Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show. This interview blew my mind. If you've been listening to me all along since 2014 or 2013, I've interviewed dozens and dozens of the best medical and health practitioners in the world. We've talked about anti aging. We've talked about healthy food. We've talked about food myths. We've talked about the blue zones. This next interview almost combines all of them and goes 10 times deeper. So it's with Ben Greenfield. He's the author of the book Boundless, Upgrade Your Brain, Optimize Your Body, and Defy Aging. We talk about everything from anti aging to sex to good morning routines. What foods are good? What supplements are good? We talk about his stem cell experiments, we talk about cold showers. I don't know. And then he explains the science behind everything, but even more importantly it's an example of how his book just has thousands of health tips, techniques, hacks, whatever you wanna call them. It's kind of a a phenomenon just talking to them. Here's the interview. Enjoy. But I'll start the podcast now. We've got Ben Greenfield. Wait. Wait. You're you're you're just now starting the podcast after all of the gold that we just recorded? Yes. We we we basically broke down the definition of luck, but just for ourselves. It came up with, like, new article ideas, a new book idea. No. That that's all ours now, held closely to our chest. Yeah. So so you had some good titles. I don't give a luck. And what was the other one? Skill well, we I I don't know the name for the greater than sign, the little open triangle, but it's skill skill is greater than luck is greater than jinx. There you go. But this book, Boundless, upgrade your brain, optimize your body, and defy aging. And, of course, not only are you in great shape, almost as in good a shape as me. But as we're doing this podcast, you're on a treadmill while we're doing the podcast. Do you do all of your podcasts on a treadmill? I do a lot of them on the treadmill. I I don't do a lot of my own. Like, when I'm interviewing someone, I'm so furiously taking notes about everything. It's kind of hard to walk while I'm interviewing somebody. But when I'm being interviewed, which means that I don't have to write down anything at all because I can be lazy and just talk, I Right. I often walk. I probably walk. So what I've found, and this this is the case for a lot of people who are in remarkable health. Usually, somewhere around a 12 to 15000 step count per day is ideal. And a lot of people, like like, once they'll put on, you know, an AURA or a WHOOP or a Biostrap or any of these these self quantification wearables, you know, they think they're pretty active because because wherever they go to the gym at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, but then they've got their a*s planted in a chair the rest of the day, and they might get, like, a 7 to 8000 step count. And, actually, a lot of the research on step count shows that 12,000 plus is a sweet spot for metabolic health. So I usually shoot for 12 to 15000, and I'm I'm kinda OCD, which means, like, if we finish our family dinner and I open up my little app and I've got, like, 11,000 steps, I'll go for a walk after dinner just to catch up. And how how big a walk is a 1,000 steps? Oh, that's that's, like, 10 minutes or so. I mean, it it depending on how how fast you're walking. So it's not long. But, you know, 15 minutes And and they've done research on this. They they call it the postprandial stroll, which makes you sound far more intelligent if you tell your friends after dinner you're going on a postprandial stroll. The, the sweet spot is 15 minutes for that. If you if you monitor your blood glucose I have this little thing in my I can't see it. I gotta well, I've got this blood glucose monitor on my arm. It's a continuous blood glucose monitor. And if you go for a walk for 15 minutes after a meal, your blood glucose goes down a lot sooner back to normal after the meal. So, So, wait, let me ask you. I I'm gonna take notes as well. That's the benefit. I I really like doing these remote podcasts since the lockdown started. So tell me about the blood glucose count. Like, what's the deal with that? Well, in in my opinion, the the two greatest things you can do for overall longevity and decreased all cause risk of mortality is to control, a, your what's called your glycemic variability, and, b, your inflammation. And glycemic variability is just the extent to which your blood glucose fluctuates during the day and, arguably, also how long it stays elevated after a meal, and then inflammation, which is actually harder to track continuously. Usually, you gotta go in and get a, like, a blood test for inflammatory markers. That would just be the levels of of inflammation, which affects everything from, you know, cholesterol becoming