicate procedure. And often because there's some throats falling involved, you do one side one day, then you wait a couple days or at least a day to do the other side. But you're supposed to do both sides. Is it dangerous? It's also known as a stellate ganglia nerve block. It could be dangerous if the person doing it, it's kind of like if you would get a brain surgery. You'd preferably want the surgeon who's done like thousands of them.

1:04:19Yeah. The person every once in a while does them. Adeel does a lot of them. Another doctor, Dr. Matt Cook in San Jose. He does them. Dr. Avi Herskovich, also in, he's in San Francisco. He does them. So there's a few people you can go to to get them done. And you sit up after having had the injection and you feel like you've like smoked a joint and had a glass of wine all at once and your stress levels just melt away. And it feels like that for at least a couple of weeks. Just a couple of weeks? Yeah. But think about this. If you open that window, it's almost like ketamine therapy for addiction, right?

1:04:53Like if you do ketamine therapy and you realize after ketamine therapy, you've got a window for a few days where if you avoid that thing that you were addicted to, which is easier to do after the ketamine therapy, then you can break that addictive cycle. And it's kind of like with stress. If you do a procedure like that and your body suddenly receives the message that it's safe and down-regulates the sympathetic nervous system, it's going to allow you to be able to be less stressed even after the acute effects wear off. Does that make sense? It does. But eventually it comes back though, unless it's managed.

1:05:24Yeah. You're not getting like anything. It's not going to be a bandaid. Yeah. Like it sounds like all of these things are just like they're short lived. They're short term. Like if you get on an Ozempic and you're going to control your calories and you're going to lose weight. But once you get off it, if you haven't developed healthy eating patterns during that time or use the Ozempic as training wheels to do so, say, oh, this is what it feels like to not be hungry. This is what it feels like to sit down and not eat all the food. This is what it feels like to have one plate at the buffet because I don't feel like I need more than if you were to wean off a drug like that.

1:05:54You would theoretically, if you built the mindfulness during, get to the point where you'd use it as training wheels and then you don't need it anymore. You know, it's like even like my wife and I did freaking like MDMA couples therapy. And that was the training wheels that it took for us to like really have long, deep, meaningful, honest, transparent discussions, which we now have without drugs. Doing it. Yeah. And it's like sometimes I don't think every couple, you know, for the rest of all time used to go out and do MDMA therapy to have honest discussions. But my wife and I were at the point where we just developed, you know, almost like a barrier to doing that.

1:06:28And now we can have great dates and sit in bed and talk for a long time. We don't have to like go use MDMA beforehand. Right. So a lot of these things are like training wheels. No, it makes perfect sense. That's actually a really true point. I know a lot of people, a lot of people, my friends who swear by that in terms of for couples therapy, because it gives you an opportunity to like open up the, or it loses your inhibitions that you would otherwise have after so many years of doing the same thing over and over again. Exactly. When did you guys do that? Like how long ago? We did it six times over the course of three years.

1:07:03Last time we did it was six years ago. Really? Yeah. And it made a big difference. Pretty big difference. I'm cautious saying that because I don't want a bunch of couples who are having issues to feel like they need to go do drugs or plant medicines together to get over that barrier. If I could, it was very difficult, kind of like what would I look like with stem cells versus without. It's very difficult to rewind the clock, but I think we could have made an even more concerted effort to just talk through our problems and have honest discussions without that. but that's just the way that things panned out.

1:07:36But I don't like, I'm, I have twin 16 year old sons, right? Like I will be coaching them and training them and talking with them many times once they do get engaged and they're preparing for the months leading up to marriage to talk with them about how to have honest, open discussions with their significant other and how to have, you know, evening prayer meetings like my wife and I have now and how to do quarterly retreats like my wife and I do now. So that hopefully they and their wife don't get, you know, like what, like we did like 14 years into our relationship and realize, oh, we have a lot between us.

1:08:09Cause I mean, I don't know about you, but my parents didn't like train me that much to be married. A lot of this stuff I just had to figure out on my own. So for me, I want to do a better job training my sons on what to expect during marriage and how to navigate discussions and living with another person, hopefully for the rest of your life. Did you date a lot? Because you said you were very much like you're homeschooled until all these years. Did you, have a big chunk of time that you dated people before you got married or did you get your wife one of your i um probably dated less than the average normal traditional public school kid just because there weren't a lot of girls around yeah i was gonna say prom was very lonely yeah dancing with myself did you go to prom even i probably had like eight girlfriends before i well i met my wife in second grade sunday school so i've known her for a really long time but i didn't started like going out with her until senior junior year of college.

1:09:02And up till that point, we'd been hanging out for a couple of years and been best friends before we even fell in love and started to, to go out together. And she went to like a local classical Christian school called Logos. And also by the nature of going to a classical Christian school, also, you know, fooled around less, didn't have a lot of boyfriends, et cetera. So we, we relative to the general population probably had fewer partners than the average person. And we didn't have sex at all until we got married. You didn't? No, no. That was just something that we committed to each other. And I promised to her parents when I asked them if I could marry her and I wanted to stay true to my word.

1:09:43So. Really? Yeah. Which was really hard. Oh my God. I can't believe that. It was was great yeah i was gonna ask you did it turn out okay yeah oh so for a year and a half you guys dated then did you guys do anything like how does it work when you have no sex are you doing nothing else are you kissing even like what are you doing everything but like what do you do we got maybe to second base so and then you guys got married oh yeah by the way that's become a big thing now have you heard about this whole celibate uh this out this whole uh celibacy trend that's become hot right now have you heard about this no what is it i don't know like my friend emily told me about it i don't know what it is you mean like guys going into monk mode and just like living in their basement and working out i don't know no no no i don't know i'm gonna ask her again it was like something that became like trendy for like a hot minute i don't know if it's still happening to be honest but celibacy like waiting until you're married to have sex like that definition of celibacy i don't i don't know if it was a way into i don't know if it was waiting until you got married or if it was a trend where people weren't having sex.

1:10:49I got to find out. I mean, the reason I think it's a good idea is the same reason that I think just like serially dating or treating sex as a casual event is potentially risky for long-term relationship and societal stability. I think that if you set up sex as something sacred and you set up marriage as something sacred and you don't get into marriage having developed the habit of as soon as something a partner does annoys you, you can ditch them and move on to the next person or try on some new flavors, then you're going to be more likely to commit to a long-term relationship, to have children, to build legacy, to build generational wealth, to set the foundation for what made this country great.

