The Science of Age-Defying Focus: Strategies for Rekindling Cognitive Performance | Ben Greenfield

26:23And those are pretty straightforward. It's basically like anything that is a manly man activity, squats or deadlifts, or heck, they've even shown like chopping wood can increase testosterone. So kind of like lifting stuff, which kills two birds with one stone because obviously you're addressing some of the muscle loss piece as well. And then really good sleep and low stress because essentially nature doesn't want a male to be able to like propagate the human species in a state of high stress or low sleep or, you know, or a lot of problematic issues. So good, good stress management and good sleep, lifting heavy stuff, eating adequate protein.

27:02And then another one that's interesting is there's a lot of people who are into like the super low carbohydrate ketogenic diet who get very, very low carbohydrate and making sure you have adequate carbohydrate is also pretty important for the testosterone piece. You might be interested, that guy who I recommended for peptides, Jay Campbell, he has a really great downloadable online resource called the Testosterone Optimization Manual or something like that. And that's probably one of the better short reads that I can find for naturally increasing testosterone and then also some of the information on testosterone replacement therapy.

27:37And then I've got a lot of that in my book, Boundless as well. And so what would you do? Let's say if you notice some of your functions declining or you're getting older, what would be your go-to therapy that you would do? I'm very data-driven, James. I typically, when somebody asks me that question, I tell them that they do need to go get blood work. You know, it might be low testosterone, but your testosterone levels might be just fine. It'd be a waste to go after testosterone So, you know, getting a full blood panel and there's even online companies now that a lot of this stuff you can do from your home.

28:11You know, Thorne has at home blood tests, inside tracker, wellness FX. But for example, your testosterone might be fine, but maybe you have super low vitamin D and a sluggish thyroid. Right. So you go after adequate vitamin D supplementation and dietary intake. And you might even do something like take some kind of a thyroid supporting supplement. It might be that you aren't getting enough protein and your amino acids are low. It could be that your inflammation measures high while everything else is fine, which typically indicates there's something in the diet that's causing inflammation or something in the environment like, you know, say mold or something like that, that could be causing inflammation.

28:51So I realize it's not a very satisfactory answer, but from a data-driven standpoint, that would be the answer. However, if we were to just say, okay, well, what are the things that if you did it, you'd feel good no matter what, well, the NR that you're on is a pretty good idea. The adequate protein that I talked about, some of the other things to support stem cells. And then I would also consider if we're really talking more about like, I don't know, you know, chess, podcasting, you know, reading, speaking, a lot of the things that you in particular do, the world of something I mentioned a couple of times now, nootropics is pretty interesting.

29:29And there are specific things that you can take like in the morning, for example, to balance neurotransmitters and to allow for cognitive function that goes way above and beyond what you would get from something like a cup of coffee. A few examples of that in terms of like done for you supplements that can really, really help with cognitive performance. There's one company called Onnit. They make a supplement called AlphaBrain. There's another company called Qualia makes one called Mind. And then probably my favorite is there's a company called Newtopia, like N-O-O-T-O-P-I-A. And if you go to their website, there's actually like a questionnaire on there that you fill out.

30:10And based on the questionnaire, it figures out your unique neurotransmitter profile and which specific ingredients would work really well with your brain. And then they formulate a special box of capsules and powders with different functions, like some for better verbal fluency, some for word recall, some for something like focus and energy, some for wakefulness in a sleep-deprived state, et cetera. And they send this whole box to your house and you just kind of keep it in your fridge. And depending on how you feel during the day, you just grab whichever packet is indicated for that particular cognitive need.

30:51And that would be an example of another really well-formulated nootropic. I mean, I guess they're research-driven. Like how much research is done on the effects of these different powders and vitamins and so on? Most of them, what they've done, and you see this a lot in the supplements industry, they've taken a whole bunch of individual molecules, each of which have good amounts of research behind them for the intended effect, but then they've combined them and most companies won't pay for the research to look at what the combined effects of all the stuff put together is. Like that quality of mind stuff I mentioned, it's got like 40 ingredients in it.