atherosclerotic to atherosclerosis itself to, you know, blood vascular integrity, etcetera. And so if you if you can control those two factors from a from a dietary or lifestyle standpoint, you're doing a pretty good job. For glycemic variability, I mean, the these blood glucose monitors, they're super convenient because normally to check your blood glucose multiple times during the day, you're gonna have to go get, like, an, you know, an Accu Chek or any other blood glucose monitor from Walgreens or CVS and prick your finger, you know, multiple times per day, which is uncomfortable. And, you know, especially if you type and stuff like that, you wind up getting pretty pretty sensitive finger pads. But these blood glucose monitors, you stick them on, the it's less than a bumblebee sting when you put it on, but it's a it's a tiny needle, that that goes just under your skin, and it monitors your glucose continuously. And you can learn all sorts of cool things. I mean, even if you just leave it on for, like, a month. You know? You don't have to wear it your whole life. But but, you know, I'll I'll slap it on for a month here and there and and just kinda do a a a check-in month of self quantification of blood glucose, and you'll learn, you know, which meals will elevate it for a long period of time, which meals allow it to return back to normal pretty quickly, what kind of activities like a 15 minute postprandial stroll or, you know, or a form of weight lifting or or some type of high intensity interval training is gonna cause it to become low pretty quickly. And you you can also, get get some pretty, good information about stress because when you're stressed, your your liver, ends up doing what's called glycogenolysis, meaning it breaks down the store's glycogen to mobilize glucose. So you have a lot of sugar in your bloodstream to, you know, run from the imaginary lion. And what's interesting about that is, you know, for example, when I was eating foods, that would spike my blood glucose, there were a few that really surprised me, like green beans. Right? Green beans are are a legume. They're a low glycemic index food, you know, kinda like like, you know, chickpeas or, you know, or seeds or nuts or or any of these kind of, like, stable carbohydrates you see a lot of healthy people consuming, you would expect them to fall into that category. And when I eat green beans, my blood glucose would go up really high. And so I thought, well, maybe maybe something's happening with green beans that make them for me not that healthy of a choice. So I got one of these food allergy tests, not one of the so so a lot of food allergy tests gives you this huge laundry list of false positives, like all these foods you're not supposed to eat, like eggs and and chicken and quinoa. And one of the reasons for that is a lot of times, you'll produce an antibody response, like a small antibody response, such as foods that you eat regularly. Like, a lot of people who eat eggs a lot, they'll get a food allergy test, and it'll tell them they're allergic to eggs. And the reason for that is a lot of these food allergy tests will, for example, expose a white blood cell to the raw version of the protein, I mean, the uncooked version of the protein, and they won't do a repeat test to ensure that it actually is a positive allergy result. So I found this this one service. The only inconvenient part is you gotta have a doc order the test for you, but it's called Cyrex, c y r e x. And they do really good, like food allergy testing, gluten testing, mold testing. They've got all these all these arrays. And so I I I did their big comprehensive food allergy test, and it turns out I I'm actually truly allergic. Like, my body actually produces a true antibody response to green beans. And I wouldn't have really realized that or even started to dig into that unless I was testing my blood glucose. The other super interesting thing, this I found this to be really interesting. Like, you and and, you you can guess about this, but, you know, the number one thing the number one thing that I can do every day to keep my blood glucose super normal the entire rest of the day. You know what it is? Probably not even at all. No. No. It's a it's a cold shower. Like, cold shower, cold bath, cold like, jumping in a in a in a cold lake or river or Right. Like, go for a swim in cold water. Your blood glucose stays super normalized the entire day. So so, like, I when I had Aubrey Marcus on the podcast, he also mentioned this. I always try to take things from each podcast and add it to my life. Since that podcast, I've been doing the cold shower. It's really painful no matter what, and I never get used to it. They always say, oh, you'll get used to it. I never get used to it because I always turn it on the extreme cold. I try to level maybe I shouldn't