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

Can you really achieve optimal health through biohacking, or is simplicity the key? In this episode of the Habits and Hustle podcast, I am joined by Ben Greenfield (again!) to discuss his change from one of the world's leading biohackers to embracing a more balanced approach to health and wellness. We dive into a range of topics such as his journey from homeschooled chess club president to America's top personal trainer, expanding stem cell therapy options, his detailed morning routine combining light, sound, and vibration therapy, and even modern parenting. Overall, we discuss the impact of simplicity on optimizing our health and longevity. Ben Greenfield is a renowned health consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author specializing in fitness, nutrition, and wellness. As a former athlete and current biohacker, he has been recognized as one of America's top Personal Trainers and among the most influential people in health and fitness. Ben hosts a popular website and podcast, speaks globally on longevity and biohacking, and is the co-founder of KION, a nutritional supplements company. What We Discuss: (05:28) Impact of Dietary Diversity on Health (16:39) Optimizing Nutrition With AI Technology (24:57) From Tennis to Biohacking Success (32:30) Evolution of Ben Greenfield's Career (39:26) NAD and Creatine for Sleep (44:33) Nutritional Evaluation and Recommendations (56:10) Expanding Stem Cell Therapy Options (01:01:53) Stem Cell Therapy for Youthful Skin (01:13:00) Relationship Development Without Traditional Intimacy (01:17:59) Rites of Passage in Modern Parenting (01:31:11) Unschooling and Mental Resilience (01:43:36) Enhanced Meditation With Technology (01:51:52) Blood Detoxification and Spiritual Growth (02:03:26) Social Media and Fitness Strategies …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: AquaTru: Get 20% off any purifier at aquatru.com http://aquatru.com with code HUSTLE Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com/ and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. BiOptimizers: Want to try Magnesium Breakthrough? Go to https://bioptimizers.com/jennifercohen and use promo code JC10 at checkout to save 10% off your purchase. Timeline Nutrition: Get 10% off your first order at timeline.com/cohen http://timeline.com/cohen Air Doctor: Go to http://airdoctorpro.com/airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Ben Greenfield: Website: https://bengreenfieldlife.com/ Instagram: @bengreenfieldfitness https://www.instagram.com/bengreenfieldfitness/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:07Jen Cohen?

  All right, you guys, we have the one and only Ben Greenfield on.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  Feld, Feld.

• 0:12Jen Cohen?

  Feld. Feld.

• 0:13Speaker 02

  I think Feld does sound pretty cool. I need to go by that, like a, like a spy.

• 0:18Jen Cohen?

  It's, I thought it was.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  In World War II, going in to kill Hitler. Ben Greenfield.

• 0:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, but you don't even.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  It's my new identity.

• 0:25Jen Cohen?

  Wow, that could be your like alter ego.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  We could just do a whole podcast about how we would assassinate Hitler.

• 0:30Jen Cohen?

  I would love that. Well, he's not.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the whole theory about there's like a butterfly effect and if somebody had killed him, somebody worse might have come up in his stead or, you know, because there's, there's a whole moral philosophical argument of like, is murder wrong? And would you, if so, would you go back in time? And if you had the opportunity, like, kill Hitler when he was a baby? And this is a really weird way to start a podcast, talking about how we would kill Hitler, but if my name was Greenfield, we have a lot of energy drinks here.

• 0:57Jen Cohen?

  I know.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  A lot of just drinks in general.

• 0:59Jen Cohen?

  Well, first of all, that's actually, I don't know where you got that one from.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Your refrigerator.

• 1:03Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay. I don't know what that is. We usually start this podcast with these magic mind shots and I'm sure you've had a million of them before, have you not?

• 1:10Speaker 02

  I always look at the ingredient label.

• 1:12Jen Cohen?

  Okay, look.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Well, I got lots of stuff in front of me.

• 1:15Jen Cohen?

  No, they're not. This is a protein drink. This is slate protein drinks. Have you not, you don't know about this?

• 1:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:22Jen Cohen?

  I thought you know about everything, Ben.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  No, I, I live in a cave slash do have a lot of stuff in my mini fridge in the garage, but some of this stuff just slips me by. I always like to look at the ingredient label though, like this one caramel latte. Because a lot of people see the stuff that, that they're told is held. Hopefully I don't throw any of your sponsors under the bus, talking about this.

• 1:42Jen Cohen?

  No, you can't. Actually, this is one of these companies that I genuinely, I drink at least one a day and I like it. But so you tell me what you think.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Okay, so this one, when you look at the ingredient label, it's brewed coffee, water and coffee. So the only thing I think about there when I'm looking at cans and ingredients is do they, do they filter the water? Do they look at the aluminum lining of the can? Have they assisted for microplastics, et cetera?

• 2:05Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  And sometimes that's not on the label. So you literally have to ask like. I interviewed you know, really popular company Zevia.

• 2:12Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Does the the it's not artificially sweetened soda stevia sweetened soda. I interviewed their CEO years ago, and that was one of the first questions I asked was, do you guys pay attention to the cans?

• 2:24Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Cause you can have a super healthy drink and then just screw it up by putting it in the wrong delivery mechanism. He was like, yeah, we go aluminum free and we test it for metals. And I thought that was cool considering you can find it like Safeway or Rosar's or whatever.

• 2:36Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Which a lot of times means they would be cutting corners. So you don't know about the can.

• 2:41Jen Cohen?

  What did he say? Does he? He said he was. Yeah, but it was it's in an aluminum can.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  It is, but you can have some kind of like a liner inside the can that keeps the metals from leaching.

• 2:50Jen Cohen?

  Could you actually prove that they do that, though?

• 2:53Speaker 02

  You could do a third party independent test on the can itself if you wanted to.

• 2:57Jen Cohen?

  Right, but you never did that.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  I didn't do it. I did take him at his word, but I think he's lying a podcast and says a little because that could blow up in your face if somebody actually.

• 3:04Jen Cohen?

  If actually someone did it.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Test it later on. So they've got brewed coffee, unfiltered skim milk. And when you look at this is one of the the terms that I sometimes don't like in the health industry. Lean protein, right? Cause you hear about eggs, for example, right? If you eat just egg whites, you get a huge dose of albumin. The protein in egg whites and many people have an inflammatory response to just eating egg whites. When you look at eggs as nature's perfectly packaged protein that include the fat soluble vitamins, which also can help out with the vitamin absorption, with the protein absorption, et cetera. Then you've got a little bit more of a cleaner profile. So there's the idea of like of in the health industry, right?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Eat lean chicken breast. I'm like, no, like you get a lot of the fat soluble vitamins and the good stuff. And even more of the collagen from the from the gristle, from the bones, from the skin. So like if I make chicken. Yeah, it's gonna be more calories if you eat the skin and have the oils and everything on there. But you're arguably getting more nutrient density and better health long term versus separating the proteins from the fats. Right? So this is why.

• 4:13Jen Cohen?

  So that again, this happened last time. So even we haven't even started. I have.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  We're only two ingredients to the label of one drink. But I love this because we can rabbit holes we go.

• 4:24Jen Cohen?

  It's crazy. Okay, so you're saying let's get with stay with the egg. So then people, if they just eat the egg whites, they can have a bigger allergic reaction or an intolerance than if they have the egg whites and the yolk together, because you need that extra fat and whatever, all the other minerals and nutrients to counterbalance the

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:42Jen Cohen?

  egg white.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:44Jen Cohen?

  Because I was gonna say that I feel like I've get I've gathered or my body, I've been eating eggs every single day for 25 years, that I now feel like I become allergic or I have an intolerance, but I do eat the yolk.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Now, it is true that when you get one of these food allergy tests, a lot of times foods that are staples in your diet can end up giving almost like a false positive that you're allergic to them. And it's because your body is doing a really good job creating antibodies to certain proteins in those foods. So it flags as a high antibody response, even though you're not actually allergic. So if I look at the results of somebody's food allergy test or food intolerance test, and it says, hey, if like red on eggs, you must be allergic to eggs. I ask them, are you eating eggs every day? Because a lot of times that can cause it to be elevated. That doesn't mean that if you're eating eggs every day and you feel like crap, you're not sleeping well, you have gas or bloating or poor energy levels or whatever, and you cut the eggs out and those symptoms go away.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Maybe you actually were allergic to eggs. But anything that flags on a food allergy profile as an issue, that is also a staple in your diet. First, make sure that it's not just because you've been having a lot of it. So.

• 5:55Jen Cohen?

  And then to that, does that mean you shouldn't be eating the same thing over and over and over again? Just because it can act as an intolerance or an allergic reaction for you?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  That is something that would fall into the category of dietary diversity. Meaning that the more myopic you are about eating just a select group of foods, the less dietary diversity you will have. So the less diverse your microbiome becomes.

• 6:26Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Which can create this vicious feedback loop because by eliminating. Eating foods constantly and going gluten free and lectin free and then low fiber and then low FODMAP and beginning to get rid of all these foods. Your biome becomes weaker and weaker and you paradoxically become less and less able to be able to digest a wide variety of foods. So the idea of eating the same thing day in and day out, if that also means that you've got low dietary diversity. And the answer is yes, that can create problems long term because you're essentially starving off your bacteria. But if you were, say, eating eggs every day and you were also, you know, like you hear a lot of these. Blue zones doing, eating a lot of different herbs and spices, plants and.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  And fruits and a wide variety of meats and eating seasonally, meaning there are certain periods of the year where you're not eating certain things. You're paying the jet fuel to fly the avocados and the coconuts in in an environment where you normally wouldn't have access to that stuff. Then that's where you can also create an issue, right? Low amount of seasonal eating, low amount of dietary diversity, eating the same things over and over again, which seems. Easy and convenient, but isn't great for keeping the biome healthy.

• 7:38Jen Cohen?

  That's so true. So basically because and in the fitness world, right? It's all about like if you stay to eating the same things that will that will. Optimize your chance of like staying within a certain weight, you know, certain body composition, all the things.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:55Jen Cohen?

  But it actually, it can actually work very much in reverse for your actual health and microbiome.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  It's true that if you have a predictable set of meals.

• 8:04Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  I have my yogurt with my berries in the morning and I got my lean protein on my whole grain sandwich for lunch and I eat the same thing for dinner. If you're trying to count and control calories, that makes it very simple and also makes it more likely that you're going to have. Fewer types of foods around the house because one of the things that dietary diversity can cause is the more access to foods that you have. The more calories you're likely to eat. Like if you walk up to like a super food salad bar and there's like 20 different things, walnuts and pecans and avocados and salsa and. Mushrooms and two different kinds of all you're going to load up the plate in many cases and wind up. With way more food than you normally eat, you know, it's buffet syndrome.

• 8:44Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  On the flip side, if you're limiting your dietary diversity so that you do a good job following a diet, yes, it could be good for weight loss and calorie control, but that is not synonymous with good health and high micronutrient and vitamin and mineral intake. So I think a part of it does come down to like self-control. If I'm going to have 20 different types of fermented foods and yogurts and superfoods and chlorella and bee pollen and dark chocolate and, you know, pastured eggs and three different kinds of meat and all this stuff in my pantry in my fridge, which I do because I love the idea of dietary diversity. It also means you're either injecting a GLP-1, so you're controlling your appetite,

• 9:25Speaker 02

  or you're actually just cognizant and aware, which isn't that like if you're writing it down anyways, you're using a, an app like chronometer or some other calorie counting app to keep track, then it makes it a lot easier. So I think you can have your cake and eat it too. Cake in this case being dietary diversity combined with moderating the amount of calories that you consume, but it does take more mindfulness.

• 9:46Jen Cohen?

  It does.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  I think mindfulness is good.

• 9:48Jen Cohen?

  It is, and I think, but I do think self-control is the most difficult thing in the world, right? We can all know, I think most of us at this point in life, especially with all the information overload, we know what to do. We've heard it all. We just don't have the self-control and the discipline to actually execute on it. That's where we get stuck.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Hence Ozempic. But you, you could look at it like, like with exercise, right? So let's take a trendy workout right now, like the, the 12 330, right? Walk at a 12% incline on a treadmill and three miles per hour for 30 minutes. And you're going to see huge, you know, drops in weight loss or increases in aerobic fitness, et cetera, which is kind of true. But if similar to the diet, your exercise program consists of you doing the same thing every day because it just makes it easy for you and that's what you're most likely to do. Yeah, it's better than nothing, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to be more fit than the person who's like, working with a trainer or doing their own research to switch things up, you know, every week and one week you're doing kettlebells and maybe the 12 330 and the next week you're doing a.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  You know, a high intensity interval training set on that aerodyne and super slow training. And the next week you're traveling. So you're doing like BFR training and cold plunges. And the more you can mix it up, the more you throw at your body, the harder it becomes to kill.

• 11:05Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Or the, the, the more fitness you see. So you see the better microbial fitness or gut fitness by throwing a lot of different foods at your body. And if you look at things like an increase in the surge of gluten intolerance, or so-called gluten allergies, or peanut intolerance, a lot of that is due to heavy restriction of those compounds, especially to kids at an early age. So they don't build up the ability, the microbiome-based ability to produce the enzymes that can help to digest those foods. So this is why if you go gluten-free for a really long time and then you have gluten, it's way worse than having gluten back when you weren't gluten-free. Or when you feed a kid who's never been exposed to peanuts at two years old,

• 11:49Speaker 02

  a bunch of peanuts or peanut butter, and they have this antiflactic reaction, it's far less likely that they would have had that if they would have had mild exposure to peanuts.

• 11:56Jen Cohen?

  Totally agree. That makes, and by the way, I know we're only two ingredients in and we're not eating.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Oh, we'll get there.

• 12:02Jen Cohen?

  I know. It's gonna be a long.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  I won't forget.

• 12:04Jen Cohen?

  I know you won't. So what, what do you think about the fact of when you do high intensity workouts and exercise? I, when I do it anyway, my appetite goes through the roof. I eat five times the amount of calories because I'm ravenous and hungry. So isn't it a better strategy than to do like the 1233 that we just said? Or any kind of lower impact or lower intensity exercise? Because then you're, you're able to control your appetite, just on a, on a weight loss, fat loss level. Let's not talk about all the other things, but just on that, because that's what I find. I find cardio at a high intensity, you end up gaining weight because you're starving.

• 12:43Speaker 02

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

• 13:26Speaker 02

  when you've depleted a bunch of carbohydrates from your body for a good reason. Right? This is why a strict ketogenic diet could be good for managing say like epilepsy or Alzheimer's, but long-term can cause some issues, you know, to your testosterone, your estrogen, your thyroid, your joints, et cetera. Cause there's just not enough glucose to go around.

