Transcript of Episode 493: Ben Greenfield: How to Actually Look 20 Years Younger + His Most Extreme Biohacks Revealed

Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

Ben Greenfield is one of a kind. He's back on the show. He is literally the most unique human I've ever. One of the most unique humans I've ever met. Oh, you're doing my shot.

And there's always these weird cocktails at your house. This is better than that. This. This tastes like somebody peed.

I don't know what that is. I just took it from my fridge. These are performance shots.

These are good. This one only keep me up till 2am No, I actually have seen these before. They're adaptogens.

Yeah, they're. And they taste delicious. And I think that they really help with. I mean, I take them before I work out. They're great for performance, but they're also great for mental focus and stress and blah, blah, blah. But I figured we do this. We usually. What we normally do, if you don't remember, we usually take a shot together. Like a healthy performance.

It's only been 30 seconds since I took a shot, so if you take yours now, we still did it together.

I know we supposed to, like, clink it and then drink.

There's still a little bit left in the bottom of mine.

But I'll tell you why I'm not doing it, because just did one like 45 minutes ago, and I think there's a maximum of how many I should probably take in a day. So I'm not going to do my shot today because it's so late.

They're adaptogens. That's what the name means. Your body just adapts.

Adapts. It'll be fine even with 50 grams of. Okay, well, I can do a little bit so we can clear.

I mean, I'm kind of joking and kind of not like, the definition of an adaptogen is something that will kind of turn up your nervous system if it needs an excitatory stimuli and turn it down if it needs an inhibitory stimuli. So an adaptogen is safer to use at night than like a pure central nervous system stimulant, like caffeine.

Your brain is. Were you always like this? Like, how do you remember? And, like, spew information at a pace that is a clip that is not human. Like, how do you have. How do you.

How do you obtain all this? A, by being mostly stupid about most things in the world except health, and then B, by doing what I think I first read in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes book, where Watson meets Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock home so he's going to try to forget Watson's name as soon as possible because he doesn't want stuff cluttering up his brain. And so I try to write stuff down all the time and get ruminating thoughts out of my brain as quickly as possible. And so I try to tell myself that I have a clearer, cleaner head because of that.

But it's like the retention. Because, like, I want to ask you a question. I'm not even sure if you can answer this, but because it. You retain, though, so much information in detail. It's not even just like, you know, most people or most people, like, they can kind of like, keep a couple of little elements of something. But if I know when I. When I talk with you or interview or whatever, I just have to say one word, like. And you can kind of like, rattle on everything up and down, sideways. Can. Is there a way that someone can work. Is there, like, actually some kind of methodology where we can become more.

Some kind of limitless smart drug?

Yeah.

Besides an IV and magic.

I'm not even joking. Do you have any tips of how people can train their brains to retain information better?

Do I look like a developmental psychologist to you?

No, but you can play one on.

Tv, so I'll play one on tv. So the way I look at it is you can stem the brain, which is what most people do, which is what I was just talking about, like caffeine, nicotine, energy drinks, Red Bull, whatever. It's like a dime a dozen. And like, a lot of energy drinks aren't bad. I mean, there's great brands out there. But it's one thing to just, like, turn the volume up on an organ that isn't necessarily going to just, like, spit out good information. If you, if you turn the volume up, you have to actually provide building blocks to allow things like, you know, the formation of new neurons to occur and, you know, greater amounts of neuroplasticity and better connectivity between neurotransmitters. And along the. Along a nerve, you know, as a nerve signal, gets propagated. So if you step back and you look at brain health in general, beyond just like, taking things that make you feel more awake, which is. Which kind of move the dial a little bit, right? You need to do things that provide fuel for the brain. So, for example, if you actually look at how a nerve propagates a signal, there's these little, like, insulatory sheaths around the nerves called myelin sheaths.

And myelin sheaths are made up primarily of two different kinds of fats oleic acid and dha. So oleic acid as the name implies is something you'd find in like extra virgin olive oil. You find it in a lot of Mediterranean fats. You find it in the diet of somebody who's not being like fat phobic, which is one of the worst things for your brain. Then DHA you would get from for example, fish oil. Right. So those are hexaenoic acid. It's different than DHEA or a lot of people confuse it with that.

What's the difference?

Hormonal precursor, like night and day.

Right.

DHA is an upstream metabolite for different hormones like you know, cortisol, progesterone, testosterone. And it's great. Like if you need hormonal support. DHA is a fatty acid that allows for those myelin Cs to have the fat composition along with oleic acid that they need. So first thing you would do is eat a diet that's rich in Mediterranean style fats. Like you've probably seen research that a Mediterranean diet's good for staving off Alzheimer's and dementia and stuff like that. And there's actually something to the idea of that being good specifically for nerve signal propagation. You also need in between those nerves to cross a little cleft in between each nerve. Neurotransmitters. And neurotransmitters are primarily made up of amino acids and they're supported by vitamin B, B, like boy. So if you have adequate protein in your diet and you're breaking down that protein, which actually as you age you can use a little bit of better living through science for meaning. Like if you, in my opinion, if you're older than about 40 and you're consuming protein, you should have digestive enzymes along with the protein to help break it down and get more amino acids, which amongst other things like say helping out with muscle can help out with neurotransmitter formation.

Collagen, essential amino acids. Any of like the supplements that have these broken down proteins in them would also count. And then vitamin B, you can get that to, to a pretty great extent from meat. It's always an uphill battle for someone who follows a plant based diet to have all the brain support that they need. Because you are, you have lower levels of vitamin B, you have lower levels in many cases of the fats that I was talking about, like the DHA and oleic acid, you have lower amounts of protein. And it's not as though you can't like eat a good plant based diet and get A lot of that stuff. It's just harder than if you were eating meat.

Can I ask you a question about the digestive enzymes? So you're saying as you get older, when you eat pro, is it when you eat too much protein or when you eat protein in general?

Protein in general.

You should always have a digestive enzyme.

I mean, I'd even say just digestive enzymes, not just for protein, but in general. As you age, as pancreatic enzyme production just decreases with age, it's a good idea to take digestive enzymes. A lot of people who get more gas and bloating from foods that didn't used to cause them issues will be able to get rid of that if they take digestive enzymes with their meal. And protein is one of the biggest.

So would you be taking it every. Would you be taking. Do you recommend people taking digestive enzymes after each meal or just after their biggest meal?

I take digestive enzymes Now, I'm 43, I take them with pretty much every meal except, and this is not like deeply rooted in scientific principles, it's just my own theory when I have a smoothie, because it's kind of like easy to digest. Yeah, it's blended and everything. And I might be totally off base like there. There actually was one research study that showed that back to the plant based thing. If you have a plant based protein, like pea, hemp, rice and you have whey protein, usually the whey protein would have more amino acid bioavailability than the plant based protein. But if you take digestive enzymes with a plant based protein, and in this study they were actually using like smoothie, like protein powder, the availability, the bioavailability of the amino acids and the plant based protein becomes just as good as the animal based protein. So I think technically I probably could get even more benefit if I just like threw a handful of digestive enzymes into my smoothie. But there's just so many things to do and so little time. When I'm making my morning smoothie, right. Right before I gotta get on a phone call, it's just like one extra step to take.

So I don't use digestive enzymes when I'm having a smoothie, but, but pretty much every meal, like if I go out to a restaurant, like I actually take one of those little pill capsule things and I put digestive enzymes in.

There and you eat it before or after the meal you said?

I mean before is good, but if you forget you can take it after. Most of the things that would be like blood sugar stabilizers digestive enzymes, gallbladder support. Taking them before the meal is best, but if you forget, you can still get benefits by taking them after, like, you know, on top of the food.

So it does, so it doesn't, it matters a little bit, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't, it doesn't ruin the actual benefit of it. Yeah, so, so it helps. So let me just get this straight. So digestive enzymes help with bloating, digestion. What are the other things, other benefits people can get from digestive enzymes?

Mostly unlocking more nutrients from food because they're basically breaking down the food better. So you have like, proteases that break down protein, amylases that break down carbs. You, you actually make salivary amylase in your mouth, which is why, like, if you put a cracker in your mouth and you pay attention, it starts to taste sweet because the salivary amylase automatically starts to turn the cracker into more simple carbohydrates, which taste sweet. And then lipase is the last one that would be like, for fats, for lipids, lipase. So if you look at a good digestive enzyme, usually it'll have a protease or some form of protease, some kind of an amylase and some kind of a lipase in it.

Do you think it's necessary then? Because I remember years ago, people were taking digestive enzymes after a big carb dinner, like they were having pizza or pasta and they would take the digestive enzymes. Is there any benefit for taking it after carbs or you think it's just really most important when you're eating a high protein meal?

It, I think it's most important with protein because protein would technically be the hardest to break down. Now if you think about it like if you were to take a bunch of digestive enzymes with carbs, and a lot of people are concerned about like spiking their blood glucose. Now your blood glucose would spike more because you're breaking down the carbs faster. But there are other things that you can take with carbs that a lot of people are doing now that lower the blood sugar response to a meal.

Like What?

They're called GDAs, glucose disposal agents. They're things that basically like help shove glucose out of the bloodstream and into the muscle more readily. One of the ways that they, that they do that is either a, by increasing insulin sensitivity, right? So basically the cell receptors are more sensitive to the activity of insulin, and insulin is going to help shove glucose into the cells, or they increase the expression of the transporters that pull glucose into say like muscle. So an example of a, of a glucose disposal agent would be berberine. Dihydro Berberine is kind of like a more powerful version of berberine. Some people call it like nature's metformin because it lowers blood glucose pretty well. Bitter melon extract is one. A lot of the things that do this are bitter. Bitter apple cider vinegar is another, like cheap hack that you can do before a meal that can lower blood glucose.

Do these things actually work?

They actually do. And they actually can work so effectively that if, and this has happened to me, like if you take a really powerful one like dihydroberine or bitter melon extract and you have carbs and then you like go exercise or you have carbs, but it's not that many carbs. You can actually watch your blood sugar and you start to go like a little bit hyper bow glycemic.

Really?