1:11:23And I think that even though it sounds kind of trite, if you have a bunch of young people sleeping around and not treating sex as sacred, getting a marriage, not understanding what a sacred committed relationship, even when the other person that you're with is not perfect actually feels like and looks like, then you can create a lot of long-term societal and familial instability. And so I think the idea of celibacy lends itself better to the foundations of a great society than the opposite. You know, it's funny that that is, if you, I'm sure you've noticed that we're living in a society now where people are not getting married anymore.

1:11:59There's no really, like people aren't even dating properly. People, men are just like watching porn. Women are like, there's no men to even be date, like for women to even date because apps and everything else has now ruined how people even socialize. They don't even know how to socialize. They don't know how to date and they're not interested in relationships because everything is just about like a swipe to the next person. Right. Like it's actually really sad how like we've evolved into this strange place where people aren't even having, they're not getting married. They're not having children.

1:12:29You know what I mean? Honestly, like I, I hate to say it's almost like the lesser of two evils, but I'd rather let's say like young men who right now are spending a disproportionate amount of time on social media, playing video games in mom's basement, whatever, not to stereotype too much. I'd rather them be going out and doing dangerous things, jumping off cliffs, partying, drinking, et cetera, than I would a generation of young men who live in their parents' basements and don't get married till they're 40. And like, I'd almost rather see young people doing dangerous things than I would them doing nothing at all.

1:13:02Absolutely. Of course. And if you've seen the decline of what's happened since people were born after 1995 actually what was happening is 83 % of the things that we used to do we don't do anymore like go out and date like get in trouble like jump off cliffs bike ride just basics right because people are now stuck on their screens yeah my son's graduated high school two months ago and I kicked him out of the house really they're in they're in uh I think they made it to Arizona so far they got a used car they don't get a dime from me and they're just off driving around the country for well they're supposed to be home by Thanksgiving They got a tent for the top of their car.

1:13:36They're like parking by the side of the road and camping and getting water from springs and eating oatmeal and beef jerky and just learning how life works and getting out of the house for a little while to just go explore, which I think is a great idea. That's so amazing. They're ready for it. So you basically said to them, you're leaving the house, come back around Thanksgiving and go fend for yourself. They knew it was coming. It wasn't just like they graduated and I said, leave. We have a whole Greenfield family constitution. rites of passages. There's everything in there. What we do for Easter, what we do for Thanksgiving, what we do for Christmas, what time we meet for meditation in the morning, what time we have dinner at night.

1:14:13Everybody's all the way down, like everybody's end of life and memorial services planned and what we would want at our funeral in terms of like songs sung and the dress code all the way back to what each family's power animal is and symbol and hex color and font and what the family crest looks like and what each element of the family logo represents. And the family logo is on the flags outside our front door and our throw pillows and the hoodies and hats that we wear out to dinner and everything. But in that Greenfield family constitution, which by the way, having a constitution like this is a great way to back to building generational wealth, building a sense of pride in the family name, building a legacy that can be passed on to my sons and then improved upon in their families.

1:14:57So there's a lot of benefits to having this idea of almost branding your family, like your brand of business. But in that constitution are rites of passage, particularly for young Greenfield men, meaning when they turn 13, they have a rite of passage into adolescence. Three days out in the wilderness, backpack, blanket, knife. They have a wilderness survival instructor who they've worked with since they were six. And he oversaw that rite of passage. When they come out, there's a ceremony, there's a fire. There's a feast with friends and family, and that marks that they are now adolescents and they're given more responsibility and chores at home.

1:15:34They're treated less like kids. They pitch in more with family dinners, and they're just expected to be a greater contributory member to the family at that point. When they are 16, and again, this is baked into the constitution, so they've known this was coming since they were eight years old. They have to leave the house for three months. It could be an international trip. It could be a domestic trip. It could be whatever, but they just can't be under mom and dad's roof for three months. They just have to go out and fly the nest. And do you give them money or no money? No money. No. But they've had time to think about this and save up and budget.

1:16:04And they know how much they can spend every day to be able to not drain their bank accounts. So they do all of that. And then at age 17 is the final rite of passage into adulthood, at which point they'll be like stamped, hopefully is ready to be contributory adults to society and ready to go off and marry and start their own families or whatever it is they want to do. So age 17 is a 10 day vision quest. Uh, that solo in the wilderness, uh, no food, no water, unless they can collect it themselves while they're out there again, backpack, wool blanket, knife, uh, you know, and a full on, you know, facing your own fears for 10 days and being alone and, and, uh, you know, doing almost like a native American style vision quest.

1:16:43Who, who put this whole thing together? Your, your dad or. I did. And I did after, you know, some of my podcasts and some of my interests has been in the realm of parenting, education, raising responsible adults. I've learned a lot from different people who I've interviewed about legacy, about rites of passage. And I wove all of this in the constitution together just based off of years of learning from people who have done similar things with their children and just kind of like borrowing from the best of the best. This is amazing. I wrote a whole book about this, by the way. You did? Yeah, it's called Boundless Parenting.

1:17:17It's like you have the blueprint for biohacking in your lap. I also have the blueprint for parenting. That's like the tools of Titans for parents. I interviewed like 32 of the top parents that I know, these super successful entrepreneurs with super impactful children who are already out changing the world in politics and business and tech. And so I asked every parent the same set of 32 questions. My wife has like 50 pages in there, 70 pages of advice. Then there's all these 700 pages of just like deep in the trenches parenting advice. What was the top three pieces of advice that really stuck with you that would help build mentally strong children?

1:17:58There's one page in the book that's like common threads, right? Things that would pop up over and over again consistently from parent to parent. The biggest one was more is caught than taught. More is caught than taught. Meaning no matter how much you tell your kids that they need to eat healthy food and that they need to get outside and move more and that they shouldn't have their devices at the table. if they see you like sneaking in Ben and Jerry's, you know, multiple nights per week and sitting inside of your desk all day without taking a break and having eight hours of sedentary time during the day and whipping out your phone like five times during dinner to check on that one last important email, they're going to catch way more under that than they are onto what you told them, right?