• 13:45Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And you can't make glucose out of fats. So when you finish a hard workout and you're getting these cravings to eat because A, you've burnt through a lot of calories and your body needs more calories, or you've burnt through a lot of carbohydrates and your body needs to refill those, or both. That's a natural urge and you shouldn't necessarily resist that urge. Because in my opinion, it's healthier to be strong and fast and have a high VO2 max and good grip strength and good lactic acid tolerance and lots of mitochondria and be eating more food to fuel all that goodness. Versus doing the same thing day in, day out, because it doesn't make you hungry and eating less food. Right? I'd rather be strong and fast and fit and also eat more calories

• 14:29Speaker 02

  than do the same thing day in, day out and just restrict my calories.

• 14:31Jen Cohen?

  Right, but like say, let's say like running versus walking, like running versus, you know, incline walking. Do you think that the walk, the, would you say that you, it's good to do a combination of both? Or that doing the incline walk is better? Cause you're maintaining muscle mass, you're not breaking it down and all those things.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  The. The idea of fitness does need to be considered in the terms of kind of like a blueprint for the body. I'll explain what I mean by that, but before I do, I didn't address the second reason that you might get hungry after you do a hard workout. To me, that's the more concerning reason. It is the train to eat, eat to train type of phenomenon where either A, you're exercising so that you can stuff your face later, not so that you can get fitter. So the only goal of exercise is to burn as many calories as possible so you can enjoy your whatever.

• 15:23Jen Cohen?

  Pizza.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Twenty five dollar smoothie or pizza, whatever it is that makes you happy because you're addicted to food. And the only way that you can be addicted to food without becoming morbidly obese or having some metabolic disease is to exercise your butt off, right? And so then we get into the whole realm of like exercise anorexia, which is a thing.

• 15:40Jen Cohen?

  It's a huge thing.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And in a similar vein, we also will finish a hard workout many times and feel like we need a reward, right? And that reward is not necessarily due to calorie burn because some people will just go face stuff on a huge breakfast after doing fifty burpees. I did the fifty and the fifty burpees doesn't burn a ton of calories. You have to walk like an hour to even burn, you know, a cookie.

• 16:01Jen Cohen?

  No.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  But people will say, hey, I did the hard thing. I'm going to reward myself with food. So using food as a reward or as something that allows you to get that dopaminergic rush and not as something that you'd be using to refill the body and restore nutrients and vitamins and minerals. That can be an issue and that's a more concerning issue. And that's where we get into the willpower, self-control component. And in my opinion, the best way to manage that is what gets measured gets managed, right? That's where you take photos of your food and upload them to the new GPT image recognition technology like GPT four O where it'll just tell you, you know, on your own notes app or whatever, how many calories that you're eating based on image recognition of that food.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Or using an app or a website like a chronometer or macro factors to actually keep track. And some of my clients who I work with, they won't follow the diet adequately that I have written down for them based on their labs and their blood work and their activity levels and everything. Unless they know I'm going to be looking at their diet. At the end of the week, and if they write it down, then

• 17:05Jen Cohen?

  The accountability.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Diet and they're less likely to do that second compensatory mechanism from exercise, which is just like, eat a bunch of food just because you're rewarding yourself for having exercised and not necessarily considering the calorie intake versus the actual calorie burn.

• 17:21Jen Cohen?

  Right. So that GPT thing that you will not the G. What did you say that thing was that people can use to? Because I've been using or people I know, the the best one I've heard of is Fitness Pal to do all that stuff. Is this one better in terms of like, like it's, is it easier?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Using GPT to to count your calories to tell you what it is that you're eating is not a diet or calorie counting app per se. It's just you literally going into Jeep. So you, if you want to get super fancy, you could use something like Fitness Pal or something like that.

• 17:52Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Um, some of them have image recognition technology built into them now to where you can photograph your food rather than, because it is a pain to write it all down sometimes.

• 18:01Jen Cohen?

  And and go into the shame. Like I had three ounces. I had six ounces. It's so far like eventually it's just like to to do all the little nuanced things. Those are annoying. So you're saying going to GPT now, you can actually scan your food in the chat GPT?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  GPT four O is the new version that has image recognition capabilities. Meaning and and same thing with the Google notebook that like you were doing an Instagram story before we start recording. I told people, hey, use the new Google notebook LM to take your notes. So a couple of cool things like I was out hunting about three weeks ago. And before I went out, I found one of my water filters that I was gonna take out there with me. And there were pieces missing. I'd tell there were pieces missing because there was like a tube that was supposed to come out of it and then a clamp on the end of that. So I took a picture of it and I uploaded it to GPT four O. I said, tell me what is missing from this water filter. Tell me the brand. Tell me where I can go download the manual and tell me where I can get the missing pieces.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  And I know people who are even doing things like working on their car engine and taking photographs using their phone and then uploading that to four O and it's telling them what needs fixing or where they can get certain parts, which is pretty cool. So you could literally take a picture, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and you could say like, hey, I want to. Protein carb fat ratio of thirty percent, forty percent, thirty percent. And I want to know if this meal is hitting that. And I want to know what my total calorie count the rest of this day is going to be. Based on this photo I just sent you of the breakfast that I just ate. And it will tell you all of that stuff. The other one, the notebook. What that will do is you can feed any PDF, any text, any, you know, I've even fed things like legal contracts into it. And here's an example.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Let's you have a big sticky legal contract or scientific document. And you just don't have the time to take the deep dive into it and roll up your sleeves and interpret it all. And have smoke come out your ears, you know, trying to read through this thing. You can upload the document into Notebook LM. And not only can you tell it to create like a user guide or a study summary or anything else that's super palatable for you. Based on what you uploaded, but there's even an audio function and I can upload. And I did this a couple of weeks ago. I uploaded a DNA test that one of my clients got. And I told it to generate a discussion between two people about that person. And what it is that they saw on that DNA test that could help that person improve. And it created like a mini podcast of two AI people who sounded very much like humans.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Having a nice friendly chat about my client's gene results. And so if I'm going for a walk and I've got it, let's say a consultation call coming up with that client. I can listen to the AI talking about my client, filling me in on what was going on in a way that could be way easier to understand than digging through the whole gene test. And that's all just based on PDF or image recognition technology. It's pretty cool.

• 20:43Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  We are, we are living in convenient times. And I mean, there's no getting wrong. You still got to double check and make sure AI didn't make mistakes. Cause occasionally it will still do things wrong, but it's still, it's pretty convenient.

• 20:56Jen Cohen?

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

• 21:33Speaker 02

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

• 22:14Speaker 02

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

• 22:40Jen Cohen?

  You put it right now.

• 22:41Speaker 02

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

• 23:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  So there's something to be said for like, if you're, you know, a young person getting a career or something like really rolling up your sleeves and telling yourself, hey, I'm gonna be a pro in like twenty years. And I'm just gonna stick to this every day and learn as much. As I can, if you really want to become like an expert in your field. So a big part of just not jumping around too much.

• 23:37Jen Cohen?

  But and you've been like, but it kind of, I feel like it's evolved. Like, what did you start? When you first started 20 years ago, what were you doing? Were you a trainer, like a, like a personal trainer? Were you like a physical trainer? Is that what you did? What was the first thing you did?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  And I realize I still owe you an answer about the exercise blueprint piece.

• 23:53Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  I'll come back to that.

• 23:54Jen Cohen?

  Did you write it down in your Google notebook?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  No, I've got it in my head. Just don't let too many things.

• 23:59Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Train wreck in my head and I'll.

• 24:01Jen Cohen?

  I have a few other things.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  You've got the exercise blueprint. We still got to finish these drinks.

• 24:05Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, the ingredients.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  But I'll tell you how I got into this first. I was not interested in exercise or fitness or physical sciences at all for the early majority of my life. I was homeschooled in North Idaho, K through 12, had very strict parents, didn't get out much. Played violin for 13 years. I was president of the chess club. I like would sit in my room and read fantasy fiction and write tales about princesses and orcs and dragons. I was a total nerd. I got into tennis when I was 14 and I, for some reason, I was just really good with a rack in my hand. And wound up playing for the local high school teams, playing for the USTA, the United States Tennis Association.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Got really good, got a really high ranking, wound up walking on to the college tennis team.

• 24:54Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  And I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to major in at the time.

• 24:57Jen Cohen?

  Which college, by the way?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  LCSC, Lewis Clark State College, NIAA College in, in Lewis and Idaho. And they transferred to University of Idaho. I had started like eating healthy after being on a standard American diet most of my childhood. Like fast food hamburgers and taken baked pizza and macaroni and cheese and, you know, just standard American diet.

• 25:14Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  And I had gotten interested in fitness, like running up and down the hills behind my house. And I got my first little pair of 10 pound dumbbells from the sporting goods place down the road. So I'd also started training and paying more attention to my diet. So I was getting somewhat interested in this whole realm. And then like, you know, three quarters of the student athletes at college, they were kinesiology or exercise science majors. So I was like, what the heck? I'll, I'll declare this as a major. And even. Though I got very little exposure to that during my largely classical Christian homeschooling education that didn't really have much of a focus in the physical sciences at all. I fell in love with all that stuff anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, biomechanics,

• 25:58Speaker 02

  organic chemistry, all of the science, like the hard science stuff. I loved it and that surprised me, but I wound up getting so in love with that that I went pre-med. I took the MCATs. I actually did get accepted to six different medical schools and opted not to go to medical school, but all during college I worked as a personal trainer. I worked as a nutritionist. I helped to manage the wellness center at University of Idaho. So I was immersed in this all through college. And then I got a job in hip and knee surgical sales after I got my master's degree in exercise physiology and biomechanics.

• 26:32Jen Cohen?

  Oh, so you have a master's and so you have an education backing. It wasn't just like a human.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:37Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:37Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  A pretty, pretty, pretty large amount of education in this as a background. But the reason that I took that job in hip and knee surgical sales was there were two MD PhD programs, one at Duke and one at UPenn that I did not get into that I really wanted to get into. So I thought, well, I'm going to go work in the private sector for a while and see if I can have a better resume for, for applying to medical school because my MCAT scores were good, but I just, you know, I don't want to, uh, I don't want to say anything offensive, but I guess as a like a young white male at the time, I had kind of an uphill battle to get into some of the schools that I really wanted. That's not the only reason that I, that does play a role.

• 27:13Jen Cohen?

  So you didn't get into the school that you wanted. So you went, that's why. Which school did you want? Duke?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  I was going to Duke or UPenn. Yeah, I was super interested in both of those because I wanted to do medicine and research.

• 27:22Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  And I got nine months into that job in hip and knee surgical sales and I hated it. I hated being in hospitals. None of the doctors seemed to enjoy their lives or their existence. Nobody told me it would be a good idea for me to go to medical school. I missed fitness. I missed nutrition. I didn't like standing there with the laser pointer showing how an orthopedic surgeon had to like put $40,000 overpriced knee and hip implants and the people who would have been better served through exercise and dietary interventions. And one day I just.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Quit and I walked into the gym across the street from the condo I was living in in Liberty Lake, Washington and asked for a job at the Liberty Lake Athletic Club and I got hired as the fitness manager there. And I had a good resume at the time just because you know I was loaded up with everything I've done in college. And long story short is a year into that and managing their fitness center, I met up with a doctor who was interested in creating a one stop shop for sports medicine. We have like chiropractors and massage therapists and physical therapists and I was going to be the director of sports performance, which I was super excited about. And so we opened this center and I operated that for five years. And during that time, I got voted as America's top personal trainer. This is in 2008.

• 28:37Jen Cohen?

  You did? Was there even a who even did that?

• 28:40Speaker 02

  The National Strength and Conditioning Association, which is the the creme de la creme personal training service in the US.

• 28:45Jen Cohen?

  What's it called?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  NSCA.

• 28:47Jen Cohen?

  So how did they even know? How did they even know you existed?

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Nominated by a bunch of the local physicians because of the work we were doing with the government's exercises medicine initiative. So we were taking a lot of the patients and transforming them in our facility because we had like the best of the best stuff. We were doing blood analysis, calorimetry analysis, V O T to max analysis, high speed video cameras, blood work, nutrition coaching, testing, like I had a like this was way before all these fancy biohacking facilities, but I was kind of like early adopter of a lot of that stuff. And so that's what kind of thrust me into the limelight, that 2008 nomination. And that's when I started doing more podcasting and writing and more online coaching and advising and investing and a lot of

• 29:30Speaker 02

  what I do now. But that's kind of like, long story short, my journey of, you know, nerded out, homeschooler in the backwoods of Idaho to really, you know, starting a big health and fitness business.

• 29:41Jen Cohen?

  So then, so basically 2008, when things started to really take off for you. When did Instagram start? When did social media become something? What year?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  No clue. But I mean, when I started my podcast, there was maybe a hundred podcast tops and like five in the health and fitness category. It was like you had to like code your RSS feed and submit it to Apple and wait two weeks. And if it was over like a Hundred megabytes or something like that would break and it was it was wild, wild west of podcasting.

• 30:07Jen Cohen?

  That's crazy. And then now, okay, are you shocked like in the area biohack? I feel like you're most known for the biohacking stuff, right? Like, are you shocked at like how popular you be you became in that world? Or you're not really shocked?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  The majority of my following for years was the triathlon and endurance sports world. I raced iron and I did the world championships in Hawaii six times. I coached, I had, you know, clients all over the world. I, you know, was repped by or I repped a wet suit company and a shoe company and a bike company and race for team Timex. So I was actually kind of like a big name in the triathlon world.

• 30:43Jen Cohen?

  Like endurance and like high, yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  So I wrote like marathoning manuals and a lot of my early books were about triathlon training. And when I got out of triathlon, just because I got burnt out on that sport. I kind of just started to shift into what got me out of triathlon in the first place, right? Like burnt out, working out the wrong way, healthy on the outside, but not healthy on the inside. Started doing blood work and biomarker evaluations and realized, hey, there's a lot more to being healthy and living a long time. And just like exercising your butt off and

• 31:15Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  eating lean protein and egg whites.

• 31:16Jen Cohen?

  Right, exactly.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  So that's what kind of like got me down the road of like looking into what functional medicine is and naturopathic medicine and biohacking and recovery modalities and self-quantification and all the things that I think now, if you piece them all together, can allow you to be a really well-functioning person without just, you know, taking the exercise and the nutrition box.

• 31:37Jen Cohen?