Yeah. But if you're gonna go to a steakhouse and like punish the bread basket or have an extra cocktail or do something that's going to put extra sugar into the body, I think it's a good idea. And if you're just like up the creek without a paddle and you forgot to take your enzymes and your glucose disposal agents to the restaurant. If you go to a restaurant or you go to anywhere that has a bar and you look behind the bar, they always typically have a lineup of bitters. Bitters, they're bitters are bitter and anything bitter is a glucose disposal agent. And anything bitter also stimulates the release of glucagon, like peptide, the GLP that a lot of people will inject. And so you get this mild like satiation inducing effect by having something bitter with a meal. That's one of the reasons, like some people will say to control blood glucose, have like the bitter, like the salad, you know, with the bitter vegetables, like earlier on the meal because it helps to control the blood glucose from the carbs that you're going to have later on.

That's a good piece of advice. So like if you're at a restaurant, what would be something in a bar that would be bitter that they can take? Bitters, like bitters?

I mean, no, bitters is kind of like, but like the elephant in the room.

Like I'm not a drinker, so that's why. What do you. I don't go to the bottom.

Water is a little bit bitter. But for me, like, honestly, like I will order soda water with a squeeze of lemon and a splash of bitters a for that effect, like actual bitters. Because I'm a lightweight and like, I. I usually don't drink more than like one cocktail when I'm at a party. So if you see me at a party and I've got glass in my hand, usually it's like bitters and soda water and lemon and I'm not like actually drinking.

Nursing it.

Yeah, yeah. And well, bitters have like a little bit of alcohol, but it's not like, it's not very much at all.

So bitters is actually a drink. I thought you meant like bitters, like.

Well, bitters, like ingredients, like an ingredient to a drink.

Yeah, yeah. I thought you were meaning more like bitters, like the. Like a bitter parsley or whatever they would put in a drink. No, that's how bad that's.

But something like that could work, I guess.

I mean.

Yeah, but like, bitters are like the actual concentrated bitters liquid they use.

That would work for sure to like, cut it. So of all those things you just said, you said the berberine, you said the bitter melon, you said a couple other things that help with glucose control. Which one works the most effective? Which was the best one?

There's ginseng, there's chromium, there's vanadium. There are a whole bunch of. I think probably the most powerful that you could just like, get as an over the counter besides like metformin, which is the diabetic drug, is dihydro berberine. The only downside to it is that, like, it's so potent that either a, it can cause a little bit of the hypoglycemia and it gives a lot of people a little bit of stomach upset. And then I have to sound like the fox guarding the hen house because, like, I own a supplements company and one of the products we have is like a blood sugar stabilizer and it's bitter melon.

Oh.

So it's like the primary ingredient in that one and it's called lean.

And does it work?

I do, yeah.

Is this kion and bitter melon actually.

Also helps with gas and bloating.

It does, yeah.

So you get some extra effects.

But also digestive enzymes does that too. Right?

Yeah. Yep.

So what. What is like your.

So there's like the 28 different pills you can take before you go out to a restaurant.

I was going to say you could like, take a whole thing. We could like, basically have that as your meal. Because I remember hearing years ago about chromium and all these other things. Yeah.

And that one's also chromium, vanadium, like those are like minerals that help to.

Support blood sugar, but not as well as the ones that you just said.

A lot of supplements will combine like the mineral based ones with the bitters from almost like a cocktail. There's another one that's really good, is called GD Aid. It's a pretty powerful one too.

GD A?

Yeah, I think that's made by biostack. But there's a few good formulas out there. And, and don't get me wrong, like there's nothing as powerful as lifting weights because chronically it gives you more muscle. Muscle like a metabolic sink that sucks up glucose and acutely it increases insulin sensitivities. Like lifting weights before you go have a big meal is a good idea. And even if you're not doing like a full on weight training session, even just dropping and doing like 50 push ups or whatever. And then the other one is cold. Cold is a potent glucose disposal agent. Meaning if you do a cold bath or cold shower, cold soak or whatever, your glucose can stay stabilized for a really long time afterwards.

How long?

Hours. Like I've, I've tested and this is an n equals 1 because I wear the blood glucose monitor. I've done cold early in the day and it has stabilized my blood glucose the entire day if it's like a cold, cold session.

So how long do you do the cold session now for?

My sweet spot is two to three minutes.

Oh, you do two, three minutes?

Yeah, yeah.

And let's talk about this because it's a great segue into my question that we asked. Was the first question I asked you.

Yesterday at coffee and chill.

Yes, at coffee and chill.

The ice tub party.

Yes, the cold plunge and coffee. I did the coffee, you did the cold plunge. What is your take on cold plunging and females? Because there's so much controversy right now with females and also I think also for hormones and cold plunging. Right, yeah. What is your take on it? I know you're not a female, but you are knowledgeable.

I do not have a uterus.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

That's, that's a future biology.

Yes. Only time will tell.

Yeah, I mean, I mean like women are more sensitive to cold. Like no offense, but generally stereotyping women have lower amount of muscle mass and muscle is a thermogenic agent. And so women tend to be more sensitive to the cold because of that. And then if you are in your luteal phase, you're going to produce more estrogen and progesterone and Both of those can cause a more vasoconstrictive response to the cold. And being vasoconstriction, you're making a blood vessel smaller so you're able to heat yourself a little less. Well, if you have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone, the other thing that can happen is a higher cortisol response, like a higher sympathetic nervous system response. The question becomes like, is any of that going to manifest in any actual issues? Right. It's kind of like theoretical that women have a different response to the cold, but is that going to cause your body to like go into starvation mode, gain fat, get adrenal fatigue, you know, being sympathetic nervous system stimulation for hours on end? And it's interesting because, because there's been studies on male versus female response to cold and female cortisolic response to cold.

There was one study of almost 60 men, 60 women, and they exposed them to cold and they measured a lot of the metabolic parameters that you would expect to be affected by cold, like insulin and glucose and a compound that fat cells make called adiponectin and leptin. And the female versus the male response was different. But technically, in that study's females, almost across the board, had a better metabolic response of all of those variables compared to the men. So metabolically, cold appears to be pretty good for women for things like fat burning, sugar stabilization, et cetera. And then there was another study where they did cold exposure for women for 12 weeks. And for the first four weeks, as a lot of people would tell you, cortisol was spiking in those women. But then after the four week mark and up to the 12 week mark, cortisol stabilized and began to chronically lower. Meaning there was like a stress resilience inducing effect of regularly timed cold exposure in women. Studies have also shown that just like I was saying earlier, if you have a high amount of estrogen and progesterone, you get more vasoconstriction and a little bit higher cortisol response to the cold.

But that doesn't mean it's causing anything bad. I would say if anything, there should be some kind of like a long term study in women that also differentiates between different phases of the cycle to actually see if there's anything like fat gain, lower hrv, higher amounts of stress, anything. But today nothing like that exists. And I think the only thing you can kind of reasonably say is that compared to men, women, and especially women in the luteal phase should consider doing cold. That's slightly less cold for perhaps a shorter period of time than a man might like.

How much time? A minute or.

Well, it's all kind of theoretical, right? But if you look at the effect of cold and its ability to be able to suppress the response to exercise, that's another reason that people say don't do the cold is because, right. If the body's super cold, you shut down your own anti inflammatory response and the body doesn't do things like mitochondrial proliferation or the development of new mitochondria or I should rather say mitochondrial biogenesis is to be called, or building of new satellite cells for building new muscle. So a lot of people have heard that and then they will exercise but not do cold after exercise. Because we've heard now that cold is bad for getting the response that you want from exercise. But the studies that have shown that to be true, which has been shown to be true, took cold exposure lengths from 10 to 20 minutes in length and a drop of almost a full Celsius and muscle tissue. And it takes a long time to do that. Like there's not a lot of people I don't know about you, but like I don't even have the time to do 10 to 20 minutes of cold after workout.

If you're doing just like a quick cold plunge, which actually is really refreshing after a workout, especially if it's like summer and you don't want to be sweaty the rest of the day, right. It's not going to impair exercise response at all. And then if you look at, well, how long should women go, how cold compared to men? I think a pretty good rule is that if you get out of a cold plunge and you're like distractingly cold and having to shiver for a long period of time to heat up, you probably overdid it. That would be the same for men and women. I mean, unless you're literally going for some kind of a WIM HOF world record or just massive amounts of fat loss or something like that because you're trying to burn a bunch off with cold. And there's better ways to lose fat than stressing yourself with excess cold. I think just a reasonable amount of cold. For me, my sweet spot is two to three minutes, but I go pretty cold because it's just like a time hack, you know, right. The shorter time, colder, shorter time. So I do 33 degrees for two to three minutes and I actually like to do pre workout cold because you get this surge of adrenaline and I have an awesome workout if I get cold before the workout and for that it's literally just like 30 seconds.

It's like there's a cold plunge between me and my gym. It's at 33 degrees. I'll walk out there, take off my shorts, jump in, get out, towel off, put my shorts on, go into the gym and that's just like 30 seconds. Like, just enough for, you know, a quick kind of like full body cup of coffee before you work out.

You know, it's funny, I was going to say to you, I. How about just what I would think to kind of warm up your body. What's your, what's your take on maybe going into the sauna for like five minutes to kind of warm up, you know? Warm up? Yeah. And then working out, because then you're like warming up your muscles. You're now like getting your body revved up as opposed to the opposite that you just said.

It's an interesting idea. So some things to think about are, first of all, if you look at sauna before or sauna after, if you want all of the performance enhancing benefits of a sauna, like the production of new red blood cells and erythropoietin or epo, like a precursor to red blood cells, and you want a higher amount of heat shock proteins and you want better blood flow, getting in the sauna after you've exercised gives you way more benefits because your body is already kind of like hot and stressed and you're piling some extra heat on top of that. Getting in the sauna or preheating before exercise compared to pre cooling before exercise would technically not be as good because even though you're kind of heating up the muscles, A, you can do that with just like a good dynamic warmup. And B, you're shifting blood flow to the skin away from muscles, away from areas of the body where you'd prefer to have blood for performance. So this would be. Well, let me ask you this. Like, if you walk into your gym and your gym's really hot, like, let's see, your gym's like 80 degrees.