1:18:45So children see by example, they don't, they don't learn by word they see by example. So you have to be the person who you want your children to be when it comes to the positive habits that you want them to develop. So that's number one is anything you tell them, understand that you better be willing and ready and already doing that thing yourself. Another one would be caution with forbidden fruits. It's all parenting approach that formally is known as love and logic, meaning the more that you just have hard no's or hard yes's in your home. Like, no, we don't talk about porn. It's not a discussion.

1:19:18You don't learn about porn is just like, you're going to eventually find that out at a friend's slumber party or wherever else. And that's just, it's off limits. We don't talk about that. Or no, you don't get alcohol. You don't taste alcohol. That's off limits. If it's forbidden fruit, that's for adults. Stay away. Weed, drugs, porn, any vice. If it's a hard no, you're creating forbidden fruit in your house. So for us, I've had very frank discussions with my sons about porn. Here's what it is. Here's what it does to your brain. Here's what it does to society. Here is what it does to the way that you think about women when you're interacting with them.

1:19:51Here's what it does to your objectification of the opposite sex. Here are the issues that it can even create in countries with things like sex slavery and sex abuse. And you're not banned from viewing or watching porn, but here's everything that it can do. Now you go out and make the decision. Not you can't have a cupcake at your friend's birthday party because gluten is the devil, but rather, hey, if you have too much gluten, it can cause neural inflammation. it could cause some protein inflammatory issues it may cause some gut issues you make the decision about whether or not you're gonna have gluten alcohol right my first experience with alcohol was stealing a bottle of scotch from my dad's office and getting drunk in my bedroom because for me alcohol was like the totally off-limits thing that just the parents did at the dinner table or whatever we do like to drive farm wines quarterly organic wine delivery service to our house every month and when it comes i open up the little brochure and we taste the wine and we have a little shot glass and the boys get a sip.

1:20:48Like they're never going to go take a bottle of wine from our pantry and go get drunk in their bedroom because it was just forbidden for them. So using, and this takes more time and attention and presence for you as a parent, but instead of having a hard no or hard yes, you explain to your child the consequences of any decision that they're going to make. And then you let them deal with the consequences of that decision with some exceptions, like a one-year-old toddling towards a hot stove. Don't say no, it's going to burn you like actually pull them away. And you know, if you need to slap their hands so that, you know, the, this mild sting of a slap is a lot less damaged than whatever, third degree burn from a stove.

1:21:23Right. Right. Um, I would say the last one was I was shocked at the number of people who didn't necessarily like homeschool or private school, but who had really good frank discussions with whatever school that their children were going to. And many of them would just like pull their kids out of public school at random times to go on a trip or one family like sent their kids to school an hour late every day so they could just have amazing family breakfast every morning before their kids went off to school and so people who like gamed the system almost and would not necessarily not send their kids to public school or private school but who almost adopted a hybrid model of you know homeschooling travel more time at home etc while still being able to use the the learning environment accordingly that their kids were in so there's there's so much in the book though yeah it's like that's such an interesting one that you just said.

1:22:13So who would tell you to do a hybrid model? So you're not homeschooling the child and you're not putting the kid in the regular school system. So you would kind of modify what's out there already and make it work to your advantage. Yeah. They'd like go and talk to the teachers and just be like, Hey, we're, we know it's not summer break, but we're leaving for a week to go travel with the kids and they'd get their homework and they'd make sure they did their assignments. And they basically would think outside the box when it comes to education in general, which is kind of like Seth Godin's philosophy that if your kids are going to go to school, your number one job when they walk in the door from school is to start unschooling them or teaching them about how life really works versus just like the rote memorization and pure adherence that they were getting at school.

1:22:57That's amazing. That book sounds, I didn't know you wrote that book. Yeah, and I self-published it because if you're a health and fitness author, you're not going to get a deal in the parenting and education category. So it was kind of an uphill battle. Even though you've sold so many books, it wouldn't give you a shot. If you've sold a bunch of books in one category, it doesn't transfer over into a publishing deal in a different category. If anything, it makes a publisher a little bit reticent to publish you in a different category, which I didn't know until I tried to do it. Yeah. No, I mean, that's, but that's actually, and is it as big as this book?

1:23:29As big or bigger. Who did you, who did you go to for your, like for your experts or for your? amazing parents who I personally knew and whose children I'd interacted with. And it just, I probably asked a hundred different parents and I had about, I think 30, 32, somewhere in that range, the final, final book. So. That's amazing. Yeah. And how did you get, are you and your wife just naturally on board with the same stuff? We are pretty much on board with a lot of the same stuff when it comes to education and parenting, just because of how much we talk about it. But wait, did you homeschool your kids?

1:24:09Kind of. Or you did a hybrid? We did private schooling for a little while. And then when we realized that they were just getting a bunch of homework and memorization and that private school just seemed like a glorified version of public school and they didn't have a lot of time to pursue their passions and their interests and their desires. In fifth grade, we pulled them from that and we started not homeschooling, but unschooling, meaning not a lot of books, not a lot of curriculum, a lot of time spent just being outdoors, visiting museums, going on trips, cooking, taking care of animals, exercising with dad, you know, just basically this, this, um, idea of learning through experience, right?

1:24:42So like for their, their, uh, sixth grade math, they built a tree fort all summer, you know, learning geometry and woodworking and angles rather than doing a math book. So unschooling is focused a lot more on experiences in life than it is on rote curriculum or hefty memorization. I love that. Unschooling is what you call it. Unschooling is what it's called. Yeah. There's a good, good book called the unschooling to university, which kind of like decodes how to K through 12. And still, if your kid wants to go to college, go to college while unschooling. I'm getting more and more interested in this.

1:25:13I just did a Ted talk actually. Why I'm asking is I did a Ted talk last week in Miami about how to raise mentally strong kids in a coddling world. And yeah. And I, I, I did a ton of research on it. I also like, I tend to try to speak to the best of the best in the world, experts, whatever, like how to do this. Because what I've found is what's happening is we really are raising very soft kids, which is not good for our future generation, right? Like, I'm sure you saw the studies and how like 20 % of kids are now taking their parents to job interviews. Did you see this whole thing? They're taking their parents to job interviews.

1:25:53because they don't feel mentally strong enough to go on their own. Oh, geez. So the coping mechanisms and coping skills have been very diminished since, you know, over many, many years of the helicoptering parents and everyone's getting a trophy. You've got to take your parent to a job interview, but you don't have to take your parent to have your sex changed. No. Interesting phenomenon. But this is where we're living now. Isn't that just crazy? So I find, so that's why when I'm asking you, I would have loved to have read the book. Interesting. What happened is it was in Miami. It was basically hurricane season and all the power went off on the entire block.