31:27And you take six to eight capsules, which for a lot of people is a lot of capsules. And if you look at each of the individual ingredients in it, all of that has research, mostly good human research in it. But nobody's done an actual study on the effects of everything combined because it's expensive for a company to do. So if you want to look at what to expect in terms of how you'd feel when you just take it all at once, all that stuff is more like anecdotal Reddit forums, talking to friends, talking to biohackers, which ones work well, which ones don't. And so, yeah, some of it's anecdotal, but if you look at the actual individual ingredients, most of them have pretty good research behind them.

32:08Let me ask you, this is about memory specifically. I've noticed my memory has definitely been on the decline. and I don't know if it's related to aging or one thing I was wondering is if it's related to podcasting because before I do a podcast, I have to not really memorize, but I have to remember so many things about the person I'm interviewing. Like I'll read their book and it's all in my short-term memory and then it gets maybe unnaturally flushed out of my short-term memory as soon as the podcast is done because I'm moving on to the next podcast and I'm wondering if that's like affected my memory muscles.

32:42I would consider three things here. The first is sensory stimuli for associative memory. For example, I have in my office an essential oil diffuser that diffuses peppermint, rosemary, or cinnamon essential oil. Any of those three because those are known to increase alertness and focus. but the double whammy effect of that and you've probably heard about these studies is that they'll have students for example do aromatherapy with a specific scent while they're studying for a test and then later when they take the actual test compare their performance with or without that same sensory stimuli and they perform better when they have that same stimuli on their memory and their word we call another example would be sound and this is a little bit more difficult but there are specific sounds, probably the most popular would be like Brain FM.

33:35And you listen to Brain FM while you're studying. And the problem with that for you is, of course, you're not going to listen to it while you're podcasting, but it comes in handy if you're reading or writing and wanting to remember something later on. You play the Brain FM while you're digesting the information. Then you play it again when you're needing to focus back upon it or spit it back out. And then the second thing I think about, in addition to some type of sensory stimuli in your office would be, you know, we were talking about nootropics and there's a couple specifically that seem to have pretty good data on them for memory.

34:06And that would be Ginkgo Biloba and Bacopa Montieri. Realize those are kind of a mouthful, but Ginkgo Biloba and Bacopa Montieri are two supplements that can be effective for memory particularly. And I think the, of the three products I mentioned earlier, I think Qualia actually has one or both of those in it. And then the third thing I think about, and this kind of flies under the radar, but electro hyper sensitivity or kind of like gradual sensitivity to things like Wi-Fi routers and Bluetooth and headphones around you all the time and being in this electronic soup, that can leave a lot of people feeling kind of brain foggy or with poor focus or memory.

34:50And so because of that, for example, The Wi-Fi is not on in my office. It's actually not on in my entire house. The whole house uses CAT7 metal shielded Ethernet cables, which means that you plug directly into the wall router or the router rather than having the Wi-Fi signal producing the signal. So everything's hardwired in my office. I have what are called dirty electricity filters. I got them from a company called Shielded Healing. and I have those plugged into the outlets in the office and those will lower a little bit of the surges in AC current also that some people are very sensitive to.

35:28A couple of other things is there is a company called Ultimate Longevity and they have these things called grounding mats. They're also called earthing mats. And you stand on them when you're at your office or you sit on your chair with your feet on them and they plug into the grounding outlet of your home or if you'd like, like I have a ground floor office with the backyard behind it. So I just have like a cable going from it to a metal stake out in the ground. And the earth emits this natural anti-inflammatory frequency that kind of combats the effects of non-natural EMFs. This is one of the reasons people feel so good sometimes when they walk outside and they're barefoot or they lay on their back on the ground or they go for a walk on the beach or a swim in the ocean.

36:10You're getting exposed to a massive amount of natural EMF And that can help to combat a little bit of the dirty electricity that you get in an office setting. And then for a podcaster, you know, even like the headphones, like these headphones, they're the Ultrasone Pro 780s. I did some research and these are headphones that actually produce a lot lower signal than other headphones. And so I'm getting a little bit lower amounts of electricity around my head when I had my headphones on during a day of podcasting. So those are a few examples of how you can kind of clean up the office from an electricity standpoint as well.