Are you gonna have a better workout if the gym's at 80 degrees or if it's at like 65 degrees?

80 degrees?

Really?

Yeah. I like to be hot. I hate, I hate, I hate going to like gyms like Equinox because the air conditioning is so cold I'm not even able to sweat. And then I don't feel like I'm really, I'm not pushing myself as hard versus if I was sweating and really hot. Like I feel like your body's much More elastic and much more flexible.

And you're a weird anomaly, really. Well, let me explain why I am anyway.

But that's hot.

Yoga is harder than regular yoga cardiovascularly.

Right.

Because your body has to work that much harder to cool itself. And it has to shift between shifting blood to the extremities to be able to cool.

Right.

Body and also get enough blood to the muscles to be able to fuel the muscles.

Okay.

And so the heart has to work harder so the heart rate goes up. So if you're working out in a hot gym, then. And it's an actual hot gym, not, like, hot enough to where, you know, your muscles aren't so cold that you can't move, but hot enough to where, like, you're sweating more, you're having to move more blood flow around your rating of perceived exertion. Like, how hard you perceive that workout to be and how hard arguably that workout actually is, is going to be higher if it's hotter. So if your goal is just like pure cardiovascular benefits, then working out in a hot environment might be superior. But if your goal is like strength, power, biomechanics, et cetera. Like, working out in, in a room that's, like, unreasonably hot would be less advantageous from a performance standpoint.

Really.

And there are, there are nuances. Like if you're, I don't know, acclimatizing to go do some kind of, like a race or something in a hot area. Like, I used to ride my bike in a really hot room when I was getting ready for Iron Man Hawaii. Or if your number one goal is, like, sweating, heat shock proteins, cardiovascular stimulus. But I would argue that, like, if you're in the gym. Gym, you should be in the gym to build strength and power. And if you want to, like, get really good cardio fitness. Yeah. Go ride your bike in a hot room or hit the sauna.

Well, it's funny you said that, because I remember. Do you know Laird Hamilton is. Obviously you do, right?

Yes, I know.

Okay. So I was, I was, was with him in this and his sauna. He had a bike in there, like a spin bike. He's, like, spinning. Yes. I was like, this is. I could barely even sit in the sauna. He's like, riding his bike in the sauna.

Yeah.

Because, I mean, I think it, I, I thought it's training your, like, it's training your endurance and stamina to a level.

It is.

Yeah. And. But I also thought, like, it's, it's. It, like, I thought it's better for you basically versus like do you ever go to equinoxes or something? Better for you. Different.

Like it's better for you cardiovascularly.

Right. But not, not, not perform, not for strength training and performing power and like.

Like, but why Everybody thinks about gym a little bit differently.

Yeah.

I primarily think about the gym as a place to build muscle and get strong and develop power and separate the cardiovascular component from that. Like if I, if I wanted the best of both worlds, I would go to a gym where it was like 65 to 70 degrees in the weight training area and then eat the most out of my cardio training. There's another room that's like kind of hot that you could go to your cardio in. So you know what I'm saying? Like it kind of depends on what your goals are.

But I, I'm so confused. On to why would it be not as good or advantageous if I were to be in a warm place doing strength training? Because like if I'm doing a deadlift.

Blood flow to the muscles.

But if I'm deadlifting, right. And I can be, I can be way more flexible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More supple.

You're right. That heat would allow you to do that. But you, you cross, you, you can pretty quickly cross a threshold from enough heat for the muscles to be warm and not stiff to so much heat that there's not enough blood to the muscles because the body has to shunt a bunch to the skin to cool the body off.

Okay.

You know what I'm saying? So it's like hot is good, but more is not necessarily better. If you're, if you're wanting to get enough blood flow to the muscles to like crank out extra reps and get strong.

Okay, fair. Let me share my daily routine game changer with you. It's the Momentous 3. I've been using their protein, their creatine and omega 3 combo for months now and the results are undeniable. These nutrients are key for long term health and performance, but hard to get enough of through diet alone. The crea pure creatine boosts both physical and your mental performance. The grass fed whey tastes great with no weird aftertaste and their Omega 3 is a must for recovery. Since adding these my energy, my recovery and my overall well being has really improved. So if you want better performance, this is the way to go. Visit livemomentous.com and use my code Jen for 35% off your first subscription. That's livemomentous.com code Jen for 35% off your 1st subscription. Trust me, you'll be happy you did. What's the one thing that people are not doing properly for weight loss or fat loss? You know, we all know about strength training. Yeah, we all know about eating protein. Okay, we got those down. And the whole cardio versus strength training. I'm sure you believe that strength training is more important than cardio.

Concurrent training, meaning doing strength and cardio at the same time, either in the same workout or throughout the week, is the most superior form for fat loss versus just strength or just cardio.

Okay.

Kind of like the order for fat loss is concurrent training and then aerobic training and then strength training.

Say more. What do you mean by concurrent?

Means at the same. So an example of a concurrent workout, and there's like one classic workout that showed it just burnt way more calories and blasted more fat than just about any workout you could do is you would do, let's say. And I'll give you an example of a workout that I do if I'm pressed for time. And I just want to get as many benefits as possible possible out of the workout. Metabolic stimuli, strength, et cetera. Now, before I explain this, there will be like a few choice people listening in who know exercise science will say, well, what about the interference effect? The interference effect means that if you are doing cardio and strength, the strength isn't going to be quite as good as it could be if you were doing the cardio. And the cardio is going to be quite as good as it could be if you're doing the strength. But both put together for fat loss and the metabolic stimuli are gold standard, and that's called concurrent training. So this would be like I walk into, let's say, like my hotel gym back here in Santa Monica, and I do two minutes on the airdyne and then I do a super set of chest press to push ups.

And then I do two minutes on the airdyne and then I do a super set of leg press to hamstring curls. And then I do two minutes on the airdyne and I superset overhead press to band pull parse, and then finally two minutes on the airdyne and lat pull downs to seated rows. Like that's an example of a concurrent training workout where it's all done in the same set and you're kind of like huffing wind and you have a metabolic rate that's through the roof. You're burning a ton of calories because you're never just like sitting there, you know, Watching TV in between sets, and you're kind of like moving the whole time. Another example of concurrent training from more of like a weekly periodized standpoint would be, and I do this a lot of times when I'm at home, like, full body strength Monday, core and cardio Tuesday, full body strength Wednesday, core and cardio Thursday, and then full body strength on Friday, and core and cardio on Saturday. So that's an example of, of a week in which you're doing both aerobic and strength training. And back to the fat loss piece. That would be an example of the best way to move or exercise if you want to burn fat.

I would say kind of related to that. One of the bigger mistakes that people make in the exercise department specifically would hearing that Zone two cardio, like aerobic cardio, burns a lot of fat. And that's like, they're just like the treadmill walking people because of that. And I have, like, I love to walk on a treadmill. I think it's great to do, like, low level physical intensity during the day. I think it can be a little bit of a waste of time to do it at the gym. Like, I'm not talking about people who actually are doing that for a race, like a triathlon or a marathon or something like that. Like, people are just wanting to burn fat. That I would rather see people getting zone 2 cardio by walking on the treadmill during a zoom call, or by wearing a weighted vest while you're cleaning the garage, or, you know, by parking a few blocks away from the restaurant, taking a brisk walk there and eating food and brisk walking back. And that. That's where I get the majority of my zone two cardio. Just kind of like moving during the day, you know, jumping on the trampoline in your backyard.

Right.

But the issue is that. So from if you look at, like, exercise physiology, there's this term called the. The rq, the respiratory quotient. And if you were to go into an actual exercise physiology lab and put on one of these masks that measures the amount of oxygen that you consume and the amount of carbon dioxide that you produce, you can look at that ratio and get a pretty accurate evaluation of how much fat you're burning and how many carbs you're burning at rest or during exercise. The exercise version is you do it while you're on a treadmill or on a bicycle. The at rest versions, you're just like, laying down, getting your metabolic rate measured. And if I were to put you on a treadmill and do that test, if you're walking at a really low intensity, you'd see a lower rq. A lower RQ means you're burning more fat and less carbs. And then as you get more and more intense, you begin to shift away from fat utilization. You begin to burn a higher and higher percentage of carbs. And then you get to the point where you're just like, running so hard up a hill, almost ready to fall off the back of the treadmill, and you're burning, like, almost 100% carbs.

So people hear that and they hear that, like this lower intensity or cardio burns a higher percentage of fat. All right, great. Well, that's why I'm gonna, like, burn all the fat off of my body. The problem is that you aren't burning that many calories at that low intensity. So if I'm burning, say, 70% fat, but I'm burning 200 calories per hour walking.

Right.

Zone two, and then I'm burning maybe 30% fat, but I'm also burning 800 calories per hour during, say, like one of those concurrent training sessions that I described.

Right.

At the end of the day, I'm burning way more calories from fat by using intensity, high intensity interval training and weight training than I am from doing zone two cardio.

So because you see this whole thing about, like, the 12 incline, 3 miles an hour, 30 minutes.

Yeah. I'm like, yeah, 12% incline, 3 miles per hour, 30 minutes.

Yeah, yeah.

12, 12, 3, 30.

Something like that. Yeah. And they're saying that that's like the. The 12, 3, 30 is like the best workout. And, you know, I tried it just to see what the whole. The hype was about. And I didn't burn very many calories.

No.

And also psychologically, I didn't feel like I did very much.

Now, granted, the best workout is the workout you're actually going to do.

Right.

And then for a lot, 100%, I can turn my brain off and go walk for 30 minutes. That person's gonna burn more calories than the person who stops at the door of the gym. Because whatever they're supposed to be doing is way harder than that.

A hundred percent. It's like when people always say to me, like, what's the best. What's the. What's the best exercise to do? The one that you're actually gonna do for sure. But is that a. I just wanted to ask you because I think there's a misconception out that, like, if you just do that, you're gonna change your body. Composite composition and you don't agree with.

That Compared to doing nothing at all. You are not, not, not as much as if you were like doing a widely varied program with both streng hit and then.

Well, because on the. The only way to really change your body composition is through strength training, I found.

Yeah, right.

I mean you're not.