  Right. So basically how it now I understand more. So you kind of were really into the high-performance fitness world. And then as you kind of got older and as your career kind of evolved, you kind of then got into more of the longevity stuff. Or like from, no, because actually went from high performance, had to train really hard, had to train really, had to perfect the training. Then you got into like a lot of the crazy stuff. Like, that's when I kind of recognized who you were. You were like trying out all sorts of wackadoo things.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Methylene blue and laser lights and coffee enemas, yeah.

• 32:10Jen Cohen?

  All the things.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And part of it too is like you just Learn is a big part of it too.

• 32:13Jen Cohen?

  And you tried everything.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Podcast for the longest time was strictly a Q and A podcast. So I went from answering questions about like, how do I bench press or how do I run a 5K to, well, I've already answered those questions in episode number 82 or 83.

• 32:26Jen Cohen?

  Right, right.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  So I'm going to answer this question about which side do you lay on when you do a coffee enema? And I've never done one, so I better go do these and figure out and and reply to the question because it's almost like my audience kept me evolving by asking all these weird questions.

• 32:39Jen Cohen?

  That makes sense.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  And as podcasts got bigger and bigger and the information era blew in, now there's all these different biohackers and fitness enthusiasts and I still would get and do get asked, you know, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? So it's like a constant evolution of not really trying to be weird or attention grabbing, but almost winding up doing that organically by replying to a bunch of weird viral questions, like the 12, 3, 30 treadmill workout or whatever.

• 33:08Jen Cohen?

  And it's funny though, but then I feel like you kind of like hit, like you were, you were doing a lot of that for a while. And then like you kind of like leveled out and now talking to you even recently, you seem much more, and don't, don't be offended by this. I mean, this isn't a nice way, but more normal. Like you're more of a normal guy who does normal, like you are really fit, but you're not like as intensely crazy about all the extreme, extreme as you were maybe three or four years ago. Is that accurate?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Depends on your definition of extreme. I mean, I'm definitely not like, is I, I was racing Spartan races and doing Ironmans, the bodybuilding.

• 33:39Jen Cohen?

  That's true. That's kind of.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  All that crazy extreme stuff.

• 33:41Jen Cohen?

  That wasn't what I'm talking about.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Don't do that anymore. I think probably though, you know, because I still get, you know, hired to shoot videos for people or, you know, to whatever, you know, do methylene blue tongue sticking out shots or whatever. And so there is a certain extent where like, if you're an influencer, if you're in social media, or if you're trying to be a pattern interrupt, you do have to step outside the box a little bit and not just be like a talking head.

• 34:06Jen Cohen?

  Totally. And you do all that. But what I mean is like, there was not a time, there was a big chunk of time where like I would scroll and see like, you would never be just like, I don't, it would always be something and like unusual. And then I think, I think I met you really in, at the biohacking. Conference in London. Do you remember when that was? And I remember like when you weren't talking to people, I was like, oh, where's Ben? I wanted to ask you a question. You were like behind the stage. You had your legs up. You had this thing on your head. Do you remember? You were like getting in like everything like I felt like every second of your day was accounted for doing something that would be beneficial to your.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  I don't like to waste time.

• 34:46Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  I like like that Oliver Berkman book, Four Thousand Weeks, like you have four thousand weeks to live.

• 34:51Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Like, I don't grasp at straws. Like, I mean, I just told you, I'm a Christian. Like, I believe I'm going to live forever and eternity. And so I'm not trying to like do it all in this life.

• 35:00Jen Cohen?

  But.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  But I also don't like to waste time.

• 35:02Jen Cohen?

  No.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  But I can't even sit through a movie.

• 35:04Jen Cohen?

  Right. Like, you're not interested in like small talk. You're like, what? Like, it's everything with you is like every moment is accounted for. Like, like.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Even right now, like I'm self-conscious that like I just opening the kimono like two minutes ago, I started thinking, have I told the audience anything? Like in the past five minutes besides talking about myself. And so I'll start thinking that way because I'm like, I don't want to waste their time.

• 35:25Jen Cohen?

  You're not.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Ben talk about sitting in his bed in Idaho, reading fantasy fiction.

• 35:30Jen Cohen?

  No, but I actually don't think it's, I think people would be curious like how how you became so intensely like just knowledgeable. To like such a crazy level. Like, I know if I ask you, there's nothing really under the sun of health or fitness. You may not, you'll always give an answer that is way more detailed than anybody I've ever talked to in my life, ever. It's, I, that's why I, and you may, it's maybe your opinion, but people don't agree with you. But at least like, there's like, I know that it was, there's something that you either read about it, thought about it, tried, like you have an experience with it.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:05Jen Cohen?

  So like, and by the way, you've given everybody, I'm still taking my notes. Okay. So now I understand how the evolution is. These guys came to give us an IV, by the way, so let them like put us into like.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Have you ever gotten hooked up to an IV while you're recording?

• 36:17Jen Cohen?

  No.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Try to keep conversation flow going.

• 36:19Jen Cohen?

  No, this will be, this should be interesting.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  I've done it before. The only part that that sucks is if they miss a vein or something and then they start poking you and.

• 36:27Jen Cohen?

  That'll be really uncomfortable.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Hope they're good.

• 36:29Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Should we usher them in?

• 36:30Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, let's try. I mean, this is because of you, by the way, we're going to be getting the, I think we're getting the NR niagen IV, which is by curiagen. Have you had it before?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Long story short is you and I were both at an event for founders and executives and

• 36:45Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  It's called Founderland and they were doing IVs there and I met one of the doctors at the after party and

• 36:55Jen Cohen?

  Oh, that's how.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  I told her at some point, we were doing this podcast and I said, we should get an IV.

• 36:58Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  During the show and then it just happened.

• 37:01Jen Cohen?

  And next thing you know, I've actually, I think I, well, I got this IV one time before. It's like the NAD IV, but.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  It's like NAD, but easier. It's nicotinamide riboside to get less of like a flushing reaction and your gut doesn't flip and it's better absorption and it's shorter. With arguably very similar effects on things like sleep deprivation and energy and mitochondrial health. So.

• 37:21Jen Cohen?

  Wow, you should be a spokesperson.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I know. I am now.

• 37:25Jen Cohen?

  How long does it, how long does it actually last in your body though, to get an NR?

• 37:29Speaker 02

  I don't know what the half life of NR is.

• 37:31Jen Cohen?

  Do you believe in, like, do you get a lot of IVs? Are you, are you like an IV person? Are they coming in or? Okay, cool.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got a stem cell IV yesterday.

• 37:41Jen Cohen?

  Yesterday?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:42Jen Cohen?

  Where? At here?

• 37:43Speaker 02

  At Joy Kong's office up in Malibu.

• 37:46Jen Cohen?

  Really? Are you able to get this many IVs and be okay?

• 37:48Speaker 02

  We'll find out if any, if any veins bust open.

• 37:51Jen Cohen?

  Oh, my God.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Um, I think I'll be okay.

• 37:53Jen Cohen?

  What kind of?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Excess IVs can cause scarring of the vasculature if the needles are repeatedly placed in the same location over and over again. But the idea of like, if you're using a different, you know, delivery portal, there's no reason that you can't get like stem cells one day and NAD one day and a multivitamin cocktail the next day.

• 38:11Jen Cohen?

  So isn't also, aren't these IVs really good for brain, like cognition and focus and?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  The NR ones?

• 38:18Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Jen Cohen?

  Like, and also for the mitochondrial health?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. As a matter of fact, my favorite stack for sleep deprivation is NR, NAD, or NMN, which are all just like NAD precursors and creatine. Because when you're sleep deprived, two things happen. You get less ATP in the brain and the creatine, the phosphagen and creatine can help to replenish that. And then the NAD assists with the cellular repair mechanisms that should have occurred. When you're sleep deprived. And so, yeah, I mean, coffee and energy drinks and all that stuff and kind of Band-Aid sleep deprivation.

• 38:47Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Using about ten, higher, higher than what you use for strength and power, like ten to twenty grams of creatine a day. And that will give you disaster pants if you take it all at once. So you do like four or five gram portions spread throughout the day if you're sleep deprived. I wouldn't, you don't need to do this every day. And then NAD, IV, patch, oral.

• 39:04Jen Cohen?

  Okay, wait, so that's a good, that's actually a good clip.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Fantastic for sleep deprivation.

• 39:08Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so say that one more time because I wanna, I wanna make sure people get that. So if you are sleep deprived, here is a cocktail that you should do that's very effective. Go ahead. Say it again. The NR.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  If, if you're sleep deprived, then coffee, five hour energy, green tea, like all these central nervous system stimulus can kind of like short term. Jack you up, but NAD combined with creatine, that stack is incredible because it helps to simulate a lot of what you would have gotten during sleep, ATP restoration in the brain and cellular repair mechanisms.

• 39:42Jen Cohen?

  Okay, this is my question. Can you take NAD, if I just took like a Tru Niagen supplement and a creatine, creatine scoop?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:51Jen Cohen?

  That would work?

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Couple capsules, although I, I recommend more than you'd usually take. So you take like four capsules of like the Tru Niagen. And then you do twenty grams of the creatine, but you split that into four or five gram portions throughout the day.

• 40:02Jen Cohen?

  Can't that bloat you to take that much creatine?

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. That's why you wouldn't want to do it every day. But you also shouldn't be sleep deprived every day.

• 40:09Jen Cohen?

  That's true.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Deeper issues to address.

• 40:11Jen Cohen?

  Are you not wearing any trackers anymore because of all the EMFs?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  I wear this ring.

• 40:16Jen Cohen?

  Oh, you do?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. I wear a ring. Rings don't produce an appreciable amount of EMF.

• 40:20Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Like a class three Bluetooth signal is not a big, like, maybe if you had it next to your head, like AirPod inside your ear all the time. Some people say it affects red blood cell flow and can cause clumping or, you know, heating of tissue, but Bluetooth is way less important of a fish to fry compared to like wifi and radio frequencies from phones, et cetera. So I use a cheapo, actually just replaced it. My last one pooped out after six years, but he's a cheapo, like thirty dollar Timex watch and a ring. And a blood glucose monitor.

• 40:50Jen Cohen?

  Oh, so you do wear the

• 40:51Speaker 02

  I do wear a blood glucose monitor.

• 40:52Jen Cohen?

  Why?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Not because I don't know by this point, after using one for two years, what does and does not spike my blood glucose, but just because what gets measured gets managed. I'm less likely to like blow through a bunch of dark chocolate trail mix on an airplane if I know I gotta look at the levels later on.

• 41:07Jen Cohen?

  I love that line, by the way.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Or drink a 100 calorie cane sugar infused caramel latte, high protein iced coffee.

• 41:13Jen Cohen?

  This one may be, let me, it's gonna hate me.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  With false advertising on the front of it.

• 41:17Jen Cohen?

  Why?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  It says lactose free energy, but it's got skim milk in it. However, they added lactase enzymes. So lactase enzymes digest the skim milk.

• 41:25Jen Cohen?

  Oh, my God, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get fired. I'm just kidding.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  It's, it's not that bad of a, like, that's good that they put lactase in there along with the skim milk. I would rather, like,

• 41:34Jen Cohen?

  Look at this one. Look at the French vanilla.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Wave a magic wand, I'd rather they be using regular milk because all the studies on the benefits of dairy tend to be much stronger with full fat dairy compared to low fat or fat free dairy.

• 41:47Jen Cohen?

  Right, full fat's better.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Especially for the metabolic function, for the satiety, for brain function and for bone health. If you go with full fat instead of low fat or fat free. So it's kind of like back to eggs. I'd rather you eat eggs with the egg yolk rather than egg whites. I'd rather you have chicken with the chicken skin and the gristle and the bone than have just pure skim milk. It's, it's more than just calories. And obviously, if we're talking about calories, yeah, it's skim milk, but there is 100 calories in this and they do use, or they do use, um, uh, low calorie sweeteners, looks like, uh, stevia. And, uh, yeah, so, so if I'm looking at ingredient label, I do like to see stevia

• 42:26Speaker 02

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

• 42:56Jen Cohen?

  But isn't that better than having, so by the way, Slate,

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:59Jen Cohen?

  Ben said eight out of 10, so that's very good.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is, it is good.

• 43:04Jen Cohen?

  And for the average Joe, who's not Ben, who is a fitness fanatic, not health, you know, health phenom, it's a really good thing to have. Because at least it's getting 20 grams of protein into somebody who otherwise would not be having that.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:18Jen Cohen?

  And it's better than having, you know, a milkshake at McDonald's.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Right. I would drink this, honestly, if I weren't myself a little bit lactose intolerant. And I know, if I can have dairy if it's fermented, and this is the case for many people. If you ferment the dairy, if you do like a good fermented yogurt, or a kefir, or those would really be the two primary delivery mechanisms for fermented yogurt. You can do better if you're lactose intolerant. You can also do better on milks that have lower amounts of lactose sugar, like goat milk, camel milk, et cetera. But if

• 43:50Jen Cohen?

  Hold on, what did you say?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Goat milk, like a lot of, I raise goats, so we do have goat milk.

• 43:55Jen Cohen?

  Of course I do. How about camel, you said camel milk?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  It's a thing, you can find it, yeah.

• 44:00Jen Cohen?

  Stop it.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:01Jen Cohen?

  Okay, is that, okay.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Yak milk.

• 44:04Jen Cohen?

  Where do you buy camel milk?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Uh, the Camel Milk Company out of California is where I've gotten it in the past.

• 44:09Jen Cohen?

  From a camel?

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's from a camel. Yeah. Surprising.

• 44:14Jen Cohen?

  Do you drink it?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  It comes from a camel. I have, but it's also really expensive.

• 44:19Jen Cohen?

  I wouldn't, how much is a, how much is a liter of camel milk?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Cause I don't really buy it anymore, but it is better for the body.

• 44:25Jen Cohen?

  Why?

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Cows milk, because of a few reasons. Lower amounts of lactose, a smaller protein that's more bioavailable than the larger protein found in cows milk. And also, a lot of cows are bred now for A1 protein instead of A2 protein. So when you see at the grocery store that you can buy A2 milk, that is milk that tends to produce a little bit less of an immune response in the body. And camel's milk and goat's milk are naturally more like an A2, or they have less of the A1 based protein.

• 44:53Jen Cohen?

  Because goat's milk, goat milk I see all the time. So are you suggesting to people that they should maybe switch from maybe even their almond milk? Or their oat milk to a goat milk? Would that be healthier?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Well, the nice thing about nut milks, again, if you are adding a bunch of, you know, cane sugar to them and and thickeners and fillers is that a lot of people who just don't do well with milk in general do better with that. And they're lower calorie in most cases. There's some that are higher calorie, like I think macadamia nut milk is the highest.