37:00what about in a competitive situation so let's say i'm playing in a chess tournament and i'm trying right now i've got this goal where i'm trying to reach the same level i reached when i was younger and it's hard. Like it's a different world out there and I'm different than when I was 30 years younger. And so what about in a competitive situation where, you know, pre-competition, during the competition, in the, in the middle of like, let's say between games, you know, some, you know, some tournaments are multi-day tournaments and I'm staying in a hotel and, you know, all, all sorts of things are going on.

37:34So what would you say, what would you recommend for competitive situations? I can tell you a few things that I would do in a scenario like this. I've had a couple of poker players I've worked with and I kind of make some similar recommendations to them. The first is that if you're able to, at some point prior to, or leading up to the competition, up in your hotel room or the hotel pool or whatever, a little bit of cold water can get the endorphins going and maintain a high amount of adrenaline and norepinephrine levels for a pretty significant amount of time afterwards. So some type of cold plunge, cold bath, cold shower before you head down to the tournament.

38:14The second would be that same type of aromatherapy that I talked about earlier, particularly peppermint, taking peppermint essential oil, smearing it on your upper lip, putting a few drops in the water that you might drink during the match. Peppermint is really, really good and maintains this kind of wakefulness effect. The next would be due to the kind of like low level flicker from the overhead lighting in a lot of these type of scenarios, a pair of daytime blue light blocking glasses, not the ones with the dark red lenses, which block so much light that you get a little sleepy, but the ones with more of the yellow or the clear lenses that you wear to avoid the retinal irritation and overhead flicker from like bright overhead fluorescent LED style lights.

38:57That can also be another good strategy. And then one of the things that I would think about, I mean, you've probably heard a lot of chatter about this whole idea of like microdosing with plant medicines. And there's a lot of different effects from them, like microdosing with psilocybin could increase creativity or microdosing with like Wachuma could increase social ability. But there's one compound you can microdose with that will increase coordination of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, increase your ability to be able to burn fat for long periods of time without eating a lot of food, and also increase wakefulness for several hours.

39:37And that one is a sergimide, LSD or LSA at about 10 to 20 micrograms, which would be considered a, you know, a microdose that's, you know, one fifth to one tenth of what you need to get a real perceptible, you know, almost like dropping acid trip type of effect. That one can be really, really good. As a matter of fact, you know what's interesting is the ultra running or the marathoning community, if you look at a lot of the top athletes in that community, particularly ultra running, most of the top competitors are stacking low-dose THC for the pain-killing and euphoric effect and low-dose LSD for the fat-burning and the focus-enhancing effect for their races.

40:19And that's kind of like the go-to stack right now in the ultra endurance community. That's so interesting because I would think that THC would make you tired while you're running. And I don't really know what the effects of micro dosing LSD are, but in terms of focus, wouldn't you like lose focus? If you took too much, you'd want to start with no more than 10 micrograms. And at very low dose, you definitely don't get that hyperactive type of bouncing around distracted effect. And then for the THC, there's a really interesting book about this called Runner's High. for the THC. Interestingly, if you use low dose THC, like five milligrams, and you're just like sitting around watching a movie or probably playing chess or anything like that, you do get kind of sleepy.

41:05But when paired with motor unit activity, such as running or lifting weights, low dose THC doesn't really cause any type of sleeping effect. And you can actually have kind of a little bit of a painkilling effect with it. But I wouldn't recommend the THC for you. But the The low dose LSD would also be another thing that's an interesting option. Obviously, proceed at your own risk within the bounds of legality, but that would certainly be something if I were playing chess and I wanted an advantage, I would consider using. That's so interesting. I have not considered that at all. I've never tried that.

41:39In terms of habits, how would you approach a competitive situation like a chess tournament or poker or whatever? What do you mean when you say habits? Sleep, for instance, is very important. So sleep is like critical during a tournament because let's say it's a four or five day tournament. By the end, your brain is exhausted. Yeah, that's a great question. So first is light. So like I mentioned, those daytime blue light blockers when you're playing. And then if you get two pair, for example, there's one company called Raw Optics, RA Optics. They have daytime blue light blockers and nighttime blue light blockers.