Well, I mean like if you look at the legs of a Tour de France cyclist, you wouldn't say, okay, well they're like, they're not doing anything. So if you, if you get enough reps at a high enough wattage doing cardio, you can change your body composition. Swimmers have huge shoulders and they're not spending a ton of time in the gym.

True.

So if you're at the extreme end of the cardio range.

Right.

We're not talking about, do that on, on an average, you know, cardio bunny workout machine.

But what would you say about this? Someone who runs, let's say the three like a three incline at five miles an hour versus the 12, 3:30. What do you think is a better way to spend your time for efficiency and effectiveness?

For what? For fat loss. For fat loss, I would say.

And keep the like think about all the things, the calories, the.

All that. Yeah, the higher intensity one, the one that gets your heart rate higher because of what's called post exercise oxygen consumption. Meaning that the harder that you work out, the higher your metabolic rate is after the workout or the more muscles that you stimulate during a workout, the higher your metabolic rate is long term because muscle burns calories and you're adding new muscle to your body. So anything that keeps the metabolic rate elevated for a longer period of time is going to be better. And there are of course like subtle nuances. Like if you over train and spend like two hours doing super high intensity stuff in the gym, you will eventually develop hormone imbalances that send your body into starvation mode. Then it wants to start holding on to fat and get the cortisol issue. So there's always kind of like a law of diminishing returns. But for the most part you're going to burn more calories, burn more fat and lose weight more effectively. If you're exercising at a higher intensity.

Instead of lower, how do you know when that's happening? Like how do people know when they are working out too much too often and they're getting a lot of these symptoms like holding on to fat and hormone imbalances, like when do you know if it's that or if it's just like midlife or another thing? Happening. Like, are there signs that that's happening?

Yeah, let's say that you weren't going to. By the way, I just bought a new shirt at TJ Maxx because I had to be on a documentary and I feel like I'm nippling out because.

I don't know how to wear any nipple, actually.

Okay, good.

But you do look very fancy in a new white shirt.

No logos.

Yeah.

So TJ Maxx, let's say you were. You couldn't or you wouldn't, or you don't have the time or just can't logistically get like a blood test or a hormone test to actually see if you have hormone imbalances. Frankly, like, that would be a pretty good idea. If you really wanted to self quantify is like, go get a urinary hormone test and see if like, cortisol's super low or you're, you know, you have low DHEA or low testosterone or any of these things that you could actually quantify. But that aside, some of the major things to pay attention to is, and this is something you'd easily do with a wearable, elevated resting body temperature for multiple days in a row over and above what it would normally be. Elevated resting heart rate over and above what it normally is, not for one day, but like consistent patterns, like usually three days or more is beginning to give you clues that there's some type of nervous system dysregulation that can be pretty tied to the type of endocrine system dysregulation that occurs from overtraining. Poor sleep. Being tired, though, but, like getting into bed and not being able to sleep.

Like, tired, but wired. So. So it's not like you don't want to get into bed, but you get into bed and you're just like, you can't sleep. And you just like lay there awake. And you can sometimes hear your blood pounding in your ears. And sometimes because of the elevated body temperature and heart rate, you're a little bit hotter than usual and you just feel like sleep is disrupted. Swelling, like swelling in the fingers, swelling in the legs, toes, just like feeling like Pillsbury Doughboy a little bit more often. Because cortisol dysregulation is linked to blood pressure regulation and also retention of fluids. So that would be another one. Lack of appetite or like a drop of appetite. Because if you are over training, like, if you look at this from like an evolutionary biological standpoint, in a state of famine or starvation or excess stress, your body wants to hold on to calories because it's unlikely that this is a time of like, feasting and a time of caloric excess. So when that happens, what you would tend to see is like a drop in hunger, like, not. And there's assuming you're not like a GLP agonist or something like that, but you're not as interested in food, you're not eating as much.

You start to experience some of those things that might indicate like, a little bit of a down regulation of the metabolic rate. And it's interesting because some of this stuff is like acute and then changes as it becomes chronic. So some people that were really paying attention to what I just said would think, okay, so Ben, what you're saying is like, my heart rate's elevated and my body temperature is elevated, but then if my thyroid is dysregulated, doesn't that make like the body get colder and slow down metabolism? And that's what happens. If you ignore all this stuff and just go for too long a period of time, then your body just starts to slow everything down. So it's like the early warning signs are tired and wired. Elevated heart rate, elevated body temperature. But then. And lack of appetite. But then long term, it's like everything just starts to shut down. And then you're cold and you're sluggish and your metabolism starts to slow down. So this is something I'm always like a little bit cautious to talk about because I think more people, maybe not your audience, I don't know. For the most part, more people need to hear, like, move more, eat less.

Yes.

Lose weight. And there's like, there's fewer people that need to hear, don't go to the gym. It's a big scary place and you're going to die of cortisol over trading.

Right?

Yeah. I mean, that is an issue with some people. And like, I am serious that more people need to hear that because this is like back to the root of your question about mistakes that people make. People sometimes grasp at straws that aren't that important or try to fry a fish. There's not big of a fish that you need to fry.

Right.

And even though I love what is going on to a certain extent in Washington D.C. with Make America Healthy Again, the MAHA campaign, and increasing awareness of what's in our food and what ingredients are in the food supply, I think there's a lot of people almost myopically focusing on artificial sweeteners and food dyes and even seed oils to a certain extent as being like the biggest problems when really, like, if we Just told more people, kids especially like get outside, move more, exercise more, eat less calories, understand the difference, you know, between how many calories are in, I don't know, like a Costco hot dog and a salad. Like those are the things that we need to be focusing on more. I'm not saying there's not some problems with what are petroleum in an ingredient, artificial sweeteners, but, but it's not that big of an issue, especially when it comes to weight loss. Like if I was coaching somebody for weight loss, I would much rather they be having like a sucralose acetyl famine potassium infused like stick packet that's 25 calories. That makes them say like not stuff their face with an extra 600 calories because they're drinking some satiating synthetic compound.

Then I would have them be like, nope, that has artificial sweeteners in it. So I'm just going to go eat. Eat six apples. No, actually like at the end of the day, like there is a calories in, calories out. Consideration of this stuff.

I mean, that's what I was going to say to you. I mean at the end of the day we try to over complicate things that don't need that much complication or to your point, focus on the wrong things and not focus on the foundational things like move more, eat less. And at the end of the day it is calories in, calories out. Like, you know, you can say yeah, huge part. It's a huge part of it. It, yeah, you can say where you're getting your calories from and all these other things. But like if that Diet Coke is going to stop you from eating another, you know, large pizza, it's probably going to be okay for you to have. Yeah.

Or just like either, like if I'm on an airplane and they're bringing out the airplane food, like I'll have a Diet Coke just because I don't think about the airplane food.

Right.

Yeah. And then I'm not going to drink like. Well, technically the law of diminishing returns for carcinogenicity of diet Coke is like 77 of them in one sitting. Like, like before you get into the cancer causing, you know who's drinking that many? Yeah, not a lot of people. And, and more like granted there's more recent research showing that the equivalent of two to three cans can cause anxiety like in rogue models. And it was weird because they even showed like anxiety that gets passed on to the offspring. Maybe, maybe aspartame is like affecting genetics and, and Sperm in some way. But again, like it's a pretty far cry to correlate that to road models and then tell somebody, you know, Diet Coke is going to make you fat and unhealthy. Like it's, it's. There are bigger fish to fry.

They're a bigger fish to fry. What do you think of those machines? Like those people now? Everyone's, it's all the rage. Like you put these electromagnetic things on your body and you work out with them and it stimulates the muscle. What do you think of that?

Well, I mean like the, like the OG ones, like the as seen on tv.

Yeah.

Like six pack abs with the like the stomach pulsing.

Those pulsing or not even that one so much but like there's like these body suits you can wear.

Yeah, yeah, but the original ones were like the abs. And for me, as somebody who like appreciates the value of hard work and blood, sweat and tears and like getting the job done in the gym, I always thought it was kind of gimmicky. And then I actually tried one of the full body electrical muscle stimulation suits and it's, it's not a walk in the park like to actually get like the muscle stimulation. A, it's a pretty significant contraction. B, it's a dashboard or a control unit that's bypassing your central governor, your brain, which sometimes forgets how to recruit certain motor units as you go through life. So all of a sudden you're using new muscles that you've never used before, so you're ungodly sore the next day. In many cases it is like your body temperature goes through the roof because you're using a whole bunch of muscles all at the same time. It is, it would fall into the category of like a biohack for muscle. And they are effective, I would say. The downside is they're a little bit just inconvenient to get on and get in and out of and everything. And they also, if you're not careful, can induce a pretty high amount of soreness.

And that's my problem is like whenever I'm doing a workout, like I really want to feel it. And yeah, whenever I've used those EMS suits, I'm just like useless for days.

Really.

Yeah, I, well, this is funny. I don't know if you're like this, but sometimes if I've got like an international flight or a period of time where I know I'm going to be sedentary, I'll crush a really hard workout before that just so I'm just like Less antsy, right? No, obviously.

And you can't work out now anyway.

Use an electrical muscle stimulus relationship before something like that. Because I know I'm just like, dude, I'm gonna be so sore. I'm not gonna want to work out anyways. And so I'll use it before a period of time where I know I'm gonna be like super sedentary.

I like that. It's a good little hack. Give me some of all the things you've done. What is the one thing that you think is like extremely effective? That like the one biohack that's like what, that would shock people and, and the one that's like so useless that like, you know, you kind of like we're into years ago or that's overhyped, that there's no bang for their buck.

Like, like a buy, like a technology or just like anything practice or anything.

Well, because you're like a guinea pig, you've tried, you try everything.

Yeah, I would say that. So, so let's cut straight to the useless since we were just talking about fat. Any of those like so called thermal burning agents, like pre workouts that amp up fat oxidation or anything like that. It is true that like green tea extract, you know, egcg, caffeine, any of these central nervous stimulants, they do shift the body into a state of higher fat oxidation, but it's such a small bump that like you're never gonna lose any appreciable amount of weight using some kind of like a thermic burning reaction. So that would be one that I'm doing. Like I'm still surprised at seeing those marketed like raspberry ketone extract or whatever. And then something surprising that I think might also be kind of like controversial as well, well is I think GLP agonists are some of the most useful weight loss compounds that we've ever developed through science and can be incredibly helpful for people who have difficulty controlling their appetite, who want to lose weight, who want to manage lipids, who want to like decrease liver enzymes. There's even evidence now with effects on neural inflammation. And I actually think they're really useful drugs.