1:26:34And so I had to sit there in the dark for two hours. And so when I went up to finally do my talk, the sound was off. So I have to now rerecord it. So I may want to read that book and see if there's anything in there that I can really include. It's a long book. Should I shoot this thing, by the way? This magic formula? Yes. By the way, I can't believe you still haven't done it. This is magic, Mike. Okay, so yeah, I was saying the agave. So by the way, all the other ingredients in this look great. And I'm sure the agave is such a small amount that it's not a big deal. They've got theanine in there that balances up.

1:27:03Yeah, this looks like a good... Yeah, the fruit thing, to unpack that glycemic index part, it is interesting because I used to think that if you drank fruit juice or if you blended fruit, it would make it way more sugary and cause a higher glycemic index and more of a spiking of the blood sugar. and it turns out research has since shown that fruit juices don't spike your blood sugar anymore than eating the whole fruit itself. Really? And when you blend fruit, you actually get a lowering of the glycemic index and less of a blood sugar response because something about blending helps to take a lot of the fibers and the seeds and the antioxidants and concentrate them in such a way that your blood sugar response is lower.

1:27:43It's really funny you should say that. Versus eating whole fruit. Well, take the shot and then I'm going to tell you why. tell me if you like it and i want to see if you're more energized and focused like right away like one two seven no it'll take you like a few minutes placebo effects i mean i can tell you i've tried a lot of the ingredients in here before like bacopa from emery and cognizant for function yeah it looks pretty good well i'm gonna send you some all right there's still it's called magic wine and they're delicious and i like the taste of them because most of these other things taste like crap yeah but these are good but what i wanted to say something that you just said what were you just saying you said something about i was talking about the blending oh yeah of fruit or the juicing of it i was gonna say i had this guy i had gary breck on this podcast a while ago and he said that we're the ultimate human the ultimate human yeah and he did this thing and we taught we talked about how he said that when you blend in a when you people have these smoothies and you're blending all the fruit and in the blender blah blah blah it skyrockets your glycemic well Gary I love you but you're wrong right first of all that clip was shared I don't know how many times it was insane yeah because people were like just railing on him that it was wrong like all those people that normally do it like all the regular suspects who like you know look at these things and like yeah and like like like Lane Norton yes yeah and like who's that other guy he's like from South Africa or South America.

1:29:06Like reaction videos? Yeah. Well, no, no, not reaction. He's a guy who's like a doctor and he like goes and like finds. Oh, geez. Anyway. I don't remember. It was like unbelievable. I have no clue how I've escaped having anybody done those things to me. Nobody's ever done that to you? Nobody's ever done anything like that to me. I have no clue why because I've said some pretty crazy things. And nobody's ever done it? I haven't said wrong things that I know of, but I've said crazy things. Well, what do you think of all these people? Do you like, do you like, do you watch and follow these people that like are other biohackers or other people who are really very popular in the wellness and health space who have a really big audience.

1:29:40Yeah. I mean, most of them are my friends. And so do you— Gary Brecke, Andrew Huberman. I wouldn't say Brian Johnson is a friend, but, you know, we talk. That's different, though. He's on a podcast. He's more of a—like, he's hacking his whole— biohacking his entire— What do you think of all the stuff that he's done? It's pretty impressive, but it requires you to have a highly systematized and regimented existence when you're eating. back to the same thing, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner and going to bed at, I don't know, starting to get ready to go to bed at some ungodly early hour. Like I don't know what time.

1:30:11You don't do those things? Pretty early. What has he done that you have not done? Well, let me think. I don't think there's much that he has not, there's much that he does that I've not done. If you want to count some of the less sexy stuff, like eating the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yes, I've done that on some days, but it's not something that I do or going to bed early or eating a super early dinner. She can sleep better. I've done that, but because we enjoy our big fun family dinners, I don't do that. I would say of the things that he's done that I know of, the only thing he's done that I haven't done is laser resurfacing of the face, which is a pretty intensive protocol and makes you look like a zombie for like four weeks, but it has incredible results.

1:30:54My friend up in Spokane, Cameron chestnut. He's an incredible cosmetic surgeon and he does those procedures. And he did one on my wife and I got home from a trip and she opened the door and it looked like a zombie movie. She couldn't leave the house for like two weeks. And then in like four weeks, she started to look younger. And so she's 42. And I would estimate that it probably took a good like eight to 10 years off her face. It's crazy. And he does the hands and the neck so that the hands and the neck don't look old in correlation to the face. I've never seen, cause I've seen a lot of, but living with someone and actually seeing that happen nearly overnight from REM procedure was pretty nuts.

1:31:38So my wife's done that and Brian Johnson has done that, but I haven't done that. Okay. Why haven't you done it? Honestly, even though I, I, I like the idea of maintaining youthfulness and bigger and you know that's good for confidence and obviously it's on brand for me i am like speaking so much video cameras in front of my face so much doing podcasts so much i don't know of a period of time that i could go for like four weeks without having a camera on my face and i suppose i could just do it with my face all bloody and stripped and swollen and stuff but i mean i think brian johnson just did it like in the past couple of weeks because it popped up on my feet and he looks like shit right now and it'll look better later but i just don't i mean even the full body stem cell procedure i'm kind of like out of commission for maybe five days tops but yeah i mean if someone were to offer me that laser resurfacing on a silver platter and you know were to do it to me i would it for me it would just be a matter of where do i find the time to to take off is it really a month it's a long time yeah yeah really it's look it up laser resurfacing it's pretty intensive okay i'm gonna look i think my friend because what they do is first they do like stem cells they take the fat out of your butt and inject it into your face and but then the finisher is a laser resurfacing and that's what makes it look like your face got run over by a truck and that sounds scary though too i was a little scared when i saw my wife you didn't know she was getting it done i knew she was getting it done but i wasn't prepared for it to look like that i mean she would like be throwing up from the pain meds and her eyes bleeding and it's her eyes Because we're bleeding?