• 45:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  But one issue is if you want to be careful with your calorie count, a nut milk is a better substitute compared to a dairy milk.

• 45:30Jen Cohen?

  But how about the carrageins in them and all that stuff like that?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And you can see on this, on this can, they say no carragene, right? That is a filler that can upset a lot of people's stomachs. So, yeah. And it says lactose free, sucralose free, erythritol free, but I, I don't want to throw them under the bus when I said false advertising. It's technically, they have an enzyme in there, lactase, that allows you to digest the lactose. So it's not lactose free.

• 45:54Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  But it's more like they have the carrier agent in there that helps digest lactose. So, so technically by the time it gets into your stomach, it is lactose free.

• 46:03Jen Cohen?

  Okay, that, okay.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Theoretically.

• 46:04Jen Cohen?

  Thank you. They're gonna, they're gonna hate me now for even bringing this on this podcast. That I don't care about, but.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  This one is, but this one has erythritol in it, which can be a little bit, like if people have like small intestine bacterial overgrowth.

• 46:16Jen Cohen?

  That's not for my friend. I don't know.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's not bad though. It's oxygenated. Yeah.

• 46:19Jen Cohen?

  Okay, this is the next one. This is Magic Mind. I love.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Hydrogen infused water, that's good.

• 46:23Jen Cohen?

  That's good. I got that for you. Okay. And then these Magic Minds, I want you, I, I'm blind, so I can't even read the ingredients. I do know there's amazing stuff in there.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  I ate my carrots. Let me see it.

• 46:33Jen Cohen?

  Okay, good. See?

• 46:34Speaker 02

  All your. It's pretty small. So Magic Mind, New Elixir, matcha green tea, agave. And it's a very small bottle. So a lot of people see agave and they'll be like, oh, that's just a.

• 46:45Jen Cohen?

  A hundred percent.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  A sweetener. And agave does have a higher amount of fructose in it. The thing with fructose, fruit juices, fruit sugars, et cetera, is a lot of people have vilified them. You know, the idea that fructose is a poison. I think Dr. Robert Lustig introduced that concept in his book about calories.

• 47:02Jen Cohen?

  Do you believe?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  So it is true that fructose can elevate triglycerides and contribute to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but only in a case in which the liver and muscle glycogen stores are already topped off. That's at which point fructose starts to spill over and cause issues. So if I'm burning 2,000 calories a day and I'm drinking 2,000 calories a day of Coke and that's all that I'm drinking, I would theoretically not elevate my triglycerides or get a lot of the issues associated with fructose because I'm at a net calorie balance. I wouldn't advise it because you're also going to be like, you know, you're going to have low nutrient density and you're not getting enough protein, etc. If you're just drinking Coke. But if people see agave or fructose or, you know, high fructose corn syrup, sometimes there's some harsh chemicals

• 47:45Speaker 02

  and things like that used to make that. So that's, that's a whole separate side issue. But the idea of fructose in general is that if you're a physically active person and you're not overeating and you're having, you know, fruit juices, you know, fruit in a blender, agave in a drink or whatever, it's usually not an issue unless you're eating too many calories, at which point fructose can become an issue.

• 48:07Jen Cohen?

  Right. I mean, this is the whole conversation about like, people are like, fruit does not get you fat, please. I mean, this nonsense of, fruit's not going to get you fat. Yeah, if you eat nine, if you eat like, everything else, plus you eat nine pounds of grapes, like maybe I do sometimes, that can be not the greatest.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Right. And, and if the fruit is sweet and has a high glycemic index, which grapes do, long-term, you're getting so many insulin surges due to that high sugar content that you could create a long-term state of insulin insensitivity. And then you get some appetite control issues, you get some metabolic issues that long-term could cause problems, even if you're not overeating the grapes or fruit, you're just eating enough to spike your blood sugar repeatedly throughout the day. So.

• 48:49Jen Cohen?

  How long did the stem cell one take yesterday?

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Hmm, like an hour.

• 48:52Jen Cohen?

  And what kind of stem cells?

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Well, they, the first thing she did was remove a bunch of my blood and ozonate it, and then inject that ozonated blood back into my body.

• 49:01Jen Cohen?

  What?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Which is kind of like an antiviral antibacterial oxygenates the blood. Then she did laser lights, which sounds kind of funky and weird.

• 49:10Jen Cohen?

  This is the stuff I was telling you that I'm.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  The light helps to direct. The stem cells or activate the stem cells using photonic absorption of the light. So they're more efficacious. Then after all that, and a few other little things like hydrogen water and some peptides, et cetera. Then she did the stem cells as the icing on the cake.

• 49:28Jen Cohen?

  Okay. So how was that different than our friend, Dr. Khan's stem cells back home, back in?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Well, if you get stem cells in the U.S., they're usually not expanded. So that means that they haven't grown them to increase the amount of mesenchymal stem cells, which are the active stem cells that would theoretically be rejuvenative or have some type of anti-aging qualities. And if you go overseas. Muse stem cells, I don't know if those fall into the category of expanded cells, but that's a brand new form of stem cells that not a lot of people know about. It's a multi-linera lineage, undifferentiated stem cell extract is what I believe muse stands for. Multi-lineage, undifferentiated stem cell extract.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  And the reason that that's interesting is because normally stem cells called ISPC stem cells have a high mesenchymal stem cell count, but they also have very low histokompatibility, meaning a lot of people have an inflammatory or an immune response that can be unhealthy or dangerous or very uncomfortable for people. And the muse cells do have a high amount of histokompatibility, meaning if you were to get an infusion with them or an injection into a joint, there's a very low likelihood that you're going to feel crappy afterwards, but they have a very high amount of healing capacity. Issue is you do have to travel internationally and they're expensive.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  However, from what I understand, they require fewer expansions than a normal expanded stem cell. And every time you expand the stem cell lineage, you run the risk of mutations, you run the risk of impurities, and you run the risk of them causing issues in a patient into which they're injected. So if you get stem cells in the U.S., they're unexpanded, but they're also arguably a little bit safer unless you're getting something like, let's say, a muse cell.

• 51:26Jen Cohen?

  You mean, you're talking about it's safer internationally or safer?

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Domestically, if you're concerned about histocompatibility, because the FDA is pretty strict about how stem cells are regulated. Actually, I don't think they're technically regulated by the FDA. But they're, they're considered to be almost like a pharmaceutical drug, or they're treated a little bit like one. They're not quite classified as a drug. You know, they're trying to classify them as a drug. But there's so much regulation in the US that you do have a lower risk of side effect issues, but also a lower stem cell count. So you're getting less of the good stuff, arguably. The question is how much less of the good stuff for it to be an issue. Now, what I did was simply a stem cell infusion. This is an anti-aging or longevity or brain-held play, right? Stem cells straight into the bloodstream, they go throughout the body. It's like a shotgun approach.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  If you were to go to, let's say, Dr., like you just mentioned, Dr. Khan, like he has clinics in Cabo and Dubai and Toronto. He will do stem cell infusions, but he also does injections into different joints using ultrasound-guided imaging. And this is something you can do for like back treatment, or a knee treatment, or shoulder treatment. And even though you can also do that in the US, the idea of regenerative medicine using safe, expanded stem cells overseas is a good idea, but it's going to be a lot more expensive and inconvenient than doing it in the US. So there's benefits to both. And I bounce back and forth. I've done international stem cell treatments. I've done domestic. If you're literally just in it for anti-aging and you wanted to like,

• 52:56Speaker 02

  you know, like the doctor I was with yesterday, Dr. Joy Kong, she's like 53 years old and she looks like she's 40, and she's been doing quarterly stem cell infusions. So every three months for like eight years or something like that. And that's, you know, that's not something out of the reach of someone who just wanted to go to a clinic and get a stem cell infusion every quarter.

• 53:15Jen Cohen?

  How much is it?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 53:17Jen Cohen?

  Of course not.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:19Jen Cohen?

  But.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  I know if you were to go overseas and do the full meal deal, like the, the super duper fancy stuff and you were to get like gene therapy and T cell therapy and stem cell therapy. That's the whole anti-aging package that a deal does. And I think that's 50K.

• 53:32Jen Cohen?

  But it gets these IVs though, right? You get the IVs with that.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  If you're doing stem cells, you want them to go into a really stress-free, low inflammation environment. So everything from like eating a really clean diet, avoiding alcohol, you know, grounding and earth thing and exercise, but not too much. And you know, avoiding toxins in your food and you know, they're like really babying your body before and after is better because essentially if you think about it, you just injected a whole bunch of fragile new baby cells into your body. And so you don't want to go like have a couple of old fashions afterwards or something like.

• 54:04Jen Cohen?

  Right. So basically you can't drink, but you said also like easy exercise. You don't want to stress your body is basically your point, right?

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, this, this kind of hearkens back to the idea of like the Goldilocks zone of exercise, right? There's a researcher named Dr. James O'Keefe, and he's identified that if you exceed about 75 minutes per week of vigorous intensity exercise, 150 per week of moderate intensity exercise, the potential for plaque accumulation, atherosclerosis and inflammation begins to exceed the benefits of the exercise. And there's a lot of people, like people who are doing CrossFit every day or training for an Ironman or a marathon or whatever, who are definitely exceeding those numbers. So you wouldn't want to be overtraining. You wouldn't want to be overdrinking. You wouldn't want to have tons of exposure to like, you know, EMF and wifi and stress and you know, all these unhealthy things, especially if you're focusing on stem cell therapy.

• 54:55Jen Cohen?

  So do you have you seen any kind of benefit by you doing this? How often are you doing these types of? This is not stem cells. I, this is not, it's an NR, Niagen IV.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Pretend they're some cells just to be.

• 55:05Jen Cohen?

  To be cool. Yeah. How often have you done the stem cells? And do you see any benefit? Have you seen any benefit?

• 55:12Speaker 02

  I have probably done like 20 stem cell therapies, everything from joints to infusions. And I don't know what 42-year-old Ben would be like not having done those. So I don't really have a.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Good comparison.

• 55:28Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  But I can tell you that I feel really good. I don't have a lot of like the aging issues that it seems like a lot of my friends are having to deal with. I feel like I've maintained a great amount of youthfulness and I would attribute some of that to the stem cells. I've been able to fix some worn and torn joints like a knee with stem cells. And I, I mean, I feel like I'm eighteen years old, so I feel pretty good.

• 55:48Jen Cohen?

  You know, it's funny, I would, I'm gonna say that you look younger now than you did when I first met you even.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 55:54Jen Cohen?

  But I don't know why that is. It's like, I think it's a, it's everything, or maybe it's just genetics.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  I think a lot of this stuff, just like anything in the biohacking or the health, it stacks, right? Like I go in the sunshine, but not too much UVA and I put on good, clean sunscreen if I'm gonna do that.

• 56:08Jen Cohen?

  You wear sunscreen?

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Red light therapy I do if I'm going to have a high UVA exposure. And now, I recently did a podcast about this, toxins, poor air, bright overhead lights, airline radiation, sunlight coming in through a window or it's blocking some of the UVB. All of these things dictate that a small amount of low SPF sunscreen is not a bad idea. A lot of the time, especially for fragile, thin skin like the face. So I've been using, so I have sunscreen on right now. Like I've been using a lot more of it and I use the Young Goose products. Basically, every two months I use their anti-aging package. It's like six different bottles plus sunscreen. So it's like a cleanser, moisturizer, serum, and those are all based on peptides. They've got a bunch of transdermally bioavailable peptides.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  And that's probably, I would say, the, it's, it's made the biggest impact on my skin health is when I started using those products.

• 56:55Jen Cohen?

  Well, you look really good.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 56:57Jen Cohen?

  So like what, hey, what other things would you say is good for your overall youthfulness skin?

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Well, I do.

• 57:04Jen Cohen?

  Or how about this, is your brother, do you have any brothers and sisters?

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:07Jen Cohen?

  Do they look like you?

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Brothers and two sisters.

• 57:09Jen Cohen?

  Do they have your skin?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  I would say, I'm self-conscious, like comparing myself to my brothers and sisters. I think my skin has aged less than theirs possibly, but I don't know.

• 57:20Jen Cohen?

  Do you have your stem cells in your skin?

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Thorough analysis of side by side analysis.

• 57:24Jen Cohen?

  Well, maybe you should.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have, I have had my skin treated with stem cells also. Yeah.

• 57:29Jen Cohen?

  Has that worked?

• 57:30Speaker 02

  I think it does make a difference. I think that if you're looking at beauty, using good, clean skincare products and taking advantage of the newer development. And things like peptide absorption for skin health is a good idea. So I like that the company, for example, Young Goose is one that I use, although I found out from Joy Kong last night that she's now making a skin cream. I've got a couple in my backpack that she puts umbilical stem cells and peptides into. I even asked her how much it costs. It's probably like the world's most expensive skin cream.

• 57:56Jen Cohen?

  Can I have one of them?

• 57:57Speaker 02

  But it, but I have it and she's just up the road. I would give it to you, but she told me that I'm supposed to do like a before after and use the two different bottles for a month and then.

• 58:08Jen Cohen?

  Well, you can't look any younger now. Your, your name could actually be Benjamin Button because you literally look like you're like twenty two.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Benjamin Green Feld or Benjamin Button.

• 58:15Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  And then a clay mask once a week combined with red light therapy daily. I think red light therapy for collagen and elastin for the face is fantastic. The clay mask helps to draw out toxins. Moisturizes. I do a derma roller before I do the clay mask. So I'm getting some of that dermal abrasion. I think if I were to go to a beauty clinic and do a microneedling protocol, that would be better than derma rolling, but I don't really have the time or the desire to do that.

• 58:39Jen Cohen?

  So wait, hold on. You went too fast. God, I gotta get my bat. Okay. So you're telling me you do a clay mask. How often?

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Once a week.

• 58:46Jen Cohen?

  Okay. Which brand are you using that?

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Ollie Torah, all the way down to like, it's got like six day old baby goat derived colostrum in it. Like you, you read the ingredient label and you're like, are they kidding me? Like just crazy stuff. Colostrum and all these different like antioxidants and nutrients, like face food.

• 59:03Jen Cohen?

  How much is that?

• 59:04Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think it's probably like around fifty bucks for a, like a little.

• 59:09Jen Cohen?

  Think of it.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Can of it. Yeah.