I think think they're prescribed in a dosage that's too high. Like if you were to go to a doctor and just get a standard prescription for like retatrutide or something like that, it's such a high dose that you get nauseous and you lose all enjoyment. Like it's almost like anhedonic for life in general. Like you lose Just like the dopaminergic response to not just food, but a lot of things. Which is why depression is one of the side effects of some of these drugs. And it slows gastric motility. You see, you get constipation and gastric upset and you lose muscle. Because even though you hear you're supposed to go to the gym and lift weights and eat enough protein, if like your favorite like protein smoothie or steak makes you just super nauseous and want to throw up, you're not getting enough protein, then you go to the gym, you feel flat because you're not eating enough calories, then you don't want to lift weights. But smaller dosages, we're talking like for example, like 1/10 of the doses looks like retatrutide. It's like just enough of a stimulus to where somebody who has difficulty controlling calories can, can resist food much better than they would be able to do in the absence of that and not have a ton of the other side effects.

And because there's a lot of other, an emerging body of, of research proven system wide effects of some of these agonists, I think that they're actually like pretty cool and useful new thing for a lot of people.

So you're talking about the, the one that it works on the three receptors, right?

Reddit True Tide does, yeah. It works on glp, a few different, different hormone or appetite and satiate satiety regulating mechanisms, glp, ghrelin, and one called gip.

How is that different than triazepatide?

I think Trisepetide is a dual agonist.

So it's two.

It's two.

So Ozempic is like old school.

Yeah.

Then you have Trisepatine, I think it's one.

And there's a new one that's coming as like five, so.

Five, yeah. What is that one called?

I don't even remember. I can tell you it's probably hard to pronounce.

I can definitely say that Reta.

True Tide is hard enough.

It is, but they compound that already.

You can like if you work with a good functional medicine doc who can get stuff like that from a compounding pharmacist.

Oh really?

So there's, there's a new company called Pepsual that's doing like you get on phone with a doctor and you have like a consult with a doctor and then they can prescribe you peptides after that. But they're not like the, that sold for human research peptides. Like they're actually like clean peptides.

I'm all about finding sustainable ways to optimize performance. The kind of work that actually moves the needle on how you feel and function. And that's why I really need to tell you about Prolon's five day program. Most of us are chasing quick fixes that never get to the root of the problem. And the result is sluggish energy, brain fog and bodies running below its full capacity. But Prolon changes that by triggering your body's natural repair and renewal process at the cellular level. It's not a cleanse or crash diet. Prolon is the only patented fasting mimicking diet developed at USC's Longevity Institute. It's a plant based program with soups and snacks and drinks. Drinks that nourish your body while keeping you in a fasting state. The benefits are backed by science. Deep cellular rejuvenation, fat focused weight loss, no injections and better metabolic health and energy. Plus improve skin and even reduced biological age. And here's my favorite part. It's a complete reset in just five days. No willpower battles, no extreme restrictions. Just a structured plan to let your body do what it's designed to do. Repair, renew and optimize. And right now Prolon is offering 30 off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift.

When you subscribe to their five day program, go to prolonlife.com Jennifer Cohen and use Jennifer Cohen to claim your discount and bonus. That's prolonlife.com Jennifer Cohen and use code Jennifer Cohen. So you believe in the microdosing? Microdosing at a really small amount for all. Just if you just want to like turn off the food noise, what would you say the dose like should even be?

I'm not a doctor, but you play one. I can't take anything that I take as medical advice. Okay, what would you do for me? Theoretically I would like 250 micrograms of retrutide on like Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then just see what happens. And most people will find that they have way better calorie control.

Really? But that's how is it.

Oh, and we should also say this though like back to like the people who risk overtraining. There are risks of like if you have an eating disorder and you struggle with anorexic or, or body image issues and you actually need to gain weight and you are, you look in the mirror and you think you're fat, but you're actually not and you look fine or you're too skinny. Like this would be a bad ide idea for you, right?

People don't know anymore if they are or not. That's the problem.

Yeah.

If you're anorexic, you don't see yourself as anorexic.

A lot of times that's the problem. So what I'm saying is, like, I just know there's probably at least one person who's like, are you going to hurt a lot of people? Putting advice like this out. I will admit that, like, if you have an eating disorder, like, these are not good compounds to be around.

No, they're terrible compounds to be around. But if you have not looked around, have you not noticed that everybody is thin now? I feel like Everybody's taking a GLP1. Like, I've noticed that a lot.

I live in North Idaho. Not.

Okay, I don't live in la, but.

But I, I do know of the phenomenon that you're talking about, and I've observed it, you know, mostly in, like, pop culture. And I think there, there are a lot of people on these. I mean, like, again, like, if you're not losing muscle and you're in your. But I think many of the people you're talking about are on a standard dose. They probably are losing muscle.

Well, this is what I'm concerned about. What happens when you get off of these things? Things if you're. Even if you're microdosing, right? Like, is this something that people have to stay on forever? Like, what happens if, you know, after a year, they're very expensive, these things, Right? So let's say after a year, like, how do you titrate off this thing? Are you going to gain all the weight back? Because you're not really changing the behavior. You're just changing your ability to. To think about it at that moment because you're medicated.

My response might be a little surprising, but I think that that's less of a risk than you would imagine. Because even though at the standard high dosages, the yo yo waken is definitely an issue. Because if you go, for me, like, super nauseous, I want to throw up around food and that finally goes away and you're like, thank God I can, like, have a steak. I get that. And there could be yo yo weight gain related to that. But if we're talking about what I was just recommending, like, microdosing, it's like training wheels. Like, if, if you have gone for such a long period of time being obsessed with food and you've almost forgotten what it feels like to not think about food all the time, and then you do something for four or eight or 12 weeks. That retrains your brain how to not think about food all the time. And then you stop using that. You still maintain the recognition of or, or the, the sense of what it feels like to not be hungry or what it feels like to resist a food food.

What's your take on.

And I'm actually talking about this from personal experience. Like I, I have for almost a year now mess around with these things, like just as self experimentation because like you pick a lot of stuff. Like I've taken a standard dose just to see what that feels like for a week and it's horrible. I've taken the baby doses and then just like not taking them at all. And I can tell you, like, if you take a baby dose and it suppresses hunger mechanisms and then you stop using it, it really is like training rules. You're like, oh, like, even though I'm not on this anymore, I've. I've taught myself that I wasn't eating that cheesecake because I was hungry. I was eating it just because I had poor satiety mechanisms and I don't actually need to eat that.

Right. So you kind of remember. Yeah. But then eventually just don't you go back to then just old patterns and old behaviors.

I don't know. But think about it. Like electrical muscle stimulation. It's like if I use an EMS suit to cheat my brain into firing, let's say, a muscle that a lot of people forget how to use, like the glute medium. And then I quit using electrical muscle stimulation. My body now remembers that that muscle is turned back on and I can start using it more when I'm doing squats and lunges and band walks or whatever in the gym. So I think that in many cases in exercise and fitness and nutrition, you can use a little bit of better living through science for training wheels. I mean, people even do this with sex, right. They'll use Viagra to induce an erection in a man who doesn't have true erectile dysfunction, but who just has this mental block to getting an erection. And then once a guy realizes that, oh, I can actually get it up, I'm not broken. You can actually taper off the Viagra and they don't have the erectile issues anymore.

Yeah, I guess that's true. Right. Like you're just kind of like proving to yourself that you can do it in a way or showing yourself that.

You can do it.

Yep, that makes sense to me.

Yeah.

Because do you have food noise though? Could you said I can't imagine.

I personally have fleet noise. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Like, yeah.

And you know what? I don't anymore. You don't anymore. And I think it's because of GLPs.

So it just. Yeah, it just stopped recently. Because of the fact that you're micro dosing. Yeah, really?

Even when I'm not using it, like, just being able to just like go. You probably know the feeling, like walking into a restaurant with a bunch of friends and you're starving. Like, let's order appetizer. Get the food out here now. It's just like you just, you know, or. Or I, for example, can just like sit there and talk for 45 minutes and not be like scanning the menu frantically to make sure that when they come, I'm able to get the order in.

Right.

And again, like, you do have to be careful because you can undereat, you.

Know, but you're someone who's like, if you, you feel like you have to do all these things to keep weight on. So I would think that someone like you would not have that food noise because you can technically eat whatever you want and nothing.

I can eat a lot of food and gain weight, but then at the same time, the best way I can explain this is that constantly thinking about food can be distracting. Like when you're just like thinking about or planning your next meal, like, it is just a little bit distracting. And it's nice to be able to sit down to a meal when you've actually found the time is convenient enough to eat and eat and eat enough because you're not nauseous, but also have the ability to be able to like, go a few hours and do some podcasts or whatever and not feel like you just. You have to eat.

Yeah, right.

No, like, it's a little hard to describe unless you.

But it's the anxiety piece of it that's taken away.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I, I'm careful not to undereat.

Well, I mean, when you started all this, this whole thing, like 20 years, like when did you start all this, like guinea pigging stuff? Like 20 years ago, 15 years ago?

Like, like probably when I, when I was bodybuilding in college. Because like bodybuilding things, you know, like the OG biohacking sports, right. Trying different pre workouts. I never gateway. I never did like drug drug just because I couldn't afford them, you know, I was like a poor college student doing creatine and tuna fish, putting relish in the tunic fish to keep it low carb and like, you know, dipping hot Dogs and peanut butter. I mean, just like the cheapest calories I could get away with. But then there's also like certain pre workouts, you're like, oh, what happens to the body If I take 10 grams of creatine instead of 5? And then going from that into Ironman triathlon, where you're just trying out a whole bunch of different things to survive out there for 10 hours.

Right.