1:33:16Oh, yeah. She's bleeding out her eyes. Yeah. But this is something like a lot of celebrities do it. Like I know people who fly to Cameron's office up in Spokane to get it done. So it's not like people don't do this. But most people, after they do it, just stay totally hidden for like a month so you don't see them. And then they come out looking super young and, you know. How much is it? Apparently they were just juicing vegetables really well. Apparently, yeah. It's more than$100 ,000. did your wife spend that or did she get a discount at least she got discounted just because he's one of my buddies yeah he gave her a good deal but what kind of deal can i get one done is it worth it i don't remember exactly what it was that she got it for but it's i mean if you wanted like what the top of the top thing that apparently all the celebrities are doing is is the the best thing for reversing age i mean i can tell you like she looks incredible after as long as she looked crappy before but i was surprised like it definitely can you show me a picture before and after i'm trying to think he has uh he has one uh cameron does on his instagram he has a ton of before and afters on his instagram okay cam what's his last name cameron chestnut okay they mean something interesting after the interview actually i was gonna say he's super interesting yeah yeah he's really interesting name is something else that you haven't done that you're like interested in doing or the and i want you to tell me the one thing that you have done that that yielded the most amazing results that that you were shocked about okay let's start with that second question okay because we've covered a lot of the sexy stuff really stem cells peptides you know a lot of the things that i think would be super sexy or fringe that move the dial a lot we've talked about But I would say one thing I've been doing recently that has absolutely transformed, particularly my mornings and just my general enjoyment of the rest of the day is combining sound, light, electricity, and vibration for meditation.

1:35:24So this is kind of fringe, but it's totally doable. Anybody can do it. So I have this chair now. It's called a shift wave chair. you sit in it and you wear a little fingertip monitor and it monitors your heart rate and your heart rate variability and then vibrates in correspondence to the beats of your heart and comes with audio tracks that you can listen to that coach you through breathwork sessions while the whole chair vibrates your body which in and of itself is pretty cool i sat on it at the american academy of anti-aging medicine conference it was so cool i got one and i used it for i probably I got it like six months ago and I used it for a while.

1:36:01But then I also got my hands on a light sound machine. And these are machines that you lay underneath that blast you through closed eyes. You can barely, well, not barely, but you can detect the light, but your eyes are closed. And it's almost like you've taken six grams of psilocybin without actually taking any drugs or anything. It automatically just shifts your brain into a whole different state using light stimulation. And in the past, I've used headset versions of that, like this one called the brain tap. Yeah. There's one called the neurovisor that I actually like. I have in my bag upstairs the neurovisor because I still travel with it.

1:36:36What does it do though? But it shifts your brain into the same state that you'd be looking for from, let's say, like ketamine, LSD, psilocybin, any of these entheogens or psychedelics people use for brainwave shifting. But it does so using light instead, light and sound stimulation. So I figured out how to take an AV cable from the light and connect it to the chair. So now I've got the light, the sound, and the vibration all going at the same time. And then Nikola Tesla said, if you want to understand the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. So I've got the light frequencies and the sound frequencies and the vibration, but then I was looking for a way I could incorporate electrical energy into that.

1:37:15So then I outfitted that whole setup with a PEMF coil. PEMF is Pulse Electromagnetic Field Therapy. Wow. And there's one called a HALO, H-A-E-L-O. and I put it in my lap during one of those sessions. And that can be set for like meditation, inflammation, digestion, whatever. So now if you go into my downstairs living room in the room beside my office, in the corner, there's a chair and the chair is the shift wave. And above that is the Ruxiva lamp. And next to that is the halo PMF coil. And then I will just like pull on a gravity blanket or one of those infrared sauna blankets. And I do this usually at about 430 in the morning.

1:37:52So I literally get out of bed early and go downstairs and I do like a, anywhere from a 30 to a 60 minute session. And it is just the coolest thing ever. What does it do for you though? Total checkout, better creativity, better focus, even though I'm getting up early, feeling like more energy than I've ever had. Uh, it's one of the things I missed the most besides my family when I travel now is my vibrating light sound therapy chair. I don't have to take any drugs, even though I feel like I used to feel when I'd like, I used to experiment with plant medicine and journey. I don't do any of that stuff now, but it's a similar feeling of just like relaxation, forgetting all your worries, meditation all at once using technology rather than drugs to shift you into that state.

1:38:34And the cool part is you sit up from it and you're just ready to tackle the world, but you're not simultaneously metabolizing a bunch of drugs out of your system. And for example, there's one session on there. It's probably my favorite session. It's called rebirth. And the session starts with fetal heartbeat, you know whooshing of mom's womb darkness occasional flashes of light and then as the session goes on it progresses to like a whole birthing experience where you're going down the birth canal and there's light and like heroic epic music and i've never done that and not sat up a crying and be just like ready to tackle the world like literally feeling almost like reborn but you do that every day just with light and sound stimulation i've probably done that 10 times like in the past two months.

1:39:17Okay, but wait, but people have to buy one of these machines though. Everything I just described to you, if you were to put everything in your living room, you'd probably spend about$20 ,000. Yeah, that's a lot. For the average person. It's a lot of money. Okay, so let's go back to people who are like - It's less than a car. Okay, less than a car. But for the person who's listening to this and like now they're like familiar with - The cheap travel hack version. Yeah, what's the more cost? The neurovisor, I don't even think that's a thousand dollars and it's like wearable glasses that do light sound simulation.

1:39:49And then there's a vibrating wristband called the Apollo. And so that's what I travel with is I'll wear the wristband or my wrist or my ankle that does the vibration. And then I lay back and I put. the glasses on and those connect to headphones. So what does the vibration do on its own? Vibrating or so-called haptic sensations can shift your brain into a certain state based on the frequency of the vibration. It's like the Apollo can be set for calm, for stress, for... But how often do you wear it? Focus. They should take this needle out of my arms soon. I know. Starting to feel... Yeah, you can feel like when it's done.

1:40:26Trust me, I know. Yeah. Yeah. So the, you know how like some animals when they've been chased, I think Robert Sapolsky talks about this in his book, Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. They'll kind of like shake it off to shake off the stress. Or sometimes like if you've been really stressed, you just shake it off. So vibrating does that similar function. It's almost like a, like a, a mild moving sensation that causes your brain to just like shift into a state of calm or focus or creativity or whatever it is you're looking for. And then the chair that I was talking about is basically neural feedback because it's detecting, based on your heart rate, where you're at and adjusting it as you're breathing.