ease into it. Maybe I should just, like, boom, go right for it. But I I keep thinking to myself, man, the joke's on me if this doesn't really work at all. Okay. So so, yeah, it it does work. Now now cold should ideally be paired with some form of breath work because all you're doing is you're training your nervous system to be more resilient to a sympathetic stimulus, to to a stressful stimulus. And so if you can do, like, some deep nasal breathing or some box breathing or, interestingly, the the the number one form of breath work to induce more of a parasympathetic restful response is called alternate nostril breathing, meaning you breathe you breathe through your right nostril. Yeah. Exactly. And out through your left nostril or or vice versa. And if you just do, like, 60 seconds of that before you get in the cold, it's remarkable in terms of activating the parasympathetic nervous system. And then the other thing and there was a guy named, well, he was a former NASA materials engineer, and then he really got into studying the effect of cold on metabolism. His name is is Ray Cronise. And what he found in his lab was that, a, you only need about 55 degrees water to really get a lot of the benefits of cold. So it doesn't have to be bone chilling cold. And then, b, you also get the same benefits of a cold shower if you do a hot cold contrast shower. Meaning you start with hot, you do hot for 10 seconds, then cold for 20 seconds, then go back to hot, then go back to cold, and you can just do that for about 5 minutes. So let let me ask you, like because I don't know what 55 degrees means. So when I turn it all the way cold, what's that temperature, you think? In New York? On a typical shower. City? Yeah. Probably in there in the forties there. You guys get pretty cold water there. Yeah. And so if if I do the combination hot cold, do I have to have it does that does that temper it a little too? So, like, I can have it 60 instead of 55? No. You'd you'd still wanna be 55 degrees or colder if you're doing a hot cold contrast shower, but the hot kinda gives you a little little carrot at the end of a stick during those 20 seconds of cold exposure and knowing it didn't get hot for 10 seconds and then go back to cold. And then how long do you do that for? Well, for 5 minutes, which will which will make a lot of people who like to conserve water kinda cringe because that's a you know, it's kind of a long shower for some people. But if you if you go just cold, you can get away with 2, 3 minutes, which is about, you know, all I do just because I don't like to waste a lot of time in the shower. But it it it's it's really impressive what it does to your blood glucose levels. Oh, and then the other thing that's super interesting, aside from green beans, you know what spikes it higher than than anything else, in in terms of of amping up the blood glucose that that a lot of this is something a lot of people do. Eat candy. Of course. That would spike it. That that might be even higher than what I'm about to sell you. But it's a, a cup of coffee a cup of coffee Really? For the same reason. Right? Same reason as a cold shower. That's the reason that coffee kinda wakes you up. It stimulates a sympathetic response. It mobilizes liver glycogen, causes a cortisol release. And so a lot of people will be like, well, you know, so I gotta quit drinking coffee to keep my blood glucose under control. But the the thing with coffee is assuming you're drinking just regular black coffee that doesn't have, you know, sugar or a bunch of calories added to it, that spike in blood glucose is all coming from your own blood sugar. So it's not like you're dumping a bunch of extra carbohydrates into your bloodstream. And then it's a very short lived spike. Like, it's it's a big spike. Like, it'll spike me up above 150, but the spike goes away pretty quickly. And it's, again, one of the reasons that coffee can be so stimulating. And there's a little hack. There's a little trick that you can do to keep that blood glucose rise from coffee from occurring to such a great extent. And and it's also something that kind of allows coffee to give you this slow bleed of energy without giving you as much jitters. And it's also really useful if you're gonna be drinking coffee after about noon because it reduces the ability of coffee to keep you up later on at night or affect your sleep cycles. And it's called theanine. It's usually sold in in supplement form as l theanine. You can get, like, a an l theanine powder or l theanine capsule. And you You take about a 100 milligrams of l theanine or you stir, like, a 100 milligrams of l theanine powder into your coffee. Your blood glucose doesn't go up as much, but you get this nice slow bleed of energy from the coffee. So it's a kind of a kind of a way to to hack your coffee. So, spell Theanine? T