And then, you know, open water swimming and adventure racing and obstacle course racing, like a big part of it for me has been like fueling and feeding extreme sports and using that as like a testing ground. And then eventually for me just like being, you know, an influencer and a podcaster and an author, it's, it's a little bit of my prerogative now to just try things out, to be able to report back from almost like an immersive journalistic standpoint about what, what works.

Is it weird to you, like the evolution of like your career? Like, did you ever think this is what you'd be doing when you were 16 years old or 18 years old?

No. So I think it's a good idea. If you look at, for example, the habits of many of the founding fathers and there's a great book about this called the Pursuit of Happiness, one of the things that many of them and many high achievers and successful people value the most is time. And if you value time as much as, if not more than money, then you do plan out your days pretty strictly like in terms of habit and routine and structure. And I am a creature of habit in that sense. But I also, from like a long term business standpoint, keep myself pretty open to opportunities, not meaning I say yes to everything, I say no to a lot of. But I have never, for better or worse, had a 10 year plan of where I want to be from a business and a career standpoint. Because I find that if I structure my days to be highly effective and efficient, to do lots of deep work, to not fritter away a lot of time doom scrolling and non social media and engaging with pop culture, I can get a lot done. And when the opportunities come my way that I feel like I want to seize, I've got, got the ability to be able to seize them.

And so no, like I never had a plan of like having a podcast for a long time or writing a bunch of books or these are not.

Books, these are manuals or tomes, whatever you want to call them.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean it is, it is kind of fun to, to be a Little bit open and at the same time like, like I'm never going to be a mega billionaire with that approach. Like if you really want to be uber wealthy, you have to have like long term business plan and be building to sell. And you know, I have companies where we're a little bit more focused on that. Like my supplements company, like Kion, we actually have like really good long term plans and growth plans and forecasting or we're just like me as a brand. I don't know about you, but it's kind of fun to keep things just like a little bit loose. Loosey goosey.

Yeah, loosey. But, but you've become like you've created a niche that there's not many people in like biohacking that you can really call to. Like when I think of a biohacker, I think of you or your friend. Right. So I think there's only a few people that's like, are doing this thing with, with real gusto. And I wanted to always know what the trajectory, like if you didn't do this, what were you thinking you were going to do? Like you were doing these Ironmans and you're living in Idaho and you got, you got a bunch of kids. Everyone seems to be so surprised by the way that I only have two kids. Well, I guess two more than people thought.

I know two kids all at once. Yeah, twin 17 year old was.

I thought you had three.

No, that I know of. Yeah, we have two. We have goats and chickens and kids.

You have goats and chick. He's living on a farm. I mean, you know, you like what, what would you have done if this didn't work out for you?

Honest answer is the one thing that I always love to do and knew that I would do in some way somehow is to teach. I love to learn new things. Not just for the sake of learning new things, but to teach people.

You can see it.

I see people's eyes light up when they understand some concepts. And so like honestly if you want to look at this from just like a formal understandable standpoint, I probably would have been a teacher in some way or another.

But you are kind of a teacher. Yeah, like, so you're basically doing all of these things kind of like, and like you, you come back to people and say this, but you do so many things. So then what would be like? Because over the years, I mean, I'm just trying to think of all the wacky things I've seen you do and put, put on and, and the sleep mechanisms and like would you say most of those things are kind of like.

I'm just waiting for the red light on the balls question. That one always comes up. What's the craziest thing you did to your crotch?

Yeah, what was the craziest thing you've ever experimented with there.

There are so many things that like I don't think are that crazy because I just live in this world. But a few examples would be I went to the only state where it's legal, Texas, and had my plasma taken out and replaced with bags of young 18 to 25 year old healthy male donor plasma as like a full oil change for my body. I have gone under anesthesia in Utah several times and done a full body stem cell procedure where they inject everything, toe to head to hair, to sex organs, to everything with basically a stem cell soup. I've gone to Tijuana, Mexico and had all of my blood pulled out via the, the, what's it called in your neck? The jugular neck. And pass through a filter that pulls out like spike proteins and you know, anything that that's basically built up in your body and then have that over the course of three days re infused back into my body. I've had stem cells injected just about everywhere that you can imagine. And those are a few of the things that I've done. One that's super interesting is I've done something that some people, people might have heard of called the stellate ganglion nerve block, where a doctor uses ultrasound guided imaging to direct this super long needle right next to your carotid artery.

So you need to be super careful and injects it like a nerve block right into your vagus nerve on one side. And then because it's pretty much impossible to swallow or chew if you do both sides at once, the next day you go in and you do the other side and it completely resets your entire vagus nerve. And you set up from the table feeling like you've smoked a joint and had a glass of wine all at once and your HRV just goes through the roof for a couple of weeks. Normally this is something that they would do for somebody who has extreme ptsd, for example, but it's also just good for relaxing the nervous system. And then there was about an eight year stint where I did very high amounts of just about every psychedelic and entheogen known to humankind in very large amounts just to see what they did to the, the brain, like which ones.

And which one, which one was the best one?

I wouldn't say that any of them are that great because. Well, I'll come right out and say that I think that it's a very dangerous place to be taking heroic doses of large amounts of psychedelics because traditionally they've been used to divine with the spirit world. And I actually believe that you, like, cross a spiritual portal and you can get exposed to different entities and interact with demons, angels, spirits, et cetera. And that's a dangerous place for a human being to be. And that's one of the reasons that I don't mess around with any of that stuff anymore, besides, like, occasionally microdosing with psilocybin or something like that. So the craziest one is not one. But there is a place that very few people know about, based a little bit outside of Nashville, Tennessee, out in the sticks, this giant, like, mansion with barbed wire fences all over it and a giant sign on the gates that says, we don't call the coffee ops. And they have several people who work there who have undergone some pretty intensive training and are able to expertly combine a whole bunch of different entheogens together to almost turn default or downregulate the default mode network while simultaneously turning your brain into, like, a supercomputer.

And then your entire experience for anywhere from six to up to, like, 30 hours in some cases is recorded as you're talking. And I did that eight times over the course of three years. And that was probably the just the craziest in terms of, like, piles and piles and piles of papers and reams of material just, like, written from my brain being a totally different state.

What does it say?

And now, you know, just, like, business ideas, relationship ideas, different breakthroughs, you know, dealing with history of past things, things, you know, the reason that a lot of people do these things. But again, like, I'm not saying this to brag about having, like, done. No, I know lots of drugs or something like that, or even to endorse that in most cases for most people. What I mean is that it's much better in most cases to climb to the top of Mount Everest rather than being dropped off by a helicopter on top of Mount Everest. And a lot of people will hear me say something like that and not do the work. Things like prayer and fasting and working on your relationships. And they're just like, yes, I want to go do the drugs and get rid of the issues. And that's why you see a lot of people, like, going back to Peru for their 38th Ayahuasca retreat to finally fix their issues. So I'm not saying that this stuff is like, recommended safe, a permanent solution. You asked me about crazy stuff that I've tried and done and there was a phase where I used a lot of those kind of compounds.

And how long where was like, what did it do to your brain and how long were you affected when you did that thing in the sticks in Nashville? What was the cocktail of things that they gave you and do you remember or did you use any of the ideas that you saw that you wrote like in your life, in real life?

I want to say the cocktail stuff just. I just don't know about like boundaries and legality and stuff like that. It's as many of the of like the entheogens the that you would know about like you know, wachuma and lysergamides and psilocybin and you know, ayahuasca and even like a lot of different synthetics, but kind of combined in a very precise fashion based on you and your needs and your body weight and your size and what it is you're looking for, et cetera.

Do you do it by yourself, by the way?

A few times. And then I've also done it six times with my wife life. And it actually was like really, really, it really, really deepened our relationship to do something like that together. And again, like, I'm super cautious here because I also don't want to like have somebody who's going through a relationship issue and be like, oh, it's time to go like to Tennessee and do drugs.

But maybe it could be helpful actually, you know, because people don't know what's out there if they don't know. Like the thing that you're speaking about, I don't think I've ever heard of it and I hear of lots of things. Right.

So it kind of flies under the radar also because it's illegal. Well, it's like one of the reasons I'm being cautious here is like, I don't want to get people in trouble. In trouble.

Right.

Because I mean, it's not as though people aren't doing this stuff in the US So it happens. But I just want to be kind of careful. I would say that as far as the effects, like you could make an argument that the long term effects of many of these entheogens or psychedelics when used properly, can be long term neuroplasticity and a changing of the brain that makes you less of a ruminator or less anal retentive or less ocd, or less add, or less of an asshole. And I would say that I actually experienced many of those type of effects. Just like the ability to be able to think more creatively, act more freely, and be back to the creature of habit thing, which is a good thing, but a little bit more free flowing in that respect. But I would say of anything, the number one thing that I got out of all of that stuff, if I could name one, was being able to back to the training wheels piece. Like talk to my wife about anything and just like be super transparent, honest with her and her with me and just see each other as like actual real, infinite spirits and souls and us doing something like that.

You hear about MDMA therapy, it would be kind of like a baby version of that. That or MDMA therapy would be like a baby version of what we did. And it, it definitely transformed our relationship. I think that it's not the only way that we could have transformed our relationship. That's just the, you know, I have a pastor, he says God draws straight with crooked lines. Right. And that just happens to be the way that we got to where we are right now. But again, like, I'm, you know, I'm being super cautious right now. Just looking down, I'm like, I'm thinking about my words carefully. Like, just because drugs can be so dangerous for so many people. Depending on, on your spiritual health, on your psychological health.

Yeah.

So, you know, just like the GLPs and everything else, like a lot of this stuff is like, just because I'm talking about something I did and getting. Because I'm asking you for everybody, but.

Right. This is not being recommended for the average person. I understand that.

Do not take anything as advice.

Do not. But because you said it perfectly, like people could either climb Mount Everest or they want to get dropped on top of it, which is so true. Like, this is someone who's done everything and is like, basically uses his, his career in life to be like a professional guinea pig. So like you're like not the same. Like if you're sticking like massive needles in your, you know, your jugular, that's not.

Well, I didn't do. A doctor did it.

Well, not you personally. Meanwhile, you were going to do your own IV outside. So, I mean, have done that. Well, there you go. So I'm saying like, you're not the normal, normal, the average person. Right. Why did you do it? If it helped your, you and your wife's relationship, why did you do it six times? Why didn't you just do it once and like be done? Why did you do it over and.