1:41:04Is it similar to what we did at the Founderland when you're like, oh, go to this thing? There's like a pod in there. It's a new device. I forget what it's called, but a little bit similar to that. It's like a pod that you lay in that vibrates, that plays sounds. Yeah. What if you just have like, did you go to the Therisage one when they had the pod and it was like a vibrational sound and then they had the red light around it? Yeah. Did you try that? See, all these things, they're all kind of going after the same thing, right? Like using electricity, light, sound, frequency, vibration, et cetera, to shift your brain into a certain state and to preferably do it without hefty supplementation or drug use.

1:41:40Okay. What's the other thing that you were going to tell me? Other thing? That was the thing that you've been using that you think have been... Yeah. Oh, yeah. But wait, if you had to say what that thing has done for you, what has it done for you in like two sentences or less? Made me feel way more rested throughout the entire day. I'm getting out of bed a little bit earlier. Better creativity, better focus, lower stress, higher on average heart rate variability. So it's affecting my nervous system. And it is very enjoyable. Like you get this big dopamine rush. You just feel incredible when you finish it.

1:42:14And what's the other thing that you said that it was the two questions I asked you was the thing that you've done. The thing that I've done and the thing that I want to do. besides the laser resurfacing, I would say there is an idea of an oil change for your body. And there are some medical clinics that will do things like ozone therapy, where they'll pull the blood out of one arm and ozonate it, and it goes into a machine, ozonates it, then it goes back into the other arm. There are other therapies like ozone plasmapheresis where they're doing that, but it's passing through like a filter. It's also called the extracorporeal blood ozonation and oxygenation, where the blood comes out, it gets filtered, goes back in.

1:42:56It's almost like kidney dialysis before your blood. Well, there's a new company called Lumati, L-U-M-A-T-I, and they've developed two different filtration systems over a three-day process of four to six hours per day. It filters out glyphosate, microplastics, COVID spike protein, Lyme, Epstein-Barr, pretty much gives you completely new blood, completely filtered blood. You fly into Encinitas. They shuttle you across the border every day to Tijuana to do the treatment, bring you back. You stay in like a luxury hotel, get great food, then you go back the next day and do it again. You go for three days in a row, completely detoxifies the entire system.

1:43:34This is something that just got developed and approved like in the past couple of months. And I think it would be incredible to do. Are you going to do that next? I'm going to do it in like three weeks. Are you? See, you know what's probably super cool? I just got signed up for it last week. Really? Yeah. See, you get to try everything. I don't have any of those things that I know of, like Epstein-Barr or Limeo, but I think it is an incredible technology. See, I think it's super cool because you get to try all these things. How do you spend your time, though, now? Do you do mostly podcasting? Do you do a lot of speaking gigs?

1:44:10What do you do with your day besides exercise and all that? I spend 10 to 15 hours a week talking to people on the phone about their health problems. I do lab work. I do blood work. I do coaching where some people pay a monthly fee for me to monitor their training and their nutrition. And they just have access to text me or email me or interact with me throughout the month. And then other people will just like purchase a one-off phone call with me where they'll usually be sending me their labs and stuff like that beforehand. I'm not a doctor. I don't practice medicine. but we just talk about issues that they're having and I tell them basically what I would do if I were in their shoes so I can't again I can't prescribe medications or prescribe labs but often they're coming to me with labs they've gotten from their doctor or problems they've had that other people haven't been able to figure out yeah and so that's like 10 to 15 hours a week just literally helping people so you do that so wait so you have code distance training so you do like you take you have you said a few times on the podcast clients clients yeah so you do have clients i do yeah i mean i used to coach like 40 people a month now i coach eight and so how do you do how much they pay you for this five thousand dollars a month and then you basically are like giving them a program of some some kind of protocol yeah and then they just have to do it and then they can just do everything for them they just wake up in the morning and do what it is that i wrote down keep their logs i monitor their hrv their sleep and just basically you know everything from actors getting ready for movie roles to executives to athletes like it's it's just basically like one-on-one coaching and then i also just do random calls with other people aren't necessarily like paying a monthly fee but just doing consoles with me so i do that i do the podcast twice a week so you twice 17 years twice a week haven't missed a session never never amazing no and sometimes i won't record any new week because i'm traveling but then i'll get back and record like seven so for you um so the podcast but alone ever or just guests or both you do some both both i have solo sodes where i'm answering listener questions and reporting on the latest research and then guests so i just get that's a huge part of my education just getting to talk to super smart people way smarter than me who would normally never give me the time of day who are like talking to me for an hour and a half and i just get to feed through the fire hose from some author whose book i've just read or some scientist who just released some new technology that's probably the favorite part of my job yeah talking to people and then i do article and book writing.

1:46:32And that's usually, I'm usually writing for anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes a day. I'm just working on a new book or working on an article or working on a copy for something. And then I do advising and also investing. So I advise a bunch of companies in the health and nutrition and fitness space and then invest in companies too. And then I own a supplements company called Keon. And even though I don't do a lot with that company anymore, there's still a little bit of management, some calls and things related to that. And then I'm trying to think if I have any other jobs. I think those are my main jobs.

1:47:05And then besides that, I just hang out with the family and work out in the morning and play a little tennis and pickleball and go on walks and hikes. You seem so much more, again, take this the right way. You seem so much more calm and chill than when I first met you. I don't remember where I was when you first met me. In London. In London. Yeah. Well, I was also traveling, getting ready to speak to a whole bunch of people. I know, but you seem much sweeter now. You seem so kind and nice. Yeah. You look like you're 18. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe you just caught me on a bad day. No, no. You were really nice then too, but I'm saying you seem like you're at a different place in life and I don't know what it is.

1:47:39I think, so obviously life is a constant evolution. We're always transforming and always becoming the people God has called us to become or becoming a better version of ourselves or hopefully engaging in things that help us to just become more grounded, more dialed, more authentic, more the people we are rather than who we think that the world expects us to be. And I think probably the thing that if you ask me that I've most doubled down on in the past couple of years, it would have been my own personal spiritual time, particularly when I travel. I neglected it a lot when I travel and then it'd be pretty good at home.

1:48:16But now, I mean, I was walking to Sun Life Organics this morning, just memorizing James 5 in the Bible and listening to a sermon and taking care of my spiritual health before I focus on physical health or work or business or anything else. And I would say similarly, the at-home attention paid to prayer time with the family, meditation with the family, reading the Bible as a family. I mean, if you fill yourself up with good, positive things, then it's likely that good, positive things are already going to come out. Or like my mom used to say, if somebody bumps you and you're full of honey, sweet things will come out and then bump you in your full vinegar, then bitter things will come out.