42:15I would have both. I wear the nighttime ones in the evening before you go to bed when you're up in your hotel room getting ready for bed. and the daytime ones during the day. Next related to light, I would also take that red light device that you held up earlier, bring that with you and use that as the way that you light up your hotel room at night rather than regular overhead lights. Or my cheap like$20 hack that I travel with because it's smaller is I bought a little headlamp off of Amazon and it's the red light producing headlamp. So when I'm in my hotel room at night, I use that to get around and see things and read and anything else because I can get to sleep a lot better without the bright overhead lighting.

42:54So that would be one. Another would be the actual temperature. As soon as I walk into a hotel room, bring the temperature down as low as it can go. If you're lucky, they'll have it set by the engineer to go as low as 64. Most hotels will at least go as low as 65 or 66 degrees Fahrenheit. And you want the room as cool as possible for sleep. And if it's in a warm location, I'll usually take a lukewarm or slightly cold shower right before I go to bed, or at least in the hour leading up to bedtime. And that helps to lower the body's temperature a little bit more. A heavy meal or like a lot of hot, spicy, oily food in the two to three hours leading up to bed can also be a pretty bad idea for sleep.

43:34So a little bit lighter, like fish and a salad and that type of thing can be a little bit better for nighttime sleep when it comes to core temperature. So light and temperature would be two. The third would be make sure that when you're in a place where you're outside of your normal sleeping environment, like a hotel, you don't train your body to associate the bed with anything related to business or work. I used to like walk into a hotel room and, you know, I plopped down to my belly and put the laptop on the bed and kind of worked there for a little while. Or, you know, as you fall asleep, you pop the laptop open and fire off a few emails.

44:08But now my rule in a hotel room is I don't allow the laptop or any type of working devices or even like business books or anything like that, you know, printed PDFs, whatever, anywhere near the bed. So when my body gets into bed, anything related to work is like across the room in the desk area of the hotel room and not in the bed. So never allow your body to associate the bed with anything but sleep and kind of like keep the computer away from the bed. And then as far as the phone, you know, the only thing that should be used for is like light, pleasurable reading, like a fiction book on that or your Kindle.

44:41or things that don't really involve a lot of mental willpower. I mean, I don't think anybody's going to stop, you know, briefly checking social media or whatever before they go to bed. But no, like work, emails, you know, trying to open the email app, things like that are a really good idea when you're in bed. And then the last thing would be noise. At least for me, you occasionally hear the slamming door or the voices in the hallway or the really loud fan or whatever. And so I have an app on my phone that's called Sleep Space, and it plays special sounds that lull you to sleep and cover up ambient noise.

45:18And I also have, and this is pretty cheap from Amazon, a pair of what are called sleep phones, which are like soft headphones, which allow you to sleep on your side and still have headphones in. And so I plug those into the phone. I put the phone in airplane mode, and then I am able to sleep. with sound that covers up any ambient noises. And if I'm in a really loud location or if there's like, I don't know, a wedding in the lobby or whatever and you can hear the pulsing music or something like that, I'll also put earplugs in and pull the headphones over the earplugs. So temperature, the light, what you do or do not do in the bed particularly.

45:55And then also the sounds that drown out other sounds and lull you to sleep would be four habits that would be really good for helping you out with the sleep. And then in the morning when you wake up, You could take one of like the nootropics that I talked about or the microdose or whatever, and then do the red light for the first little bit, like the first half hour or so. When you get up, keep the red light as the main way that you light up the room and then flip on all the lights, open the curtains, really send the body this big light signal. And then you'd be pretty good to go with the habit stack like that.

46:25And I read something on your site about something called Tai Chi shaking. I don't really know what the purpose was, but it looked interesting. It's interesting you bring this up because, you know, at home, when I get up at some point before I start work, I stretch and I do breath work and I kind of swing the body around for about 15 minutes. Usually I heat up the water for coffee or tea or whatever, and then I go stretch and stuff. Then I come back and grab my coffee and head down into the office and turn the red lights on. And when I travel, I also do the same thing. I'll get up and I'll do a certain series of exercises.