h e a n I n e. And that that's one that also increases, your production of alpha brainwaves. So it's really good for focus too, and a lot of people find that it helps them to sleep better at night. I wouldn't I wouldn't drink it with a cup of coffee at night, but you can take it at night. I usually do about, on average, one and a half cups of coffee in the morning. So by 9 AM, I'm done with my coffee. But you're saying and I do black coffee all the time. Yeah. But you're saying try the L theanine. You know, sometimes I have, like, like, chaga mushrooms or, you know, lion's mane, stuff like that. What do you think of those? Yeah. I I love those. So what I do is like you, I have a, like, one cup of coffee, 1 cup of black coffee in the morning even though my cups are really big a*s cups. Like, I think my my mug up in the kitchen is like a I I custom I use that website, Zazzle, and I'll take all my favorite quotes, and I'll put them on cups. But the mug that I always choose on Zazzle is their biggest one. I think it's 24 ounces. So, you know, I have a big cup of black coffee in the morning with one of those those big a*s mugs. But then what I'll do with the with the Chaga is, actually, you you know, Tucker Max. Yeah. And and Tucker turned me onto this. He he doesn't drink coffee. He does drinking chocolate. So there's this company called My Cacao, and they sell, like, cacao nibs and cacao shells that are like tea that you steep in hot water. And the the tea doesn't have calories, you know, as you would get from, like, a like, drinking hot chocolate. But this cacao tea, what I'll do is is I'll do the same as you. I'll I'll take, like, chaga extract or lion's mane extract, and this is what I'll do in the afternoon. Right? So I have the cup of black coffee in the morning. But then in the afternoon, I do this cacao tea, which has a lot of dopamine precursors in it. Right? So it's a real good kinda feel good drink in the afternoon. What what what in the tea has is does it have, like, L Tyrosine? Or it's a theobromine, I think, is is the one that's the primary feel good chemical on that. And And and why would you wanna do that in the afternoon? Won't that, complicate sleep later? No. No. It's got less caffeine than coffee. But just the dopamine effect, though, won't that the dopamine keep you up a little as opposed to, you know, moving into a serotonin stage? No. Because because caffeine occupies your adenosine receptors, and adenosine is the chemical that would cause sleep drive. Right? So so you're blocking sleep drive when you're blocking those adenosine receptors with the caffeine molecule. Because caffeine and adenosine are molecularly they're very similar. So caffeine binds to the adenosine receptor. And, unfortunately, what happens is when you bind adenosine receptors repeatedly day after day, your body increases its adenosine receptor density. Right? So you have a whole bunch more adenosine receptors. You gotta make more adenosine to get sleepy at night, which and I I talk about I think it's a chapter 2 of the book. I talk about this Yeah. With regards to neurotransmitters. So what you do is you gotta reboot your adenosine receptors. And what they found in research is that it takes about 10 days to do that. And so what you do is every month or every couple of months, just switch to, like, a good, like, Swiss water processed decaf or find something else to drink in the morning, you know, like, like chaga or or lion's mane or something with less caffeine. You reset the adenosine receptors, and you keep yourself sensitized to coffee when you cycle it between coffee and decaf or coffee and something else throughout the year. So, by the way, let me take a step back. This is, like, how the 630 pages of your book is. It's like you know, I don't wanna call them biohacks. It's not quite that, but it's just, like, point after point after point of, you know, medical health, life advice. And and you are there's so I have so many pages overturned here, and I wanna ask you about but it's just like non stop information. How did you learn all this stuff? How long did it take you to I I could never write a book like this. And I've written 22 books. This is, like, a 1000 pages of really dense health advice. And by the way, there's no way to do all this. Like, do you do every like, it's, like, 2020,000 things to remember. Like Well, it's also kind of a choose your own adventure. Like, it like, the gut chapter about healing the gut and how to nourish the gut and fix gut issues. Obviously, if you don't have gut issues or if you only have one of those gut issues, you know, you treat it like a cookbook. You don't buy a cookbook and and go make yourself, like, rib eye and beef wellington and salmon and casserole for dinner. Right? Like, you choose the the one thing that's most pertinent to you at the time. And