1:48:56And I think that just like intentionally and systematically focusing on making sure that my intake at the beginning and the end of the day and my work is specifically focused on spiritual health, I think that that manifests itself physically and emotionally and from a character standpoint. So I'd say that's probably the biggest thing. That's a big one though. Yeah. So you pray. What other modality has helped you with your spiritual or spirituality to be more grounded and be more happy? I used to read a lot of positive self-help books and devotionals and books related to spirituality. And now I mostly just read the Bible.

1:49:40I just read the Bible. And I have an amazing study Bible where I can read the notes and unpack stuff and go back and forth between chapters. So I don't follow a reading plan per se, but right now I'm just reading the whole book of John. And then every morning or every evening I memorize a verse from the Bible. And so that is also not like through the whole Bible. Typically I'll pick a section that's really spoken to me lately. I have had some health issues in the family in the past few months. And so right now, again, I'm memorizing James 5 just because it's a section of it called the prayer of faith.

1:50:19It's about healing through prayer. And so I'll choose something that really speaks to me in the moment. Before that, it was Psalm 23 about how God helps you during trials and tribulations and tough times. So that was another one that I needed at the time. Before that, it was Proverbs 3 because it's filled with a whole bunch of wisdom for young men. And I was preparing my sons to go and leave on this trip. So we were memorizing that together. so just kind of like cutting out all the distractions and kind of just like super old school and simple just opening up the bible and reading the bible that's one thing that i've kind of changed recently versus reading a whole bunch of books written by other people about the bible versus just opening the one book that i feel not to get too woo almost kind of has magical powers in and of itself and is the only book that when you're reading it you can turn around talk to the author right afterwards.

1:51:08So I'd say that. And then also really doubling down on how I end the day, meaning, you know, not Instagram or YouTube or devices or kind of like coddling myself with social media or whatever else, just turn off the brain at the end of the day, but instead just praying. So me and my wife and every day, you know, before my mouth tape goes on and my head hits the pillow, we just pray and we pour out our hearts to God together. You know, it's like like a spiritual sacred thing you can do together. And yeah, we just, we talk to God and we pour out our hearts and we start our day like that too. But just like starting and ending the day with a real focus on the spirit and on speaking with God and learning from God, to me, it's just, it's so fulfilling, more fulfilling than a workout and a smoothie and, you know, a good day of work or anything else.

1:51:59Wow. How long is it? Probably because it's eternal, right? It's like our spirits are, for better or worse, the one thing, the one part of us that goes on to exist for eternity. Yeah. And each prayer, how long is the prayer practice? Is it a few minutes? Is it 10 minutes, 15 minutes? I pray in the morning for about 5 to 10 minutes. I pray before all my meals and just occasionally throughout the day when I have a decision to make. And then my wife and I pray for 5 to 10 minutes in the evening. So it's not crazy. It's not like an hour of dancing and speaking in tongues and candles and incense. It keeps you grounded, though.

1:52:31Yeah, it's more like a habit, like a consistent habit. It's like running a marathon every week is not as palatable as running two miles a day. Absolutely. And then the last question is social media and all that. You don't strike me as somebody, even though you are a social media person, that you would spend a lot of time on social media. Do you? That's kind of a funny question. So my sons have social media accounts because they're starting a tabletop gaming company. And I told them the same thing that I kind of do myself. Like, don't, you don't have to have all the apps and spend all your time reading the comments and posting yourself.

1:53:04Like, get a social media manager. It's well worth it because then you just don't get sucked in and you have somebody else who's posting your content and you focus on the content. You're not the manager, you're the maker, you're not the consumer, you're the creator. Right. So that's what I coach them to do. And I have a very similar mindset for myself. I'm on TikTok, but I don't know how to access TikTok. I don't have the username or the password or anything. I have a social media manager who posts that stuff. If I do a video, I'll send it off to them and they cut it and post it and figure out when they're going to time it.

1:53:32There is such a thing as what's called organic posting. And I literally have a calendar on my phone and it'll say, don't post anything on Instagram today, Ben, because my social media team knows when stuff is supposed to get posted and when. I don't fully understand, but all I know is I'm not supposed to mess stuff up. so i don't ever scroll on social media i never got it twitter facebook instagram yeah i follow people and you know when you first open it whatever you see there is the first post that you see which is so weird because i open instagram on the way here and you and i hadn't even talked today and the first post was from you really so it's almost like they knew where uber was taking me i don't know but are you serious i'm serious you know that phones have how weird though i don't know maybe maybe it literally i mean because it does say in my calendar on my phone i have an appointment with jen today so maybe it has calendar access i don't know but crazy but i don't actually do the scrolling scrolling thing like i have just never gotten that and i know that it's engineered to keep me scrolling if i start doing it but so i'm on social media but i use it as a producer and a creator not a consumer or a manager i don't go into the comment section i don't scroll through feeds.

1:54:47There's occasional times when, uh, I'll give you an example when Iran recently attacked Israel. I clicked on that section on Twitter and read through the posts to catch up on the news. But I, that's pretty rare that I do something like that. If there's some current event that I just want to catch whatever's trending on it pretty fast, I'll do that. But I, not only am I kind of a Luddite when it comes to social media, but I've purposefully kept myself a Luddite with a lot of that stuff. Because I don't even know how to log into my own website anymore i don't know my if i did get locked out of social media i wouldn't know how to get back in it's just not a big part of what i do and that's why you're so i think this is part of why you're a you're so productive like you're the kind of person where you're not saying is that you said like if i'm not saying something that's meaningful or i'm not spending every minute kind of accounted for you feel like you're wasting your time and that's probably why because social media is a huge time suck yeah you know and you've like by the way i know we have to wrap this up because what time is this it's been like forever oh yeah it's been like two and a half hours oh yeah i do have to wrap pretty soon um okay so do you wear shoes did you come here without shoes by the way they're outside oh okay so you do wear shoes yeah okay one more question and then i'm gonna i'll fly and wrap this up what's the one thing that people ask you about the most what supplements should i take and what would you say it's different from person to person go test your body.