46:59exercises and when i'm at home you know i'll use like foam rollers and you know i even have like a mini trampoline that'll jump up and down on but obviously i'm not gonna travel with a trampoline and a big long foam roller so when i travel uh and you can look this up i think i have an article about my website or video and you could also just google it and find them but i do what are called the the five tibetan longevity exercises and you know the lore is that these came from these extremely long-lived Tibetan monks. And it's a series of different moves and twists and some like the shaking that I talked about.

47:32And I just do these five moves. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes and you kind of pair it with a little bit of breath work. Sometimes I'll put a really uplifting song on. And those would be an example of some really good exercises, the five Tibetan longevity exercises that you could do when you wake up to get the body going. Or the other option would be a breathwork session. Probably my favorite app for that is called Othership, even though there's also another really good one called the Breath Source. And both of those have anywhere from like five to hour-long breathwork sessions that kind of charge the body up with oxygen.

48:06I don't know, have you ever done breathwork, James? Not really. I mean, I used to do yoga, which is kind of breathwork, but I haven't done anything like using these apps. Yeah, it kind of hyper-oxygenates the body. And some of them really pick you up. They have like nighttime sleep sessions and stuff on there too. But yeah, morning breath work and or morning stretching and shaking and jumping up and down can be really good. And then you could just like finish that, hit the cold shower, and you'd be a lot more amped up than just rolling out of bed and putting on the clothes or taking a warm shower and heading down.

48:38Now, I know you're always like trying different experiments and using yourself as the subject. What are some of the latest experiments you've been up to? The classic, what gives you explosive diarrhea and what doesn't? question. Let's see. I'll just throw a few out that come top of mind because these are like recent in the past few days. Somebody sent me a bed of nails for your feet, which basically involves standing on two platforms with tiny nails built into each platform for acupressure. And it looked really painful. And I think it was the name of the company is Gravity Mind. And they're meant to be standing on like, maybe if you're at your standing desk or doing some type of breathwork session in the morning or doing sunrise gazing or whatever and apparently it's like a 2 000 plus year old tradition in india for increasing your uh pain-killing endorphins and focus and wakefulness molecules so uh you know i just got them a couple of days ago i've been standing around on them and they actually are kind of cool and they look super intimidating but once you get used to it and kind of know how to put your weight on them you know probably not as good as tony robbins bed of coals that you run over or whatever but they seem to to really kind of have an effect in terms of the acupressure points on the feet and you you've you've found a difference yeah yeah you kind of notice this like it's almost like this uh relaxed focus type of effect but again like this is all just like brand new stuff fresh to your podcast james so i haven't had a chance to mess around that much they seem pretty cool another one there's a a little device i've really been liking a lot lately you wear it on your ankle or your wrist and it vibrates for a specific responsive cue that it's meant to get from the body, like energy or focus or calm.

50:20Like right before our podcast, I usually take an afternoon siesta and I put it in power nap mode and it plays calm and then it shifts into sleep and then it gradually goes back up into focus to wake you up. So I took a power nap before our podcast and then I went and jumped in the cold pool and came in here. And that one's called the Apollo. And I also like it because if you wake up in the wee hours of the morning and you want to go back to sleep, you don't even have to pick up your phone or anything. You just press a little button on it and it replays whatever sleep setting that you were on when you were putting it on to first go to sleep.

50:53So that one's pretty cool. And then one other that is like a brand new thing I've been messing around with is kind of interesting. My brother sent me a TikTok video yesterday of this clinic in LA that is using for like vets with PTSD or people who want to kind of do something like a plant medicine journey without plant medicine. They're using like these light strobes where you lay back with your eyes closed and the light strobing over your head paired with specific sound and music and audio cues to have a pretty profound effect on things like PTSD and kind of rewire the brain. And he sent me the video and I replied and I was like, oh, I've had something very much like this for the past few weeks.

51:36It's this thing called a neurovisor. And I think it's made by a company out of Finland, I believe. And you put it on and you close your eyes and it makes all these flashy lights. And you select on the app, like creativity or focus or decreased stress or whatever. And it does this like 11 minute session and you put in your headphones and it cues music to the lights. And it's really cool. Like, you know, you can lay back and do a session. You feel like you're laying there for like an hour and just 11 minutes go by. And then you kind of just like sit up and it's like a mini power nap or a creativity session or whatever for your brain.