Over because it was so profound at deepening our relationship that we came back and did it several times also as a part of that particular organization. You're kind of like, supposed to do it it multiple.

Oh, so it's not like a one.

And done, kind of like a build phase. And then one of the reasons that I just hinted at that I stopped doing it was because I realized and, and like, this is one of the only podcasts in a really long time that I've even talked about this stuff. I realized that for every, like, nine people that it might help, there's one person who gets, like, super psychologically or spiritually messed up from this stuff stuff. And so now I'm really careful, like, saying, oh, like, go to entheogens and pharmacological psychedelics in ayahuasca and go find God with dmt. Just because I think, like, like, these are like the nuclear bombs of the spiritual world. And you. You have to be way more careful with this stuff than what a lot of people think.

Right? You said something also, but, like, crossing over, like, you said, like, the spirits and angels and all that, that, like, what do you mean by that? You mean, like, that's what's dangerous. Like, you people are doing these things and it's. It's like entering into a different universe and they don't even know it.

The way that humans have traditionally interacted with the spiritual world and pierce the veil and cross the portal is typically via the use of some kind of chemical compound. Puts the brain into a state where I personally don't believe it's just a soup of different neurochemicals, but I believe you are actually crossing into a different dimension. And the fact that people from so many different walks of life who have never spoken to each other see similar elements of sacred geometry, see similar entities like purple fairies and fairies and praying mantises have similar experiences, encounter each other in that space, even without knowing that each other were in that space. Like, seeing each other's spirits in that world. Some people coming back literally, like, possessed with almost like an entity or a demon on board. Really, people being able to go to, like, South America and keep getting pulled back there because, you know, a shaman or someone who has the ability to be able to do this has somehow, like, cursed or possessed them. And even if you look at, like, here's a perfect example, like, astral travel, like, like the ability to be able to, like, go somewhere else in, in your mind while your body is in one place, like, LSD would be like, One of the traditional methods with which like elements of the world of like, sorcery and witchcraft have done that.

Like a witch riding on a broom. Like the, like the stereotypical, like, Halloween silhouette image of a witch riding on a broom is influenced by the fact that women sorcerers used to dip their brooms in a lysergamide, like an LSD like compound, and then apply that vaginally for the rapid absorpt to then be able to travel mentally to a different world, to be able to interact with different beings, including the spiritual world. Now it's like a witch riding on a broom, but that was where that originally came from. So if you talk with someone who's done like ayahuasca or a heroic dose of psilocybin or especially dmt, there's very few people who do something like that and come back denying the existence of a spiritual world. Especially if they were like an atheist before that. Because. Because you really do cross over this portal where you realize there's a whole different dimension around us that we can't see in our native state, but that certain chemical compounds that grow on this planet or that are synthesized allow us to be able to delve into and interact with.

Do you know, have you ever heard of this place? It's called arrhythmia. Have you been there before? I bet you.

No, I haven't been there.

Oh, you haven't been there.

I'm familiar with it. Wow.

They sent me there. Like, I did this. Like, they invited me to go there. Like this is like five years ago. And I went there with my. My sister. And I think, just why not? I thought, oh, it'd be something fun to try, you know, it'd be a fun little vacation. And what it is, basically you're doing like ayahuasca for like a week. Yeah, okay. It was. To say it was not my cup of tea is probably an understatement, but it didn't. The weird thing is, Ben, that we did it like you do it five nights in a row and they give you your portion and every. Every night it's a different type of ayahuasca. Yeah, but it didn't. I didn't feel it any of the nights I didn't get me. Like, I was. So what they do is they put you in that big room, you're with a bunch of people, strangers. You're stuck there between 12, like for 12 hours. Everyone's tripping. And people were demonic. That's what I was going to say to you. It was really Actually very scary because I'm still, I'm lying there like, oh my God, this is so not like, not for me.

It's not working. And they won't let you leave because it's like I think a danger to the. It's like a risk for them. But I'm sitting there and there's like a million people in this room who are literally like screaming and crying and barfing and like pooping. It was unbelievably insane to me. And in my head I'm like, they have to be like they're, they're literally out of their minds. They're like in another place because, because in real, no matter how high you are, no matter how drunk you are, people don't act and respond like that. It just doesn't happen. I've never seen a human with like it, other than in that situation be that like out of their minds. Like seriously, it's crazy. So is that why these things tend to like help people with trauma? Like are they seeing things that are otherwise unable to see because they're not in the right dimension to like heal themselves? Does that make sense?

A lot of hard charging high achievers who like no offense are. You're not sometimes wired up to be like very controlling.

Yeah.

That's one of the reasons that like they are successful. Have probably like you experience a little bit more difficulty like turning off the brain down, regulating the default mode network. And in many cases I was sober. Yeah. There is training and pre integration that's involved to actually help to teach you how to do that. Or in some cases people will just like carpet bomb you with more of the substance which has biochemical implications for, for days and days afterwards. I think it's better to just like you know, do things like breath work that, that teach you how to be comfortable in that space before you go in so that the standard dose is able to shift you into the state that.

So have you ever heard of this before?

Yeah.

You have? No. I'm not the first person to tell you that.

Oh no? No. Like, like, like, like that would be roughly translated as what would be called in, in the world of, of psy looks like like the ability to be able to let go. Right. And many people just ego is on board and it's very hard to let the ego not be on board because that is a feeling that takes you out of the safety and control that is part of your success and that you've grown to become dependent on. But that if you're looking for the Breakthroughs, like physically or more appropriate, like mentally or spiritually from something like that. Like, at some point you have to turn off that part of the brain and just let go to get the breakthroughs that you want. And related to the trauma piece, sometimes it is the ability of compounds like that to be able to train the brain how to let go of the control and how to understand once again what it feels like not to be gripping tightly and clutching tightly and to know that that's a safe place that one doesn't need to be afraid of. But I think probably when it comes to trauma.

And again, like, I'm no psychedelic expert, like, I'm just not something I was like. Like, you know, I don't have a degree in mushrooms, but you can open.

That if you want.

The ability in that state to be able to access past memories and then process them when you are not in a state of full control is one of the things that they attribute to, like the success of something like that. Being able to help someone release past traumas or, or deal with them as they come up again. It's kind of like stem cells. If you were to go to that place in Utah that I went to and get a full body stem cell procedure, you get all sorts of aches and pains from all the old injuries that the stem cel reinitiate. Your body remembers all that inflammation. The stem cells go to battle to help to fix those areas that were never fully fixed. Whereas kind of similar with something like psychedelics, they open up memories of these traumas that you just haven't given yourself a chance to deal with in the past and open them up. When your brain is in a state where it's far more receptive to seeing those things in a new light and dealing with them.

But then why are people going back over and over again again? Like, why doesn't it cure somebody? Or it does help them for, let's say, a while. And then like, I'm just talking about my friends who've gone and done it and worked on them like they were fine and it worked and helped them. But then they went back again and.

Again and again comes down to the getting dropped off by a helicopter at the top of Mount Everest piece. Rather than learning how to climb Mount Everest, you have to get to a point where you understand that life is full of incidents that cause shame and guilt and fear. And there will always be times in your life when things come up that leave you feeling less worthy, leave you feeling full of shame, leave you feeling guilty about something you've done or about something someone's done to you. And one of the ways to deal with that is to write a chance check, get on a plane, pop a pill, and try to nuke it once again. And now I'm speaking from a very, like, biased perspective because I'm also a man of faith, and I believe that. And this is what I love about the Christian faith in particular, is that is a faith of forgiveness, meaning no matter what. What you've been through, no matter how horrible of a person you think you are, no matter how horrible the things are that have been done to you, the. The Jesus Christ figure in Christianity is there because the story of Christianity is that God sent a sacrificial lamb to die on the cross, which was a very, like, painful thing to happen, but that happened so that we can then take all that shame and fear and guilt and just let it go by.

For example, just dropping to our knees and praying that God would release it and laying all of that at the foot of the cross. There's a beautiful book about this called Pilgrim's Progress by this guy that's just struggling with this huge backpack, this burden, for years. And then in a part of the story, he gets to the base of this hill where there's a cross, and all of a sudden, the heavy burden just comes tumbling off his back. And he stands up and he's light and he's free. And even though psychedelics can do something like that, it's temporary. It's never permanent. And I think the only way to truly get rid of shame and guilt and fear in a permanent way way is through an interaction with the divine in a way that goes beyond just drugs and in a way that goes to more of the Christian idea of just pure forgiveness, no matter who you are, and knowing that you are free to leave that and get rid of it because someone else has taken it for you.

Wow. That was a big answer. And what happens if you're not Christian and you're Jewish or another religion? What happens?

What happens to what?

To us? To us Jews or to anybody who's not, like, a Christian person? Is it that we have to. You could you say you're a man of faith and all these things you are. And is your message mostly for people to believe in something bigger and greater than themselves? Right. And to.

Yeah, to. To believe that, like you. You as a human being can be forgiven and not carry shame and guilt and fear around your whole life? Because there is a divine being who wrote a greater story for your life. And that divine being loves you enough to accept you for who you are. Not that you should, like, want to continue or continue to be a bad person because of that, but who loves you for who you are. And, and that's why I think that not just spirituality, but religiosity, like, having it, like, woven into your life in some way.

We have that in the Jewish.

It's like a very freeing way to. To live. Just to know there's a greater purpose written for your life. And no matter what, you are unconditionally loved.

Yeah, we have that in the Jewish world, where I believe in having a higher. Believing in something higher than yourself is. Well. But we have something called. It's like. It's a Yum Kippur. It's like what we do too. When you're repenting and all the things like that. I. I do agree with you. I think that's really important to, like, it kind of closes the entire pie. It's like, very much. Not like, I think it's. I see. When people don't have any of that in their lives, there's a lack of something. Right. And there's a searching for something.

Right. The eternal hole in the soul that can only be filled by something eternal.

Exactly.