1:56:12There are a few that seem to have broad applicability across a wide range of individuals, namely creatine, fish oil, a multivitamin, and increasingly I'm saying NAD or some variant of it, but everything else. We live in an era where you can go test and find out if you need vitamin D or if taking vitamin D would give you vitamin D toxicity, or if you need XYZ probiotic or your microbiome is balanced just fine. Thank you very much because you need a diet rich in fermented compounds or you do you need a fish oil or is your omega index at eight percent or above like all this stuff now is testable so i tell people hey there's a few base ones that work but besides that go test your body because it's not that expensive or difficult to do now and then you you asked me one question i didn't answer which one you asked me if it was better to walk on the treadmill or do that's so true that's right and the answer is it i'll see if I can spit this out in 60 seconds.

1:57:06Your cardiovascular fitness is split into four different categories. Your fat burning capacity, your VO2 max, your mitochondrial density, and your ability to be able to tolerate lactic acid, AKA the burn. If you are just walking or just sprinting, you're not going to hit all those variables. For VO2 max, once every one to two weeks, you do a hard maximum sustainable pace effort, like a four by four minutes on a bike with four minutes of recovery after each. For lactic acid tolerance, you go hard and then you recover, but not for very long. This would be like the classic Tabata set. 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, eight times through, four minutes, boom, done.

1:57:41That can be a couple times a week. For mitochondrial density, you go really hard, then you recover for a long period of time. So this would be like five 30-second sprints with two to four minutes of recovery after each one. The sprints are really hard. The recoveries are really easy. And then for fat burning capacity, you could do like a 12, 3.30 or go out for a long hike or whatever. But you need to be aware that cardio fitness is not just cardio. Cardio is technically four different things. So if you hit those four, VO2 max, mitochondrial density, lactate tolerance, and fat burning capacity, and those are kind of like woven throughout your week, then you're going to get all of them.

1:58:12Now, if you're lucky enough to be a soccer player or a tennis player or lacrosse or one of these sports that has a lot of start, stop, and endurance baked in, you're kind of getting all those from your sport. But if not, you kind of have to intentionally program them in if you want the most bang for your buck, aerobically speaking. Someone in their 40s, what's the best exercise to do? depends i knew that my wife with the high risk of bone density weight training if you're morbidly obese endomorphic with a lot of fat sores long slow fat burning walks if you're getting ready for a triathlon high intensity interval training so it depends the reason why i'm asking is because i think a lot of times work as you get older anyway for me especially you get injured much more easily your bodies are a wear and tear they of course it's about like building strength training and doing cardio and all those things.

1:58:59However, if you had to pick one exercise, if someone's not an exercise person, what would you suggest? Something that involves axial loading of the spine, the arms and the legs. So it would probably be something very much like a squat to overhead press. Building arms, legs, functional, training the core. And there is loading across the entire spine, the arms and the legs. And I mean, it can be a little bit of a difficult exercise to learn. Best, most biomechanically friendly way to start off with something like that would be with a med ball 20 to 50 pound med ball hold it to your chest squat down stand press it overhead you'd be a great trainer you should be a trainer again just do that i know you should do it again you should do it again another life yeah i'm telling you me i i would hire you okay ben when can we do part three next time i'm down here let's do it when you back i don't know you don't come you come around i avoid la but i sometimes come down here and just batch a whole bunch of stuff i'll probably back here before the end of the year.

1:59:54I hope so. Yeah. Because every time I'm like, listen, I have like a whole other, I didn't even ask you any of the questions from your other book, if you can believe it. Oh, geez. I have a million questions. Well, I've always got to know them. You're going to be like a co-host. All right. Hilarious. Okay, Ben, I love having you on, as you know. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for spending two hours with me, or however long it's been, God knows. Thanks for doing an IV with me. Thank you for inviting me along on your IV experience. By the way, I will say again, those NRV IVs are really good for me and great for everybody.

2:00:28And so I'm actually very fortunate that we got one. So thank you for making that happen. Yeah. All right. So if anyone wants to know more about Ben, check him out. He also does coaching. He has Keon, his supplement company. And just check him out on Instagram because even just looking at his clips and you learn so much. What else can I say about you? comment I might not see it but I might yeah he probably won't see it but you can still comment and there you go thank you Ben thanks Jen

From the publisher

Can you really achieve optimal health through biohacking, or is simplicity the key?
In this episode of the Habits and Hustle podcast, I am joined by Ben Greenfield (again!) to discuss his change from one of the world's leading biohackers to embracing a more balanced approach to health and wellness.

We dive into a range of topics such as his journey from homeschooled chess club president to America's top personal trainer, expanding stem cell therapy options, his detailed morning routine combining light, sound, and vibration therapy, and even modern parenting. Overall, we discuss the impact of simplicity on optimizing our health and longevity.

Ben Greenfield is a renowned health consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author specializing in fitness, nutrition, and wellness. As a former athlete and current biohacker, he has been recognized as one of America's top Personal Trainers and among the most influential people in health and fitness. Ben hosts a popular website and podcast, speaks globally on longevity and biohacking, and is the co-founder of KION, a nutritional supplements company.

What We Discuss:
(05:28) Impact of Dietary Diversity on Health
(16:39) Optimizing Nutrition With AI Technology
(24:57) From Tennis to Biohacking Success
(32:30) Evolution of Ben Greenfield's Career
(39:26) NAD and Creatine for Sleep
(44:33) Nutritional Evaluation and Recommendations
(56:10) Expanding Stem Cell Therapy Options
(01:01:53) Stem Cell Therapy for Youthful Skin
(01:13:00) Relationship Development Without Traditional Intimacy
(01:17:59) Rites of Passage in Modern Parenting
(01:31:11) Unschooling and Mental Resilience
(01:43:36) Enhanced Meditation With Technology
(01:51:52) Blood Detoxification and Spiritual Growth
(02:03:26) Social Media and Fitness Strategies

…and more!

Thank you to our sponsors:
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TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100.
Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout.
BiOptimizers: Want to try Magnesium Breakthrough? Go to https://bioptimizers.com/jennifercohen and use promo code JC10 at checkout to save 10% off your purchase.
Timeline Nutrition: Get 10% off your first order at timeline.com/cohen
Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers.

Find more from Jen:
Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/
Instagram: @therealjencohen
Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books
Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement

Find more from Ben Greenfield:
Website: https://bengreenfieldlife.com/
Instagram: @bengreenfieldfitness

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