52:13So it's light sound stimulation. That one's called the Neurovisor. This seems like a great thing. Have you noticed this like kicking in? Like, does it work? Yeah, it does. Like if you're super tired, you don't have time for a longer nap. Like it seems to work well for that. I put it on before sleep a couple of times. And then also just for almost like a movie in your brain, you know, with a, you know, it's almost like you've just taken a heroic dose of psilocybin or something like that, but it's not all in your system and you're not like laid out for hours. You just put it on and then when it's done, you turn it off.

52:44And it's actually pretty cool. And then over the weekend, I experimented with plugging the phone audio into this giant sound mat that I have. It's made by a Korean company called Biomat. They have something called an acoustic therapy mat, and it plays sound to the entire mat, almost like you're soaking up the sound through your body. And then you plug headphones and you could hear the sound through your ears too. And so basically I plugged the Neurovisor app into that, laid back and literally had a full sound bath session for my body while looking at these lights with the headphones and playing music in my ears.

53:21And it's pretty cool. It's like this mini little light sound trip that just whisks you off to another planet for 11 minutes. and this sounds like it's something i can easily travel with you could you could pack both of those in a bag not the sound therapy matt that thing's pretty big but you could certainly pack neurovisor and that apollo thing that that little wearable that's like the size of like a fitbit so that one you can easily travel with and i actually like that on airplanes too for sleeping on airplanes and what about let's say actually in the competition so let's say i'm i'm in so there's there's the the glasses you mentioned the the um red the blockers but what else let's let's say i feel like i'm losing focus during a game or doing during a competition or for anybody who's listening to this let's say they're losing focus during a test or a musical competition or whatever it is they do what would be a good thing to like spike focus at the moment pull out your eyelashes uh no seriously uh one thing i just mentioned it that apollo device that you wear you could put that around your ankle put your phone in focus mode and anytime you're feeling a little leg and energy turn it on again that thing will be amazing i didn't even think of that when i was telling you about some of the other stuff but that would definitely be up there the peppermint oil that i talked about just dabbing a little bit of extra on the lip that would be really good to get a little bit more advanced if you did wind up hooking up with mad or limitless life or peptide sciences or anybody else and you have that intranasal c-lank c max spray you know going in the bathroom, doing a few huffs of that, coming back out, that would be also a huge pick me up, especially at the end of a long day.

54:55And then, okay, so we talked about NAD. And obviously, you know, maybe you don't have your bottle of NAD capsules or whatever, your NR capsules there, but they actually make patches. There's a company called Ion Layer. And I use this on airplanes because sometimes you feel kind of crappy after a long flight flying to London on Thursday. And I'll wear one of these the whole flight. but you slap it on your inner thigh or your butt or wherever you don't have a lot of hair and it gives you like a 12-hour slow bleed of NAD directly into your bloodstream almost like you were sitting there playing with an IV hooked up but it's it's literally just putting massive amounts of NAD into your system and you feel pretty good on that and the interesting thing is that let's say that you did have a poor night of sleep NAD is fantastic for sleep deprivation as well but this is a high dose this would be like you taking a couple of capsules of that thorn stuff like every 15 minutes or whatever, but it's just like constantly going into your system and you feel pretty good on that stuff too.

55:50Could there be negative effects of taking so much? If you took a whole lot, probably like more than about 2000 milligrams, you would probably start to get like kind of queasy and stomach upset, but this is like a thousand and it's spread out over 12 to 14 hours. So there's not really a problem with that. That's interesting. I never really, with the NR, I've never really noticed kind of a daily effect from it. I always thought it kind of just built up in your blood over a long period of time, and that's how it helped you. Well, to experience it, try this. The next time you only sleep five hours or a poor night of sleep, you're traveling, take about triple the dosage of it and notice how you feel after about a half hour.

56:30Like if you normally take two capsules, take like six, and you actually do notice a pretty significant effect when you take a little more NR or NAD on a sleep-deprived day. That's fascinating because at the end of these tournaments, I'm always sleep deprived. Like there's no way to not be sleep deprived by the end. So I'm going to try that. Yeah, there's two others for sleep deprivation. One would be a yoga nidra. Typically, you would play a yoga nidra session. Like that sleep space app I told you about, there's a yoga nidra session on that. And it's kind of like a full body scan combined with relaxation.