• 59:10Jen Cohen?

  Okay. So wait, you put the clay mask on and then you put the red light on top for how long?

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Twenty minutes.

• 59:17Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  And then I actually walk around for a little while longer and just let the clay dry just while I'm doing my thing. And I go shower it off.

• 59:22Jen Cohen?

  And that's once. Okay.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 59:23Jen Cohen?

  Okay. Give me some other stuff you do for your skin.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  In addition to the clay mask, I do a scrub once a week. So twice per week, my skin is getting abrazed. Once with the derma roller, plus the clay mask, once with the scrub. You wouldn't want to get skin turnover all the time because then you're just going to wear away the skin layers too quickly and, and have a very, very fragile face. But scrub once a week, clay mask once a week with the derma roller. Young Goose products, the moisturizer, toner, serum, their whole suite, once in the morning, once in the evening. And then I probably had stem cells on my face three times.

• 59:54Jen Cohen?

  Three times. Did Dr. Khan do it to you?

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Everything I'm saying is nowhere near what, you know, there's like biohackers like frigging Brian Johnson, who are doing a full laser resurfacing crazy.

• 1:00:03Jen Cohen?

  I was gonna ask you about him, though.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Jen Cohen?

  Because, wait, finish what you're gonna say, then I'm gonna ask you about him. So then, did you do with Dr. Khan, the stem cells on your face?

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  No, I did that with Dr. Adelson. I did, uh, Dr. Adelson's full body stem cell procedure. I've done that twice in Park City, Utah, and they go toe to head. They, they do literally hair, skin, nails, genitals, every joint, up and down the back. And, I mean, you're like, you're literally under anesthetic induced surgery for like four hours, and they do everything.

• 1:00:31Jen Cohen?

  I remember you were talking to that Dr. Adelson at the biohacking conference in London about this whole stem cell. That was like in nine, that was in 2020 or something you did that, right?

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Jen Cohen?

  And you did that again?

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  I've done it twice. Yep.

• 1:00:46Jen Cohen?

  Why, why? Why do you need to do it twice?

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Well, as you age, you do decrease your bioavailable stem cell pool. The first time that I did it, he used my own stem cells. He tapped my hips and used my own bone marrow and made like a bone marrow soup with stem cells and then injected that into all my joint skin, everything. And then he came out with a new protocol in which he uses umbilical stem cells. And because of the reasons I was talking about earlier, you get a little bit less of like an immune response, cytokine inflammatory response to those, you recover faster. And I wanted to see what that second protocol that he does was like. So I went down there and did it again. Both times that I've done it, like, you feel kinda like you got hit by a truck for a few days, because you're kinda sore, and you got everything injected. And then within a

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  couple of weeks, you start to feel like Superman. You recover faster, uh, your erections are better, your skin looks better, like your hair, skin, nails, everything grows faster. So it definitely turns back the clock.

• 1:01:41Jen Cohen?

  And how much is that? Like, if you're getting full head to toe?

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  That, I think, is seventy thousand to do. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a pretty big procedure.

• 1:01:48Jen Cohen?

  And how long does it last? I know you did it twice, but how long does it, do you have?

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  I mean, theoretically, the benefits would last for your life, but I would say, you know, if you were doing this a full-on anti-aging play, this would be something you could do like every four or five years. You don't have to do it. I mean, if you did it just once, you'd see huge benefits in turning back the clock.

• 1:02:06Jen Cohen?

  So how long apart did you do both treatments?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  About five years.

• 1:02:10Jen Cohen?

  Five years?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:02:11Jen Cohen?

  Does Dr. Khan do that one too?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  He doesn't do the full body one. Dr. Allison's one of the only guys I know of in the world who specializes in, because it's a pretty intensive procedure and there's two doctors working on you at the same time and it's kind of, it's kind of one of those things where, hey, let's just shotgun everything. And not a lot of doctors will do that, but Dr. Khan is very good at joints. He's very good at back. He also does, like I said, gene therapy, T killer cell therapy.

• 1:02:34Jen Cohen?

  What is gene therapy really?

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  It does like a vagal nerve block where it resets your nervous system with an injection into the vagus nerve. Like he has some cool tricks up his sleeve that you can't do in the States, so you can travel internationally.

• 1:02:46Jen Cohen?

  What does that do though? What you just said?

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 1:02:49Jen Cohen?

  The one where you like the vagus nerve?

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  The vagus nerve is the nerve that kind of snakes through your whole body, innervates the pacemaker cells of your heart. It helps you to manage stress if it's well toned. There are things like chanting, singing, humming, gargling, cold water face dunks, even electrical vagus nerve stimulators you can hold up to your neck, all of which work to specifically increase your heart rate variability, like lower stress by, by toning the vagus nerve and increasing your ability to have good balance between your, your fight or flight nervous system and your rest or digest nervous system. That's basically how addressing your vagus nerve can have benefit. Lower stress improves digestion, improves cardiovascular function, improves focus, et cetera. Like that's the benefits of the vagus nerve. The more stress that you're under,

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  the more likely it is that you have poor vagal nerve tone or poor nervous system balance. Now, if you wanted to just say, okay, I'm going to roll up my sleeves and use the big guns on this thing, that's where you could literally go to a doctor and this would be normally something for like extreme PTSD or trauma or just stress that someone cannot manage at all, that won't go away, that you would do this. You wouldn't normally just like wander into a doctor and have him jam a needle right behind your carotid artery.

• 1:04:00Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Because it's a delicate procedure. And often because there's some throat swelling involved, you do one side one day, then you wait a couple of days or at least a day to do the other side, but you're supposed to do both sides.

• 1:04:10Jen Cohen?

  Is it dangerous?

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  It's also known as a stellate ganglia nerve block. It could be dangerous if the person doing it, it's kind of like if you were to get a brain surgery, you'd preferably want the surgeon who's done like thousands of them.

• 1:04:19Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  The person every once in a while does them. Adele does a lot of them. Um, another doctor. Dr. Dr. Matt Cook in San Jose, he does them. Dr. Avi Hershkovich in also in he's in San Francisco, he does them. So there's a few people you can go to to get them done. And you sit up after having had the injection and you feel like you've like smoked a joint and had a glass of wine all at once. And your stress levels just melt away and it feels like that for at least a couple of weeks.

• 1:04:45Jen Cohen?

  Just a couple of weeks?

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, but think about this. If you open that window, it's almost like ketamine therapy for addiction, right? Like if you do ketamine therapy and you realize after ketamine therapy, you've got a window for a few days where if you avoid that thing that you were addicted to, which is easier to do after the ketamine therapy, then you can break that addictive cycle. And it's kind of like with stress, if you do a procedure like that and your body suddenly receives the message that it's safe and down regulates the sympathetic nervous system, it's going to allow you to be able to be less stressed even after the acute effects wear off. Does that make sense?

• 1:05:21Jen Cohen?

  It does, but eventually it comes back though, unless it's managed.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not get like anything, it's not gonna be a Band-Aid.

• 1:05:27Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, like it sounds like all of these things are just like they're short-lived.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if you get on Ozempic and you're gonna control your calories and you're gonna lose weight. But once you get off it, if you haven't developed healthy eating patterns during that time or use the Ozempic as training wheels to do so, say, help, this is what it feels like to not be hungry. This is what it feels like to sit down and not eat all the food. Or this is what it feels like to have one plate at the buffet because I don't feel like I need more than if you were to wean off a drug like that. You would theoretically, if you if you built the mindfulness during, get to the point where you'd use it as training wheels and then you don't need it anymore. You know, it's like even like my wife and I did freaking like MDMA couples therapy. Right. And that was the training wheels that it took for us to like really have long, deep, meaningful, honest, transparent discussions, which we now have without drugs.

• 1:06:15Jen Cohen?

  During it.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like sometimes I don't think every couple, you know, for the rest of all time is to go out and do MDMA therapy to have honest discussions. But my wife and I were at the point where we just developed, you know, almost like a barrier to doing that. And now we can have great dates and sit in bed and talk for a long time. We don't have to like. Go use MDMA beforehand.

• 1:06:35Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  So a lot of these things like training wheels.

• 1:06:37Jen Cohen?

  No, it makes perfect sense. That's actually a really true point. I know a lot of people, a lot of people, my friends, who swear by that.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Jen Cohen?

  Terms of for couples therapy because it gives you an opportunity to like, open up and or it loses your inhibitions that you would otherwise have after so many years of doing the same thing over and over again.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:06:57Jen Cohen?

  When did you guys do that? Like, how long ago?

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  We did it uh six times over the course of three years. Last time we did it was six years ago.

• 1:07:05Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Jen Cohen?

  And it made a big difference.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Pretty big difference. And I'm cautious saying that because I don't want a bunch of couples who are having issues. Feel like they need to go do drugs or plant medicines together to to get over that barrier. If I could, it was very difficult, kind of like, what would I look like with stem cells versus without? It's very difficult to rewind the clock, but I think we could have made an even more concerted effort to just, you know, talk through our problems and have honest discussions without that, but that's just the way that things panned out. But I don't like, I'm, I have twin sixteen year old sons, right? Like, I will be coaching them and training them and talking with them many times. Once they do get engaged and they're preparing for the months leading up to marriage, to talk with them about how to have honest, open discussions with their significant other and

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  how to have, you know, evening prayer meetings like my wife and I have now, and how to do quarterly retreats like my wife and I do now, so that. So that hopefully they and and their wife don't get, you know, like, what like we did, like fourteen years into our relationship and realize, oh, we've we have a lot between us because, I mean, I don't know about you, but my parents didn't like train me that much to be married. A lot of this stuff, I just had to figure out on my own. So for me, I want to do a better job training my sons on what to expect during marriage and how to navigate discussions and living with another person, hopefully for the rest of your life.

• 1:08:25Jen Cohen?

  Did you date a lot? Because you said you were very much like you're homeschooled until all these years. Did you? Did you have a big chunk of time that you dated people before you got married? Or did you with your wife, one of your?

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  I um probably dated less than the average, normal, traditional, public schooled kid just because there weren't a lot of girls around.

• 1:08:44Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Prom, prom was very lonely.

• 1:08:46Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Dancing with myself.

• 1:08:48Jen Cohen?

  Did you go to prom even?

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  I probably had like eight girlfriends before I, well, I met my wife in second grade Sunday school. So I have known her for a really long time, but I didn't start like going out with her until senior, junior of college. And up till that point, we'd, you know, been hanging out for a couple of years and been best friends before even fell in love and started to, to go out together. And she went to like a local classical Christian school called Logos. And also by the nature of going to a classical Christian school, also, you know, fooled around less, didn't have a lot of boyfriends, et cetera. So we, we relative to the general population, probably had fewer partners than, than the average person. And we didn't have sex at all until we got married.

• 1:09:31Jen Cohen?

  You didn't?

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  No, no, that, that was just something that we committed to each other. And I promised to her parents when I asked them if I could marry her. And I wanted to stay true to my word, so.

• 1:09:43Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, which was really hard.

• 1:09:46Jen Cohen?

  Oh, my God, I can't believe that.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  A year and a half of torture, but.

• 1:09:51Jen Cohen?

  Wait, so you dated for?

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Payoff was great.

• 1:09:53Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you, did it turn out okay?

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Jen Cohen?

  Oh, so for a year and a half, you guys dated then?

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:59Jen Cohen?

  Did you guys do anything? Like, how does it work when you have no sex? Are you doing nothing else? Are you kissing even? Like, what are you doing? Everything but? Like, what do you do?

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  We got maybe to second base, so.

• 1:10:11Jen Cohen?

  And then you guys got married?

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 1:10:14Jen Cohen?

  By the way, that's become a big thing now. Have you heard about this whole celibacy, uh, this, this whole celibacy trend that's become hot right now? Have you heard about this?

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  No, what is it?

• 1:10:23Jen Cohen?

  I don't know. Like, my friend Emily told me about it. I don't know what it is.

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  You mean like guys going into monk mode and just like living in their basement and working out?

• 1:10:30Jen Cohen?

  I don't, no, no, no, no, no. I don't, I don't know. I'm gonna ask her again. It was like something that became like trendy for. Like a hot minute. I don't know if it's still happening to be honest, but.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Celibacy like waiting until you're married to have sex like that definition of celibacy.

• 1:10:42Jen Cohen?

  I don't know if it was a way into, I don't know if it was waiting until you got married or if it was a, it was a trend where people weren't having sex.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Jen Cohen?

  I gotta find out.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the reason I think it's a good idea is the same reason that I think just like serially dating or treating sex as a casual event is potentially risky for long-term relationship and societal stability. I think that if you set up sex as something sacred and you set up marriage as something sacred and you don't get into marriage, having developed the habit of as soon as something a partner does annoys you, you can ditch them and move on to the next person or try on some new flavors, then you're going to be more likely to commit to a long-term relationship, to have children, to build legacy, to build generational wealth, to set the foundation for what made this country great. And I think that even though it sounds kind of trite, if you have a bunch of young people sleeping around and not treating sex as sacred, getting into marriage, not understanding what a sacred committed relationship,

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  even when the other person that you're with is not perfect, actually feels like and looks like, then you can create a lot of long-term societal and familial instability. And so I think the idea of celibacy lends itself better to the foundations of a great society than the opposite.

• 1:11:50Jen Cohen?

  You know, it's funny that that is, if you, I'm sure you've noticed that we're living in a society now where people are not getting married anymore. There's no really, like people aren't even dating properly. People, men are just like watching porn. Women are like, there's no men to even be dating, for women to even date because apps and everything else has now ruined how people even socialize. They don't even know how to socialize. They don't know how to date and they're not interested in relationships because everything is just about like a swipe to the next person. Right? Like it's actually really sad how like we've evolved into this strange place where people aren't even having, they're not getting married. They're not having children, you know what I mean?

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:02Jen Cohen?

  Absolutely, of course. And if you've seen the decline of what's happened since people were born after nineteen ninety five, actually, what was hap- is happening eighty three percent of the things that we used to do, we don't do anymore. Like go out and date, like get in trouble, like jump off cliffs, bike ride, just basics, right? Because people are now stuck on their screens.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, my son's graduated high school two months ago and I kicked him out of the house.

• 1:13:24Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  They're in, they're in, uh, I think they made it to Arizona so far. They got a used car. They don't get a dime from me. And they're just off driving around the country for, well, they're supposed to be home by Thanksgiving. They got a tent for the top of their car. They're like parking by the side of the road and camping and getting water from springs and eating oatmeal and beef jerky and just learning how life works and getting out of the house for a little while to just go explore, which I think is a great idea.