Because there's like this gnawing that. Wait, you're telling me we're a bunch of like, chunks of flesh and blood just like floating on a giant rock through space? And then like, at the end of the day, like, you just kick the can one day it's game over, and it's over it. And to me, that's kind of like a hopeless way to live versus like it is. There is. There's like a divine being that created the planet, and there's immortality and an afterlife, and there's way more life than just like you and me being here for 80 or 90 or for like the best little biohackers, like, 150 years. Like, I find that a really, really hopeful and happy way to live. Just to know that. That there's like, something greater outside of me and like a greater purpose written for my life.

I want to take a quick break from this episode to thank our sponsor, Therassage. Their Trilite panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go. And I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where, honestly, I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach, cramps, shoulder, ankle, red light therapy is my go to. Plus plus it also has amazing anti aging benefits including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face which I also use it for. I personally use Therassage Trilite everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable and it's really effective. Head over to therassage.com right now and use code B Bottle Bold for 15 off. This code will work site wide again. Head over to therassage T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E.com and use code be bold for 15 off any of their products. Have you gotten more into, into faith and religion as you got older or were you. Did you grow up like this?

I, I grew up in a Christian church, like a Christian house. But I think, I think like going through the hard knocks of life just like experiencing just like you know, like living paycheck to paycheck and trying to make ends meet and trying to find your purpose in life and you know, making marriages work and raising kids. Like I think that all of that develops faith. I mean there's, you know, there's a saying that gold is refined through fire. Right. And I think that as, as you grow, especially through hardships, that it, like without a doubt for me personally, like that has deepened my faith. For some people, like weekends are faith like there must not be a God if all these bad things are happening to me. But my perspective is that in many cases, you know, bad things happen so that the good things can shine through at an even higher level.

Yeah, that's. I mean I always. That's. I like that. I mean it's good to think that way, right? It's very, it's a very optimistic way of seeing things. By the way, I know it's been like, how many hours have we been like, hours? I didn't ask you anything about like testing. Like I did this environmental toxicity test test. Did you ever take one of these tests before? And it says that I have like super high arsenic poisoning.

Yeah.

Do you find these tests to be accurate? How important do you think these tests are? What are some of the tests that you think are the most important thing.

People should do for their, for the environmental toxin test? The only thing I can tell you is try it again under a different name and see what happens.

What do you mean?

I say that because they can be kind of notorious for giving you wildly varying results from test to test.

Really.

Now the thing, thing that we do know is we live in a toxic environment and it's always a good idea to be cognitive. Mold, mycotoxins and microplastics. But I would not put all your faith into a test like that. The test that I think you can get good data from is just like once in a lifetime, a genetic test just to see what kind of stuff you're hardwired up to potentially get a disease for live preventively. Basic blood panel. You know, I do it like once a quarter just to look at, you know, lipids and vitamins.

Yeah.

You know, just like the standard complete blood count, comprehensive metabolic panel type of stuff. Some kind of test once a year for micronutrients that the basic blood panel wouldn't cover. This would be, for example, there's one called metabolomics. Look at fatty acids and amino acids and fungal markers and little micronutrients that a basic blood test won't give you some type of hormone panel. I think blood will give you a snapshot, but saliva and urine can give you a little bit more of like, like a 24 hour running cycle of your hormones because hormones do fluctuate throughout the day. And then the last couple I would think about would be basically everybody's favorite, some kind of a poop test. Like.

Yeah, is that the Dutch test?

No, Dutch is urine. There's one called the Genova diagnostics that'll do like yeast, parasites, fungus, bacterial balance. And I think that's good to do even just like once a year or like as symptoms arise, if you've been traveling or whatever, you know, and you want to see if you got a parasite because you come back from Asia and you've got diarrhea or something like that.

Okay, but the poop test, like what is the poop test test for?

Bacterial balance, inflammation in the gut, yeasts, parasites, fungal markers, clues for whether or not you might have leaky gut or gut permeability issues. It's a pretty good test and, but.

People don't just get it usually like a functional medicine doctor would prescribe it if necessary. Right.

There are some websites where you can like start an account and order some of these to your house. But usually a functional medicine doc is going to order most of these tests. And then the last one I'd like think about would be like a good food allergy test. Not one that's going to give you like a laundry list of false positives, but like Zoomer is a good one. Cyrex, C, Y, R, E, X. That's a good one. So if I'm, if I'm like coaching somebody and writing out their nutrition plan and their training plan and everything, it's usually like those five or six tests that I recommend that they get get for me to be able to sit down with that. And then like maybe some wearable data like a blood glucose and a, and you know, an aura or a whoop or something like that. That usually gives me quite a bit of information to say, okay, well, here's a relatively customized way for you to supplement, eat, you know, move, exercise, et cetera.

I have to ask you about your skin. I do all the time, but your skin's really nice.

Thank you.

And it looks like a baby's behind. It's really like smooth and young looking. What are you, Is it tire streaks on it? No, there's nothing. I think like, I think it's genetics personally. But is there any kind of trick that you can tell us about how to, how to look 10 years younger.

That you've tried rapid fire, besides using one of those face age apps. So like 10 years younger would be underlying building blocks for skin. So earlier we were talking about things like collagen, you know, amino acids, protein absorption, anything that's going to help with the building blocks for the skin.

So do you believe. Hold on, I'm going to do rapid fire. Do you believe in collagen supplements?

Yes, if you want really good skin. If you do like 20 to 40 grams of collagen and up to 20 grams of essential amino acids a day, that's good for the skin. Something that will increase blood flow to the skin. And there are different camps about this. Some people think a derma roller is just like ripping open the face and like micro needling pens. Better.

Better.

I derma roll. I've done it for like 10 years, once a week. And then right after I derma roll, I use a clay mask. I use one made by a company called Alitora. And so I just leave that on for like 20 minutes. And then three times a week I do a red light mask which is like the. You've seen these before?

Like, yeah, I use the therage one.

Have you tried? The one I have is coal. Is therasage, is good eye restore. Like, like the letter I restore is the one I'm using.

Oh yeah, I saw that one.

And then for so, so basically once a week, Derma rolling clay mask. Three times a week, the red light. Good collagen, protein and amino acids. And then the last thing, besides just the basics like don't go out in the sun too much and burn your skin is for products. I use Young Goose, I use Young Goose. I think it's a really good skincare company because they have like these bio absorbable anti aging peptides and I feel like, like my face has gotten better since I started to use those.

Really?

Yeah. In a good way.

Yeah, because I use Young Goose. I use their. Yeah, they have like any. No. What do they have in it? Spermidine. Is that what it's called? What is Fermidine?

Apparently it helps with DNA repair of the skin. Kind of like the Salmon sperm facials that you can get now.

Yeah, but isn't a lot of that stuff not like it's pretty hyped, probably overhyped. Yeah.

You know especially just because Salmon sperm facial probably sells a of lot, a lot of procedures.

Yeah.

But I do think like you can make a case that spermidine can have some anti aging effects on the skin.

How about all those things? Yeah, I mean I actually I do like my Young Goose. I have like all like a bunch of their products actually. It's very, very nice. You were talking earlier about that plasma that you got taken. You got like a bunch of 25.

Year old people replacement therapy.

The plasma replacement therapy. Is that the same thing that, that don't die Brian Johnson did with his son?

Son, yes, except I didn't use his son.

Okay, good. But you use some other random person. Same procedure but different person.

I don't know who it was. The bag just said healthy male, 18 to 25 year old donor plasma.

But how do you know that's, how do you know?

Trust.

So you can have some.

Nobody's died there yet. Really? Well, I mean like yeah, I trust the doctor. Like I, I vet these people. I'm just go to random fly by night clinic and you know, you know, go through the nail salon in the back and.

Right, right, right.

Plasma.

So that actually you did the same thing that he was doing.

Yeah, it was the same.

But you did it just one time.

Yeah, but I would do it again. It's not inexpensive but.

How much is it again?

I think it's about said and done around 40k to do like 40k procedure. Yeah, but I felt so good after doing it. It's one of those things where I would consider like maybe every five years or something like that doing it.

What does it do?

You literally just like feel this is, this is going to sound like super, super broad but you feel younger, you just like recover faster and you have Higher libido and your head goes clear and you sleep better. It was one of the things I've done. Like immediately I felt like unstoppable. Almost like too good. Like I need more things to do type of really energy.

How long did it last?

Last at that level, about four weeks. And then like, honestly, I did it like five months ago and I still feel like I feel better, just like younger.

Do you think that's why? And I, I might even say this to like blow smoke up your ass, but do you think that's why you look young, because you did something like that?

I think a lot of this stuff just adds up because I've also, I've also done like, you know, stem cells in the face and exosome facials. But. But I think the, the daily routine, like the daily in and out things that I do make a pretty big difference. Just derma rolling, clay mask, red light peptides on the face. Just because you don't have to drive to a clinic and floss.

And you do that every day.

Some of them are not every day. Like derma rollings once a week, Clay mask is once a week, red light, face masks three times a week. The young goose stuff. I never thought I'd use this many products, but I literally do. Like, I get their brochure and I do exactly what it says. It's like some kind of like serum cream lotion. Like four things in the morning and four things in the evening.

That's what I do too.

Nod and smile and do it.

So says I do exactly the same thing. Okay, I think I can let you go now, considering everyone's sleeping back behind you.

But even all the Reddit true tide in the world would make me not start thinking about dinner about now.

You're so cute. Okay, by the way, Ben does have a new book out. It's actually a manual or an encyclopedia, whatever you'd like to call it. It's called Boundless. It's a revised version of his other book, Boundless, because his brand is called Boundless. It is literally an encyclopedia. It's unbelievably just. There's so much information on exercise, on overall health optimization, brain peptides, stem cells, energy focus, vitality. I mean, it's just sex. We didn't even get to the sex part. There's so many gut bacteria, gut health, you guys. It's amazing. This everything that he does, he. Well, look, nothing is like. It's everything. There's so much information. You guys have to. To pick the new one up. Because I think you revised it, what, five months ago or. Yeah, so Ben Greenfield. Check him out if you don't know who he is. And what else, Ben? Anything else?

I think we covered a lot.

Okay, bye. Everybody on the plane. I'm landing. All right, cool.

Thanks, guys.

Okay, bye.