57:02And you can do it within like 20 minutes. And they've shown that to assist with a quick rest in the middle of a sleep deprived state to put a little bit of energy back into your system. And then similar to NAD, the other kind of like molecule that has good research behind it for wakefulness in the face of sleep deprivation is pretty cheap and widely available. And that's just plain old creatine, about five grams of creatine powder that you can mix into your coffee or your morning water or whatever. I didn't know that. So creatine, what is that? It is an amino acid that traditionally was made popular because of its effects on muscle strength and power.

57:40But ongoing research has demonstrated it to be beneficial for things like staving off muscle loss with age, for wakefulness in a sleep-deprived state, for a little bit of a DNA protective effect. And it's probably, in addition to fish oil, one of the most studied and proven safe, effective, affordable, and widely available supplements that exist. Now, what's the deal with things like both caffeine and at the other extreme, Adderall, like do they work or the nootropics you recommended are better or how does all that come into play? Caffeine can induce a wakefulness enhancing state depending on how fast you oxidize or metabolize it.

58:23It can also cause a lot of jitteriness and a comedown effect that dictates that. I think that the main reason I drink coffee in the morning is to have a good poop about a half hour later, but I don't think coffee. I think coffee is pretty old school and doesn't work as well as a lot of these nootropics, many of which have caffeine in them. The other problem with coffee, of course, is you got to have like good organic coffee because coffee is notoriously kind of like a moldy bean. So you want to be careful with that. And then Adderall, you know, Adderall, I think it has some issues in terms of a little bit of irritability that you'll see associated with it um sometimes ups and downs in the focus i'm a much much bigger fan as a matter of fact i've had some people have used adderall and switched off it to these more natural nootropics or even peptides and found that they get much more stable energy and focus and not quite as much irritability as they would get on something like adderall which some people report so i think there's better alternatives to adderall out there now you know so much stuff like you go to your 10 doctors, but I go to you.

59:27So I don't have one of the 10 doctors because you're going to them. Dude, I'm a dummy. I just learned all this stuff from people I interview on podcasts. That's fine. I don't interview them because you do. And then I talk to you. So what else are you working on? Where can people find your stuff? What should they look for on your site? Oh, I've been getting a lot into parenting and family and been doing a lot of content related to that, you know, education, discipline, legacy, finances, and building family wealth, things along those lines. So I just published a book called Boundless Parenting. That was my last book.

59:59And you could get that on Amazon or whatever. The audio book just came out. I interviewed like 32 different parents and they each like recorded their own chapter of the audio book. And it's got all sorts of wit and wisdom from all different types of really impressive parents and entrepreneurs and teachers and educators. And so that one's my newest work. And then I'm currently working on a new cookbook. It's actually finished. I have a team in Australia doing all the food photography right now. But the original cookbook is at boundlesscookbook.com. And the second cookbook comes out soon. And then my website, my podcast, everything is just at bengreenfieldlife.com.

1:00:36Yeah, and I highly recommend to people all the articles on your site. It's always fascinating stuff. You're definitely always hitting the cutting edge. It's not all the usual stuff. It's extra like you just did in this podcast. Just put the finishing touches. It comes out tomorrow morning. Huge article on NAD. You're going to love that one. Okay, great. Yeah, no, I had David Sinclair on my podcast several times. He's always such a smart guy. And I've had the guys from Thorne on. So I've done a lot of anti-aging. I also had that. What do you think of that guy, Brian Johnson? He's come on the podcast.

1:01:05Yeah, he's super informed and well-researched. I think he's almost like, people might laugh about this coming from me, but he's almost like too strict for me. Like, I don't think I could keep up with him, you know, not eating anything after noon and having the same thing seven days a week to eat and taking a hundred and some supplements in the morning. It's impressive. Like I would not be surprised if that dude lives a very long time, but I don't know if I could keep up with him as far as the attentiveness and thoroughness and strictness that he, that he manages his longevity program by. But everything I've seen him do is something that I can definitely say there's good research behind.