• 1:13:47Jen Cohen?

  That's so amazing.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  They're ready for it, so.

• 1:13:50Jen Cohen?

  So you basically said to them, you're leaving the house, come back around Thanksgiving and go fend for yourself.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  They knew it was coming. And it wasn't just like they, they graduated and I said, leave. We have a whole greenfield family constitution. Meaning those rites of passages. There's everything in there. What we do for Easter, what we do for Thanksgiving, what we do for Christmas, what time we meet for meditation in the morning, what time we have dinner at night, uh, everybody's all the way down, like everybody's end of life and memorial services plan and what we would want at our funeral in terms of like songs sung and the dress code, all the way back to uh, what the each family's power animal is and symbol and hex color and font and what the family crest looks like and what each element of the family logo represents and the family logo is on the flags outside our front door and our throw pillows and the

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  hoodies and hats that we wear out to dinner and, and everything. But in that greenfield family constitution, which by the way, having a constitution like this is a great way to back to building generational wealth, building a sense of pride in the family name, building a legacy that can be passed on to my sons and then proved upon in their families. So there's a lot of benefits to having this idea of almost branding your family, like you brand a business. But in that constitution, our rites of passage, particularly for young greenfield men, meaning when they turn thirteen, they have a rite of passage. Into adolescence, three days out in the wilderness, backpack, blanket, knife. They have a wilderness survival instructor who they worked with since they were six.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  And he oversaw that rite of passage when they come out, there's a ceremony, there's a fire, there's a feast with friends and family. And that marks that they are now adolescents and they're given more responsibility and chores at home. They're treated less like kids, they pitch in more with family dinners and they're just expected to be a greater contributory member to the family. At that point, when they are sixteen, again, this is baked into the constitution. So they've known this was coming since they were eight years old. They have to leave the house for three months, could be an international trip, it could be a domestic trip, it could be whatever. But they just can't be under mom and dad's roof for three months. They just have to go out and fly the nest.

• 1:15:59Jen Cohen?

  And you give them money or no money?

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  No money, no, but they've had time to think about this and save up and budget. And they know how much they can spend every day to be able to not drain their bank accounts. So they do all of that. And then age seventeen is the final rite of passage into adulthood. At which point they'll be like stamped, hopefully is ready to be contributory adults to society. And ready to go off and marry and start their own families or whatever they want to do. So age seventeen is a ten day vision quest. Uh, that's solo in the wilderness, uh, no food, no water, unless they can collect it themselves while they're out there. Again, backpack, wool blanket, knife, uh, you know, and a full on, you know, facing your own fears for 10 days and being alone. And, and, uh, you know, doing almost like a Native American style vision quest.

• 1:16:43Jen Cohen?

  Who, who put this whole thing together, your, your dad or?

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  I did, and I did after, you know, some of my podcasts and some of my interests has been in the realm of parenting, education, raising responsible adults. I've learned a lot from different people who I've interviewed about legacy, about rites of passage. And I wove all of this in the constitution together, just based off of years of learning from people who have done similar things with their children. And just kind of like borrowing from the best of the best.

• 1:17:13Jen Cohen?

  This is amazing.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  I wrote a whole book about this, by the way.

• 1:17:15Jen Cohen?

  You did?

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's called Boundless Parenting. It's like the boundless, it's like you have the blueprint for biohacking in your lap. I also have the blueprint for parenting. It's like the tools of Titans for parents. I interviewed like thirty two of the top parents that I know, these super successful entrepreneurs with super impactful children who are already out changing the world in politics and business and tech. And so I asked every parent the same set of thirty two questions. Uh, my wife has like fifty pages in there, uh, seventy pages of advice. Then there's all these, so it's seven hundred pages of just like deep in the trenches parenting advice.

• 1:17:49Jen Cohen?

  What was the top three pieces of advice that really stuck with you? That would, would

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Jen Cohen?

  help build mentally strong children?

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  They're gonna catch way more onto that than they are onto what you told them, right? So children see by example. They don't, they don't learn by word. They see by example. So you have to be the person who you want your children to be when it comes to the positive habits that you want them to develop. So that's number one is anything you tell them, understand that you better be willing and ready and and already doing that thing yourself. Another one would be caution with forbidden fruits. It's all parenting approach that formally is known as love and logic. Meaning the more that you just have hard no's or hard yeses in your home, like no, we don't talk about porn. It's not a discussion. You don't learn about porn is just like you're gonna eventually find that out a, a friend's

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  Number party or you know, wherever else and and that's just, you know, it's off limits. We don't talk about that or no, you don't, you don't get alcohol, you don't taste alcohol. That's off limits. If it's forbidden fruit, that's for adults, stay away. You know, weed, drugs, porn, any, any vice, if it's a hard no, you're creating forbidden fruit in your house. So for, for us, I've had very frank discussions with my sons about porn. Here's what it is, here's what it does to your brain, here's what it does to society, here's what it does to the way that you think about women when you're interacting with them. Here's what it does to your, your objectification of the opposite sex. Here are the issues that it can even creates in countries with things like sex slavery and sex abuse. And you're not banned from viewing or watching porn, but here's everything that it can do.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Now you go out and make the decision, not you can't have a cupcake at your friend's birthday party because gluten is the devil. But rather, hey, if you have too much gluten, it can cause neural inflammation. It could cause some protein inflammatory issues, it may cause some gut issues. You make the decision about whether or not you're gonna have gluten. Alcohol, right? My first experience with alcohol was stealing a bottle of scotch from my dad's office and getting drunk in my bedroom. Cause for me, alcohol was like the totally off limits thing that just the parents did at the dinner table or whatever. We do like to drive farm wines quarterly, organic wine delivery service to our house every month. And when it comes, I open up the little brochure and we taste the wine and we have a little shot glass and the boys get a sip.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Like I'm never gonna go take a bottle of wine from our pantry and go get drunk in their bedroom because it was just forbidden for them. So using, and this takes more time and attention and presence for you as a parent, but instead of having a hard no or hard yes, you explain to your child the consequences of any decision that they're going to make. And then you let them deal with the consequences of that decision with some exceptions. Like a one year old toddling towards a hot stove, don't say, no, it's gonna burn you. Like actually pull them away and you know, if you need to slap their hands so that, you know, the, this mild sting of a slap is a lot less damage than whatever. Of course. Third degree burn from a stove, right? Right. Um, I would say the last one was I was shocked at the number of people who didn't necessarily like homeschool or private school, but who had really good frank.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Discussions with whatever school that their children were going to and many of them would just like pull their kids out of public school at random times to go on a trip or one family like sent their kids to school an hour late every day. So they could just have amazing family breakfast every morning before their kids went off to school. And so people who like gamed the system almost and would not necessarily not send their kids to public school or private school, but who almost adopted a hybrid model of you know, homeschooling, travel, more time at home, et cetera. While still being able to use the the learning environment accordingly that their kids were in. So there's there's so much in the book though, yeah, it's like

• 1:22:10Jen Cohen?

  That's such an interesting one that you just said. So who would tell you to do a hybrid model? So you're not homeschooling the child and you're not to putting this, you're not, you're not putting the kid into a regular school system. So you would kind of modify what's out there already and make it work to your advantage.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'd like go and talk to the teachers and just be like, hey, we're, we know it's not summer break, but we're leaving for a week to go travel with the kids and they'd get their homework and they'd make sure they did their assignments and they basically would think outside the box when it comes to education in general. You know, it's just kind of like Seth Godin's philosophy that if your kids are going to go to school, your number one job when they walk in the door from school is to start unschooling them or teaching them about how life really works versus just like the rote memorization and pure adherence that they were getting at school.

• 1:22:57Jen Cohen?

  That's amazing. That book sounds, I I didn't know you wrote that book.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I and I self-published it because you won't, if you're a health and fitness author, you're not going to get a deal in the parenting and education category. So it was kind of an uphill battle and

• 1:23:11Jen Cohen?

  Even though you've sold so many books, they wouldn't give you a shot.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  It does. If you've sold a bunch of books in one category, it doesn't transfer over into a publishing deal in a different category. If anything, it makes a publisher a little bit reticent to publish you in a different category, which I didn't know until I tried to do it.

• 1:23:24Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that's, but that's actually, and is it as big as this book?

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  As big or bigger.

• 1:23:31Jen Cohen?

  Who did you, who did you go to for your, like, for your experts or for your?

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Amazing parents who I personally knew and whose children I'd interacted with.

• 1:23:41Jen Cohen?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  And it just, I probably asked a hundred different parents and I had about, I think thirty, thirty-two, somewhere in that range, the final, final book, so.

• 1:23:50Jen Cohen?

  That's amazing.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51Jen Cohen?

  And was, how did you get, are you and your wife just naturally on board with the same stuff?

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  We are pretty much on board with a lot of the same stuff when it comes to education and parenting, just because of how much we talk about it.

• 1:24:08Jen Cohen?

  But wait, did you homeschool your kids?

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Kind of.

• 1:24:10Jen Cohen?

  Or you're a hybrid?

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  We did private schooling for a little while. And then when we realized that they were just getting a bunch of homework and memorization and that private school just seemed like a glorified version of public school and they didn't have a lot of time to pursue their passions and their interests and their desires. In fifth grade, we pulled them from that and we started, not homeschooling, but like unschooling. Meaning, not a lot of books, not a lot of curriculum, a lot of time spent just being outdoors, visiting museums, going on trips, cooking, taking care of animals, exercising with dad. You know, just basically this, this um, idea of learning through experience, right? So like for their, their uh, sixth grade math, they built a tree fort all summer, you know, learning geometry and woodworking and angles rather than doing a math book.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  So unschooling is focused a lot more on experiences in life than it is on rote curriculum or hefty memorization.

• 1:24:59Jen Cohen?

  I love that. Unschooling is what you call it.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  Unschooling is what it's called. Yeah, there's a good, a good book called Unschooling to University, which kind of like decodes how to K through twelve and still if your kid wants to go to college, go to college while unschooling.

• 1:25:11Jen Cohen?

  I'm getting more and more interested in this. I just did a TED Talk, actually. Why I'm asking is I did a TED Talk last week in Miami about how to raise mentally strong kids in a coddling world. And um, yeah, and I, I uh, I did a ton of research on it. I also like, I tend to try to speak to the best of the best in the world, experts, whatever, like of how to do this, because what I've found is, what's happening is we're, we're really are raising very soft kids, which is not good for our future generation, right? Like, I'm sure you saw the studies and how like twenty percent of kids now, kids are now taking. Their parents to job interviews. Did you see this whole thing?

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  They're taking their parents to job interviews?

• 1:25:53Jen Cohen?

  To job interviews because they don't feel mentally strong enough to go on their own.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  Oh geez.

• 1:25:58Jen Cohen?

  So the coping mechanisms and coping skills have been very diminished since, you know, over the la- over many, many years of the helicoptering parents and the everyone's getting a trophy.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Take your parent to a job interview, but you don't have to take your parent to have your sex changed.

• 1:26:14Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, but that's isn't that the icon? Isn't that, but this is where we're living now. Isn't that just crazy?

• 1:26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Jen Cohen?

  So I find, so that's why when I'm asking you, I would have loved to have read the book. Interesting. What happened is it was in Miami. It was basically hurricane season and all the power went off all on the entire block. And so I had to sit there in the dark for two hours. And so when I went up to finally get do my talk, the sound was off. So I have to now re-record it. So I may want to read that book and see if there's anything in there that I can read.

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  Long book. Should I shoot this thing, by the way? This, this magic formula?

• 1:26:50Jen Cohen?

  Yes. By the way, I can't believe you still haven't done this. This is magic, Mike.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  Okay. So yeah, I was saying, I seen the agave. So by the way, all the other ingredients in this look great. And I'm sure the agave is such a small amount that it's not a big deal.

• 1:27:01Jen Cohen?

  No, this is an amazing one.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  That balances out the, yeah, this looks like a good, yeah, the fruit thing, you know, to unpack that glycemic index part. It is interesting because I used to think that if you drank fruit juice or if you blended fruit, it would make it way more sugary and cause a higher glycemic index and like more of a spike in the blood sugar. And it turns out, research has since shown that fruit juices don't spike your blood sugar anymore than eating the whole fruit itself.

• 1:27:26Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  And when you blend fruit, you actually get a lowering of the glycemic index and less of a blood sugar response because something about blending helps to take a lot of the, like the fibers and the seeds and the antioxidants and concentrate them in such a way that your blood sugar response is lower.

• 1:27:43Jen Cohen?

  It's really funny you should say that.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Versus eating whole fruit.

• 1:27:46Jen Cohen?

  Well, take the shot and then I'm going to tell you why.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:27:48Jen Cohen?

  Tell me if you like it. And I want to see if you're more energized and focused.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  Like right away, like in two seconds?

• 1:27:54Jen Cohen?

  No, it'll take you like a few minutes.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Placebo effect. I mean, I can tell you, I've tried a lot of the ingredients in here before, like bacopa for memory and cognizant for function. Yeah, it looks pretty good.

• 1:28:03Jen Cohen?

  Well, I'm going to send you some.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Well, let me think. I don't think there's much that he has not, there's much that he does that I've not done. If you want to count some of the less sexy stuff, like eating the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yes, I've done that on some days, but it's not something.

• 1:30:29Jen Cohen?

  Okay, that's not.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  I do, or going to bed early or eating a super early dinner so you can sleep better. I've done that. But because we enjoy our big fun family dinners, I'll do that. I would say of the things that he's done that I know of, the only thing he's done that I haven't done is laser resurfacing of the face, which is a pretty intensive protocol and makes you look like a zombie for like four weeks, but has incredible results. My friend up in Spokane, Cameron Chestnut, he's an incredible cosmetic surgeon and he does those procedures. And he did one on my wife and I got home from a trip and she opened the door and it looked like a zombie movie. So she couldn't leave the house for like two weeks and then in like four weeks, she started to look younger.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  And so she's forty two and I, I would estimate that it probably took a good like eight to 10 years off her face. It's crazy. And he does the hands and the neck so that the hands and the neck don't look old in correlation to the face.

• 1:31:30Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  Never seen, because I've seen a lot of, but living with someone and actually seeing that happen nearly overnight from Ren procedure was pretty nuts.

• 1:31:38Jen Cohen?

  What does he do?

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  So my wife's done that and Brian Johnson has done that, but I haven't done that.

• 1:31:42Jen Cohen?

  Okay, what, okay, why haven't you done it?

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Honestly, even though I, I, I like the idea of maintaining youthfulness and vigor and you know, that's good for confidence. And obviously it's on brand for me. I am like speaking so much, video cameras in front of my face so much, doing podcasts so much. I don't know of a period of time that I could go for like four weeks without having a camera on my face. And I suppose I could just do it with my face all bloody and stripped and swollen and stuff, but. I mean, I think Brian Johnson just did it like in the past couple of weeks. Cause it popped up on my feed and he looks like shit right now and it'll look better later, but I just don't. I mean, even the full body stem cell procedure, I'm kind of like out of commission for maybe five days tops, but yeah.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  I mean, if someone were to offer me that laser resurfacing on a silver platter and you know, were to do it to me, I would. It would, for me, it would just be a matter of where do I find the time to, to take off.

• 1:32:39Jen Cohen?

  Is it really a month?

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  It's a long time. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:32:43Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  It's look it up, laser resurfacing. It's pretty intensive.

• 1:32:46Jen Cohen?

  Okay, I'm gonna look. I think my friend did.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Cause what they do is first they do like stem cells that take the fat out of your butt and inject it into your face and enjoy, but then the the finisher is a laser resurfacing and that's what makes it look like your face got run over by a truck.

• 1:33:01Jen Cohen?

  And that sounds scary though, too.

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  I was a little scared when I saw my wife.

• 1:33:04Jen Cohen?

  You didn't know she was getting it done?

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  I knew she was getting it done, but I wasn't prepared for it to look like that. I mean, she would like be throwing up from the pain meds and her eyes bleeding and it's.

• 1:33:14Jen Cohen?

  Her eyes were bleeding?

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. She's bleeding out her eyes. Yeah. But this is something like a lot of celebrities do it or like I know people who fly to Cameron's office up in Spokane to get it done. So it's not like people don't do this, but most people after they do it just stay totally hidden for like a month. So you don't see them. And then they come out looking super young and, you know.

• 1:33:35Jen Cohen?

  How much is it?

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  Apparently they were just juicing vegetables really well.

• 1:33:40Jen Cohen?

  Apparently, yeah.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Uh, it's more than a hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:33:43Jen Cohen?

  Did your wife spend that or did she get a discount at least?

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  She uh discounted just because he's one of my buddies.

• 1:33:48Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Speaker 02

  He's he gave her a good deal, but.

• 1:33:50Jen Cohen?

  What kind of deal? Could I get one done? Is it worth it?

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  I don't remember exactly what it was that she got it for, but it's, I mean, if you wanted like what the top of the top thing that apparently all the celebrities are doing is is the the best thing for reversing age. I mean, I can tell you like she looks incredible after. As long as she looked crappy before, but I was surprised like it definitely.

• 1:34:11Jen Cohen?

  Can you show me a picture before and after?

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Trying to think. He has, uh, he has one, uh, Cameron does on his Instagram. He has a ton of before and afters on his Instagram.

• 1:34:19Jen Cohen?

  Okay, Cam, what's his last name?

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  Cameron Chestnut.

• 1:34:21Jen Cohen?

  Okay, name me something else.

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  Interesting after interview, actually.

• 1:34:24Jen Cohen?

  I was gonna say, I'm gonna keep me in touch with them.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he's really interesting.

• 1:34:28Jen Cohen?

  Name me something else that you haven't done that you're like interested in doing or the and I want you to tell me the one thing that you have done that that yielded the most amazing results that that you were shocked about.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  Okay, let's start with that second question. Okay. Because we've covered a lot of the sexy stuff, really. Stem cells, peptides, you know, a lot of the things that I think would be super sexy or fringe that move the dial a lot, we've talked about, but I would say one thing I've been doing recently that has absolutely transformed particularly my mornings and just my general enjoyment of the rest of the day is combining sound, light, electricity and vibration for meditation. So this is kind of fringe, but it's totally doable. Anybody can do it.

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  So I have this chair now. It's called a shift wave chair. You sit in it and you wear a little fingertip monitor and it monitors your heart rate and your heart rate variability and then vibrates in correspondence to the beats of your heart and comes with audio tracks that you can listen to that coach you through breathwork sessions while the whole chair vibrates your body, which in and of itself is pretty cool. I sat on it at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine Conference. It was so cool. I got one and I used it for, I probably got it like six months ago and I used it for a while. But then I also got my hands on a light sound machine. And these are machines that you lay underneath that blast you through closed eyes.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Uh, you can barely, well, not barely, but you can detect the light, but your eyes are closed and it's almost like you've taken six grams of psilocybin without actually taking any drugs or anything. It automatically just shifts your brain into a whole different state using light stimulation. And in the past, I've used headset versions of that, like this one called the BrainTap. Yeah. There's one called the Neurovisor that I actually like. I have in my bag upstairs, the Neurovisor, because I still travel with it. What does it do though? It shifts your brain in the same state that you'd be looking for from, let's say, like ketamine, LSD, psilocybin, any of these, you know, entheogens or psychedelics people use for brainwave shifting, but it does so using light instead, light and sound stimulation. So I figured. Figure out how to take an AV cable from the light and connect it to the chair.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  So now I've got the light, the sound and the vibration all going at the same time. And then Nikola Tesla said, if you want to understand the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. So I've got the, the light frequencies and the sound frequencies and the vibration. But then I was looking for a way I could incorporate electrical energy into that. So then I outfitted that whole setup with a PEMF coil. PEMF is pulse electromagnetic field therapy. Wow. And there's one called a halo, H A E L O. And I put it in my lap during one of those sessions and that can be set for like meditation, inflammation, digestion, whatever. So now if you go into my downstairs living room, in the room beside my office, in the corner, there's a chair.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  And the chair is the shift wave and above that is the Roxiva lamp and next to that is the halo PEMF coil. And then I will just like pull on a gravity blanket or one of those infrared sauna blankets. Yeah. And I do this usually at about four thirty in the morning. So I literally get out of bed early and go downstairs and I do like anywhere from a thirty to a sixty minute session. And it is just the coolest thing ever. What does it do for you though? Total checkout. I had better creativity, better focus, even though I'm getting up early, feeling like more energy than I've ever had. Uh, it's one of the things I miss the most besides my family when I travel now is my vibrating light sound therapy chair. I don't have to take any drugs, even though I feel like I used to feel when I like, I used to experiment with plant medicine and journey. Yeah.

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  And I don't, I don't do any of that stuff now, but it's a similar feeling of just like relaxation, forgetting all your worries, meditation. All at once, using technology rather than drugs to shift you into that state. And the cool part is you sit up from it and you're just like ready to tackle the world, but you're not simultaneously metabolizing a bunch of drugs out of your system. And for example, there's one session on there, it's probably my favorite session. It's called rebirth and the session starts with fetal heartbeat, you know, whooshing of, of mom's womb, darkness, occasional flashes of light. And then as the session goes on, it progresses to like a whole birthing experience where you're going down the birth canal and there's light and like heroic epic music.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  And I've never done that and not sat up, A, crying and B, just like ready to tackle the world, like literally feeling almost like reborn. You do that every day? With light and sound stimulation. I've probably done that 10 times, like in the past two months.

• 1:39:16Jen Cohen?

  Okay, but wait, but people have to buy one of these machines, though.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  Everything I just described to you, if you were to to put everything in your living room, you'd probably spend about twenty thousand dollars.

• 1:39:26Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, that's a lot for the average person.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  It's a lot of money.

• 1:39:29Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so let's go back to people who are like.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  Less than a car, but.

• 1:39:32Jen Cohen?

  Is okay, less than a car, but for the person who's listening to this and like now they're like familiar with.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  The the cheap travel hack version.

• 1:39:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, what's the trap? What's the what's the more?

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Neuro, the neurovisor, I don't even think that's a thousand dollars. And it's like wearable glasses that do light sound stimulation. And then there's a vibrating wristband called the Apollo. And so that's what I travel with is I'll wear the wristband or my wrist or my ankle. That does the vibration and then I lay back and I put the the glasses on and those connect to headphones.

• 1:40:02Jen Cohen?

  So what does the vibration do on its own?

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  Vibrating or so called the haptic sensations can shift your brain into a certain state based on the frequency of the vibration. It's like the Apollo can be set for calm, for stress, for um.

• 1:40:17Jen Cohen?

  But how often do you wear it?

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Focus, they should take this needle out of my arm soon.

• 1:40:21Jen Cohen?

  I know.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Start, starting, starting to to to feel, yeah, you can feel like when it's done.

• 1:40:26Jen Cohen?

  Trust me, I know.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, you know how like some animals when they've been chased? I think Robert Sapolsky talks about this in his book Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. They'll kind of like shake it off to shake off the stress. Or sometimes like if you've been really stressed, you just shake it off. So vibrating does that similar function. It's almost like a, like a, a mild moving sensation.

• 1:40:49Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  That causes your brain to just like shift into a state of calm or focus or creativity, or whatever it is you're looking for. And then the chair that I was talking about is basically neural feedback because it's detecting based on your heart rate, where you're at and adjusting it as you're breathing.

• 1:41:04Jen Cohen?

  Is it similar to what we did at the Founderland when we you're like, oh, go to this thing?

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  There's like a pod in there, it's a new device, I forget what it's called, but a little bit similar to that. It's like a pod that you lay in that vibrates, that plays sounds that.

• 1:41:16Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, what if you just have like, did you go to the Therisage one when they had the pod? And it was like a vibrational sound and then they had the red light around it?

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Jen Cohen?

  Did you try that?

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  All these things, they're very like, they're all kind of going after the same thing, right? Like using electricity, light, sound, frequency, vibration, et cetera, to shift your brain into a certain state and to preferably do it without hefty supplementation or drug use.

• 1:41:40Jen Cohen?

  Okay, what's the other thing that you were gonna tell me?

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  Other thing?

• 1:41:45Jen Cohen?

  That was the thing that you've been using that you think have been

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Jen Cohen?

  Oh yeah, but wait, what if you had to say what that thing has done for you? What has it done for you in like two sentences or less?

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  Made me feel way more rested.

• 1:41:55Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Throughout the entire day.

• 1:41:57Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  I'm getting out of bed a little bit earlier. Better creativity, better focus, uh, lower stress.

• 1:42:03Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  Higher on average heart rate variability. So it's affecting my nervous system and it is very enjoyable. Like you get this big dopamine rush.

• 1:42:12Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Feel incredible when you finish it.

• 1:42:14Jen Cohen?

  And what's the, okay, now what's the other thing that you said that it was the two questions I asked you was the thing that you've done?

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  The thing that I've done and the thing that I want to do.

• 1:42:23Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Besides the laser resurfacing.

• 1:42:25Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  I would say there is an idea of an oil change for your body. And there are some medical clinics that will do things like ozone therapy. Whether or pull the blood out of one arm and ozonate it and it goes into a machine that ozonates it. Then it goes back into the other arm. There are other therapies like ozone plasma feresis where they're doing that, but it's passing through like a, a filter. It's also called the extracorporeal blood ozonation and oxygenation where the blood comes out, it gets filtered, goes back in. It's almost like kidney dialysis for your blood.

• 1:42:58Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:42:59Speaker 02

  Well, there's a new company called Lumati, L U M A T I. And they've developed two different filtration systems over a three day process of four to six hours per day. It filters out glyphosate, microplastics, COVID spike protein, Lyme, Epstein Barr. Pretty much gives you completely new blood, completely filtered blood. You fly into Encinitas, they shuttle you across the border every day to Tijuana to do the treatment, bring you back. You stay in like a luxury hotel, get great food, then you go back the next day and, and do it again. You go for three days in a row, completely detoxifies the entire system. This is something that just got developed and approved like in the past couple of months. And I think it would be incredible.

• 1:43:44Jen Cohen?

  Are you gonna do that next?

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  I'm gonna do it in like three weeks.

• 1:43:47Jen Cohen?

  Are you? See, you know it's probably super cool.

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  I just got signed up for it last week.

• 1:43:50Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:51Jen Cohen?

  See, you get to try everything.

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  And I don't have any of those things that I know of, like Epstein Barr or Lomew, but I think it is an incredible technology.

• 1:43:59Jen Cohen?

  See, I think it's super cool because you get to try all these things and like, what, okay, how do you spend your time though? Like now, do you do mostly podcasting? Do you like do a lot of speaking gigs? Like, how do you like, what do you do with your day besides exercise and all that?

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  I spend ten to fifteen hours a week talking to people on the phone about their health problems.

• 1:44:19Jen Cohen?

  Do you coach people?

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  I do lab work, I do blood work, I do coaching where some people pay a monthly fee for me to monitor their training and their nutrition. And they just have access to text me or email me or interact with me throughout the month. And then other people will just like purchase a one-off phone call with me where they'll usually be sending me their labs and stuff like that beforehand. I'm not a doctor, I don't practice medicine, but we just talk about issues that they're having and I tell them basically what I would do if I were in their shoes. So I can't, again, I can't prescribe medications or prescribe labs, but often they're coming to me with labs they've gotten from their doctor or problems they've had that other people haven't been able to figure out.

• 1:44:55Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  And so that's like ten to fifteen hours a week, just literally helping people.

• 1:44:58Jen Cohen?

  So you do that. So wait, so you have coached?

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  Well, like distance training.

• 1:45:01Jen Cohen?

  So you do like, you take, you have, you said a few times on the podcast, clients, clients.

• 1:45:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:07Jen Cohen?

  So you do have clients?

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  I do, yeah. I mean, I used to coach like forty people a month. Now I coach eight.

• 1:45:13Jen Cohen?

  And so how do you do, how much do they pay you for this?

• 1:45:15Speaker 02

  Five thousand dollars a month.

• 1:45:16Jen Cohen?

  And then you basically are like giving them a program of some, some kind of protocol?

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Jen Cohen?

  And then they just have to do it and then they can.

• 1:45:23Speaker 02

  I just do everything for them. They just wake up in the morning and do what it is that I wrote down, keep their logs, I monitor their HRV, their sleep and just basically, you know, everything from actors getting ready for movie roles to executives, to athletes, like it's, it's just basically like one-on-one coaching. And then I also just do random calls with other people who aren't necessarily like paying a monthly fee, but who are just doing consults with me. So I do that. I do the podcast twice a week. So.

• 1:45:48Jen Cohen?

  You twice a week?

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  Seventeen years, twice a week. Haven't missed a session.

• 1:45:52Jen Cohen?

  Never?

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  Never.

• 1:45:53Jen Cohen?

  Amazing.

• 1:45:54Speaker 02

  And sometimes I won't record any new week because I'm traveling, but then I'll get back and record like seven. So.