1:01:39So if you, if you can keep up with him. that's funny because i would think you would be able to like do how many supplements a day do you take oh uh probably about i would say maybe 20 different supplements uh compared to like 120 and i'm a foodie i do like hard exercise i do dangerous things sometimes you know spearfishing and free diving and bow hunting and like he's very into risk mitigation on all fronts i also kind of like I'm into lifting heavy weights. Like I do some stuff that technically would kind of like tear up the body or beat it up a little bit. I mean, hell, I did like 20 years of triathlon racing, which theoretically is really bad for your heart at the level I was doing it.

1:02:20So I think I, I live a little bit too fast, dangerous, exciting, widely varied life to do Brian's full protocol. It's interesting. Uh, it's interesting the role of risk mitigation, because I would think to some extent taking risks is rewarded by nature. Yeah, not really, because it would potentially put the population at risk. And, you know, potentially you'd have a lot of people, you know, dying off from risky activities versus staying as safe as possible, managing calories as well as possible, keeping the environment as predictable as possible, and engaging in some things that would cause the bite to become stronger, like high intake of plant-based antioxidants, or, you know, sane amounts of training or sauna or things like that.

1:03:07But I think that Brian will definitely, if we continue on the same path, live significantly longer than me, but I might have more fun than him. Well, what about calorie restriction? What's your views on that? I'm a fan. I'm a fan of, again, I don't go as deep into it as Brian. I probably eat about 3 ,000 calories a day, but I'm also pretty active. and I sometimes feel like eating a wide variety of foods and adequate calories and then staying very active, you kind of feel like you have more energy and more vigor than restricting calories and sitting around a lot. But I do an intermittent fast, so 12 to 16 hours a day, typically at bedtime all the way up until like 10 a.m.

1:03:43in the morning. I don't eat any calories. And then a couple of times a month, I'll do a longer fast. Usually like if I'm traveling, doing airline travel, stuff like that, I'll do a 16 to 24 hour fast. I think there's definitely something to it. Do you think, I once read that not eating the 24 hours before you go on, let's say, a transatlantic flight, that you'll avoid jet lag. Do you think there's some truth to that? Yeah, there is. Simply because the oxidation of food, the increase in metabolic rate, and some of the inflammation that gets piled on top of the radiation and inflammation that you're already experiencing on the airplane dictates that if you're able to restrict the appetite while you fly, it can be a good idea.

1:04:22Yeah, the problem is I get very hungry when I'm sitting around and bored and like watching movies on an airplane or whatever. So I travel with liquid ketones and those keep my appetite really well satiated, but still allow your body to be in a fasting state. So there are companies like HVMN or Ketone Aid, and they sell these little like two to three ounce ketone shots. And I'll typically just like slam one of those every few hours during a long plane flight. And it seems to help out quite a bit with jet lag. And ketones also have a little bit of an anti-inflammatory effect. So something like that and then just lots of water can be a pretty good idea.

1:04:55Ben, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all this. You have so much information. You're always so knowledgeable about all this stuff. And I'm going to have to just read the transcript because I'm going to forget everything after this podcast is over. But Snapchat GPT, do the summary for you. Yeah, that's a good idea, actually. What app do you use? There's read.ai, there's Descript. What do you use to summarize a podcast? I use two different things. I use Adafi if it's a YouTube video as a plugin for YouTube. And then I just use the iOS or the browser-based chat GPT Plus and tell it to summarize.

1:05:35And sometimes it'll depend on podcasts and how much time I have. Sometimes I'll request like a one-page summary with quick bullet points. Sometimes I'll request like a six-page summary that has timestamps and breaks down each author, et cetera. And so that's usually what I'll use. All right, well, Ben, again, thanks so much. What's the URL of your website? BenGreenfieldLife.com. And also people should check out the BoundlessCookbook.com and Boundless Parenting. Plus, I recommend to everybody Boundless. I have it like right there on my shelf. So Boundless, an incredible book. It's like the best book I've ever read about physical health.

1:06:13Thanks, man. That means a lot coming from you. Yeah, I've recommended it all over the place. So hopefully it keeps on selling. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. I'll send you a royalty check soon. I promise. No worries. Ben, thanks so much. Thank you.