• 1:45:58Jen Cohen?

  For you.

• 1:45:59Speaker 02

  Um, so podcasts.

• 1:46:00Jen Cohen?

  But alone ever or just guests or both? You do some of those?

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Both. I have solo sodes where I'm answering listener questions and reporting on the latest research and then guests. So I just get, that's a huge part of my education, just getting to talk to super smart people, way smarter than me, who would normally never give me the time of day, who are like talking to me for an hour and a half. And I just get the feed through the fire hose from some author whose book I've just read, or some scientist who just released some new technology. That's probably the favorite part of my job.

• 1:46:27Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  and play a little tennis and pickleball and go on walks and hikes and.

• 1:47:13Jen Cohen?

  You seem so much more, like, again, take this the right way. You seem so much more calm and like chilled than like when I first met you.

• 1:47:20Speaker 02

  I don't remember where I was when you first.

• 1:47:22Jen Cohen?

  In London. Yeah.

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  I was also like traveling, getting.

• 1:47:25Jen Cohen?

  I know, but you seem much sweeter now. You seem so kind and nice, like you look like you're eighteen.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  I don't know. Maybe you just caught me on a bad day.

• 1:47:34Jen Cohen?

  No, no, you were really nice then too. But I'm saying like, you seem like you're at a different place in life and I don't know what it is.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  I think, so obviously life is a constant evolution. We're always transforming and always becoming the people God has called us to become, or becoming a better version of ourselves, or hopefully engaging in things that help us to just become more grounded, more dialed, more authentic, more the people we are rather than who we think that the world expects us to be. And I think probably the thing that if you.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Asked me that I've most doubled down on in the past couple of years, it would have been my own personal spiritual time, particularly when I travel. I neglected a lot when I travel and then I'd be pretty good at home. But now, I mean, I was walking to Sun Life Organics this morning, just memorizing James five in the Bible and listening to a sermon and taking care of my spiritual health before I focus on physical health or work or business or anything else. And I would say similarly, the, the at home attention paid to prayer time with the family, meditation with the family, reading the Bible as a family. I mean, if you fill yourself up with good, positive things, then it's likely that good, positive things are already going to come out.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  Or like my mom used to say, like if somebody bumps you and you're full of honey, sweet things will come out and then they bump you and you're full of vinegar, then bitter things will come out. And I think that just like intentionally and systematically focusing on making sure that my, my intake at the beginning and the end of the day and my work is specifically focused on spiritual health. I think that that manifests itself physically and emotionally and from a character standpoint. So I'd say that's, that's probably the biggest thing.

• 1:49:17Jen Cohen?

  That's a big, that's a big one though. Yeah. So you, so you pray. What other modality has helped you with your spiritual or spirituality? To be more grounded and be more happy?

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  I used to read a lot of positive self-help books and devotionals and books related to spirituality. And now I mostly just read the Bible. I, I just read the Bible. And I have an amazing study Bible where I can read the notes and unpack stuff and go back and forth between chapters. So I, I don't follow a reading plan per se. But right now I'm just reading the whole book of John. And then every morning or every evening I memorize a verse from the Bible. And so that is also not like through the whole Bible. Typically I'll pick a section that's really spoken to me lately. I have had some health issues in the family in the past few months and so.

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  Right now, again, I'm memorizing James five, just because it's about it's it's a section of it called the prayer of faith. It's about healing through prayer. And so I'll choose something that really speaks to me in the moment. Before that, it was Psalm twenty three about, you know, how God helps you during trials and tribulations and tough times. So that was another one that I needed at the time. Before that, it was Proverbs three, because that's whole bunch of it's it's filled with a whole bunch of wisdom for young men. And I was preparing my sons to go and leave on this trip, so we were memorizing that together. So just kind of like cutting out all the distractions and kind of just like super old school and simple, just opening up the Bible and reading the Bible. That's one thing that I've kind of changed recently versus reading a whole bunch of books written by other people about the Bible.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  Versus just opening the one book that I feel, not to get too woo, almost kind of has magical powers in and of itself. And is the only book that when you're reading it, you can turn around and talk to the author right afterwards. So to say that, and then also really doubling down on how I end the day. Meaning, you know, not Instagram or YouTube or devices or kind of like coddling myself with social media or whatever. I'll just turn off the brain at the end of the day, but instead just praying. So me and my wife end every day, you know, before my mouth tape goes on and my head hits the pillow, we just pray. And we pour out our hearts to God together, you know, it's it's like a spiritual sacred thing you can do together.

• 1:51:39Speaker 02

  And yeah, we just we talk to God and we poured our hearts and we we start our day like that too. But just like starting and ending the day with a real focus on the spirit and on speaking with God and learning from God. To me, it's just, it's so fulfilling, more fulfilling than a workout and a smoothie and, you know, and, you know, a good day of work or anything else.

• 1:51:59Jen Cohen?

  Wow. How how long is

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  Probably for this eternal, right? It's like our spirits are for better or worse, the one thing, the one part of us that goes on to exist for eternity.

• 1:52:07Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. And each prayer sec, like every, how long is a prayer practice? Is it a few minutes? Is it 10 minutes, 15 minutes?

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  I pray in the morning for about five to 10 minutes. I pray before all my meals and just occasionally throughout the day when I have a decision to make. And then my wife and I pray for five to 10 minutes in the evening. So it's not crazy. I mean, it's not like, it's not like an hour of, you know, like, you know, dancing and speaking in tongues and

• 1:52:27Jen Cohen?

  No, no, no.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  burning candles, incense, it's just

• 1:52:29Jen Cohen?

  It's keeps you grounded though.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's more like a habit, like a consistent habit. It's like you're running a marathon every week is not as palatable as running two miles a day.

• 1:52:38Jen Cohen?

  Absolutely. And then the other, the last question is social media and all that doesn't strike. You don't strike me as somebody, even though you are a social media person, that you would spend a lot of time on social media. Do you?

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  That's kind of a funny question. So my sons have social media accounts because they're starting a tabletop gaming company. And I told them the same thing that I kind of do myself, like, don't, you don't have to have all the apps and spend all your time reading the comments and posting yourself. Like get a social media manager. It's well worth it because then you just don't get sucked in and you have somebody else who's posting your content. You focus on the content. You're not the manager, you're the maker. You're not the consumer, you're the creator. Right? So that's what I coached them to do. And I have a very similar mindset for myself. I'm on TikTok, but I don't know how to access TikTok. I don't have the username or the password or anything. Like I have a social media manager who posts that stuff. If I do a video, I'll send it off to them and they cut it and post it and figure out when they're going to time it. There is such a thing as what's called organic posting.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  And I literally have a calendar on my phone and it'll say like, don't post anything on Instagram today, Ben, because my social media team knows when stuff is supposed to get posted and when. I don't fully understand, but all I know is I'm not supposed to mess stuff up. So I don't ever scroll on social media. I never got it. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

• 1:53:56Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:57Speaker 02

  I follow people and you know, when you first open it, whatever you see there is the first post that you see, which is so weird because I opened Instagram on the way here and you and I hadn't even talked today. And the first post was from you.

• 1:54:08Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  So it's almost like they knew where Uber was taking me or so, I don't know. But

• 1:54:13Jen Cohen?

  Are you serious?

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  I'm serious. You know, phones have

• 1:54:16Jen Cohen?

  How weird though.

• 1:54:17Speaker 02

  I don't know, may maybe it literally, I mean, because it does say in my calendar on my phone. I have an appointment with Jen today, so maybe it has calendar access. I don't know.

• 1:54:26Jen Cohen?

  That's crazy.

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  But I don't actually do the scrolling thing. Like, I have just never gotten that. And I know that it's engineered to keep me scrolling if I start doing it. But so I'm on social media, but I use it as a producer and a creator, not a consumer or a manager. I don't go into the comment section. I don't scroll through feeds. There's occasional times when, uh, I'll give you an example, when Iran recently attacked Israel. Clicked on that section on Twitter and read through the post to catch up on the news, but I. That's pretty rare that I do something like that. If there's some current event that I just want to catch whatever's trending on it pretty fast, I'll do that. But I, not only am I kind of a Luddite when it comes to social media, but I've purposefully kept myself a Luddite with a lot of that stuff.

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  I don't even know how to log into my own website anymore. I don't know my. If I did get locked out of social media, I wouldn't know how to get back in. It's just not a big part of what I do.

• 1:55:22Jen Cohen?

  And that's why you're so, I think this is part of why you're, A, you're so productive. Like, you're the kind of person where you're not saying, as you said, like, if I'm not saying something that's meaningful, or I'm not spending every minute. Kind of accounted for, you feel like you're wasting your time. And that's probably why, because social media is a huge time suck.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Jen Cohen?

  You know, and you've like, by the way, I know we have to wrap this up because what time is this? It's been like forever.

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:49Jen Cohen?

  It's been like two and a half hours.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  I do have to wrap pretty soon.

• 1:55:53Jen Cohen?

  I, okay, so do you wear shoes? Did you come here without shoes, by the way? Oh, okay. So you do wear shoes? Okay, one more question, and then I'm gonna offline wrap this up. What's the one thing that people ask you about the most?

• 1:56:05Speaker 02

  What supplement should I take?

• 1:56:07Jen Cohen?

  And what would you say?

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  It's different from person to person. Go test your body. There are a few that seem to have broad applicability across a wide range of individuals, namely creatine, fish oil, a multivitamin, and increasingly I'm saying NAD or some variant of it. But everything else, we live in an era where you can go test and find out if you need vitamin D or if taking vitamin D would give you vitamin D toxicity, or if you need XYZ probiotic, or your microbiome is balanced just fine. Thank you very much because you need a diet rich in fermented compounds, or you do you need a fish oil, or is your omega index at eight percent or above? Like, all this stuff now is testable. So I tell people, hey, here's a few base ones that work, but besides that, go test your body because it's not that expensive or difficult to do now. And then you, you asked me

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  one question I didn't answer.

• 1:56:56Jen Cohen?

  Which one?

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  You asked me if it was better to walk on a treadmill or do the

• 1:56:59Jen Cohen?

  That's so true. That's right.

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  And the answer is, I'll see if I can spit this out in 60 seconds. Your cardiovascular fitness is split into four different categories. Your fat burning capacity, your VO2 max, your mitochondrial density, and your ability to be able to tolerate lactic acid, AKA the burn. If you are just walking or just sprinting, you're not going to hit all those variables. For VO2 max, once every one to two weeks, you do a hard maximum sustainable pace effort, like a four by four minutes on a bike with four minutes of recovery after each. For lactic acid tolerance, you go hard and then you recover, but not for very long. This would be like the classic Tabata set. 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, eight times through, four minutes, boom, done. That can be a couple of times a week. For mitochondrial density, you go really hard, then you recover

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  for a long period of time. This would be like five 30 second sprints with two to four minutes of recovery after each one. The sprints are really hard, the recoveries are really easy. And then for fat burning capacity, you could do like a 12, 330, or go out for a long hike, or whatever. But you need to be aware that cardio fitness is not just cardio. Cardio is technically four different things. So if you hit those four, VO2 max, mitochondrial density, lactate tolerance, and fat burning capacity, and those are kind of like woven throughout your week, then you're going to get all of them. Now, if you're lucky enough to be a soccer player, or a tennis player, lacrosse, or one of these sports that has a lot of start, stop, and endurance baked in, you're kind of getting all those from your sport. But if not, you kind of have to intentionally program them in if you want the most bang for your buck, aerobically speaking.

• 1:58:27Jen Cohen?

  Someone in their 40s, what's the best exercise to do?

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  Depends.

• 1:58:31Jen Cohen?

  I knew that.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  My wife with the high risk of bone density, weight training. If you're morbidly obese, endomorphic, with a lot of fat sores, long slow fat burning walks. If you're getting ready for a triathlon, high intensity interval training.

• 1:58:45Jen Cohen?

  So it's not one thing. The reason why I'm asking is because I think a lot of times as you get older, anyway, for me especially, you get injured much more easily. Your bodies are a wear and tear. They, of course, it's about like building, um, strength training and doing cardio and all those things. However, if you had to pick one exercise, if someone's not an exercise person, what would you suggest?

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  Something that involves axial loading of the spine, the arms and the legs. So it would probably be something very much like a squat to overhead press. Building arms, legs, functional, training the core, and there is loading across the entire spine, the arms and the legs. And I mean, it can be a little bit of a difficult exercise to learn. Best, most biomechanically friendly way to start off with something like that would be with a med ball. Twenty to fifty pound med ball. Hold it to your chest, squat down, stand, press it overhead.

• 1:59:34Jen Cohen?

  You'd be a great trainer. You should be a trainer again.

• 1:59:36Speaker 02

  I used to do that.

• 1:59:37Jen Cohen?

  I know. You should do it again. You should do it again.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  Another life.

• 1:59:40Jen Cohen?

  I'm telling you, me, I, I would hire you. Okay, Ben, when can we do part three?

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  Next time I'm down here, let's do it.

• 1:59:46Jen Cohen?

  When are you back?

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:59:49Jen Cohen?

  You don't come, you come around often.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  I avoid LA, but I sometimes come down here and just batch a whole bunch of stuff. I'll probably back here before the end of the year.

• 1:59:54Jen Cohen?

  I hope so. Cause every time I, I'm like, listen, I have like a whole other, I didn't even ask you any of the questions from your, your other book, if you can believe it.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  Oh geez.

• 2:00:03Jen Cohen?

  I have a million questions.

• 2:00:04Speaker 02

  I've always got another one.

• 2:00:07Jen Cohen?

  You're gonna be like a co-host. Hilarious. Okay, Ben, I love having you on, as you know. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for spending two hours with me, or however long it's been, God knows.

• 2:00:18Speaker 02

  Thanks for doing an IV with me.

• 2:00:19Jen Cohen?

  Thank, thank you for, thank you for inviting me along on your IV experience. By the way, I will say again, those NRV IVs are really good for me and great for everybody. And so I'm actually very fortunate that we got one. So thank you for making that happen.

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33Jen Cohen?

  All right. So if anyone wants to know more about Ben, check him out. He also does coaching. He has Keon, his supplement company. And just check him out on Instagram because even just looking at his clips and you learn so much. What else can I say about you?

• 2:00:48Speaker 02

  Comment, I might not see it, but I might.

• 2:00:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, he probably won't see it, but you can still comment and there you go. Thank you, Ben.

• 2:00:55Speaker 02

  Thanks, Jen.