so I I kind of wanted to be a little bit more of a cookbook in that sense in that if if if, you know, sleep is a huge issue for you, you read the sleep chapter. And if maybe sleep isn't a huge issue for her, but it's just waking up at 2 AM, you just read that section of the sleep chapter about what to do if you wake up at 2 AM. But everything is really an issue, though. Like, you know, on page 58, there's brain food 101. And so it's great to know. Here's all these brain foods, like, you know, avocado oil, you know, coconut oil, duck fat, you know, and all these different single page is I kind of get tense reading it. Like, I feel like, oh my gosh. I don't do, I don't do this. And, I I don't take, magnesium. I don't do, you know, all these other chemicals and whatever. So I think about it this way. And by the way, I do wanna come back to Chaga because there's something cool about Chaga that's not in the book. But I think about it this way, and and I heard somebody use this phrase the other day, and I really liked it. They they use the phrase JOMO to mean joy of missing out rather than fear of missing out. Meaning, like, there there's all sorts of very, very cool things that we can learn about our body, about our brain, about our sleep patterns, our gut, our performance, you know, fat loss, muscle gain, what have you. And rather than taking an all or nothing approach and just kinda thinking, oh, jeez. There's no way I'm gonna learn all this. You know? Maybe I have a little fear of missing out. Maybe I'm even getting a little bit depressed knowing all these things I could do for my body that I don't have the time to do. You instead just basically you know, I I I thought about it this way when when when they use this phrase JOMO. You you can just be full of joy that there's so many cool things about your body or about anything else that you might be studying that inspires you to not only be blown away by the awesome complexity of the human body, but also to look at it as, like, a long term project that you're just gonna tackle until you've really decoded the human machine inside and out. Like, I I was telling your audio engineer before we started recording that I set up my my office this morning to be a music studio. I actually had an engineer come over, and we hooked up my guitar. We took we took my whole podcasting setup, my mixer, my mics, everything, and hooked it up to PreSonus Studio 1. And, basically, I'm able to now record professional studio quality audio in my office. And as a result of that, you know, this morning, I purchased 2 Udemy courses on professional mixing and mastering and, and singing songwriting on Studio 1. And, you know, I can be pretty depressed that now I have an entire Udemy course and a whole new body of knowledge that I have to attain about singing and songwriting and mixing and mastering in my own office. And I went upstairs, and I told my wife, babe, 6 years from now, I got this. And that like, those are the kind of timelines I give myself because if I take that all or nothing approach, I think, okay. By the end of the week, I gotta watch all these Udemy courses and learn this all inside and out. Otherwise, it's gonna drive me nuts. You know, it's just a very defeatist mentality. So I I I did just take a real long term approach to to all this stuff. Right. But there's a difference between audio mixing and your health. Like, your health, you really kinda have to attend to and I'm a big believer in this as you are. You have to really attend your health on a regular basis, whereas audio mixing, I could take it or leave it even if it's something I'm really interested in. Well, kind of, but but it's a journey. Right? Like like, nobody's gonna switch from, like, eating McDonald's every day to buying a grass fed, grass finished cow and making your own sourdough bread for the buns and growing your heirloom tomatoes in your backyard. Right? 1st, you go from McDonald's to maybe some other burger. I don't eat a lot of fast food, but some other burger joint, like, let's say, you know, Chick Fil A or or something that might be using a slightly healthier meat option. And then, eventually, you're asking for your burger perhaps without the bun and the sauce on the side. And then, eventually, you realize you can buy some organic or grass fed meat from the grocery store and start to make your own burgers. And then maybe 5 years later, you decide, oh, you know what? I wanna make my own sourdough bread, make my own buns. And then, you know, 7 years later, you might have a little backyard patio garden where you're growing your lettuce and your tomatoes. Like, it's just like anything else. It's a journey where you're learning as you go. Incremental improvement is key to that journey. Right. So I kinda wanna ask you about specific things in the in the book, but I also wanna ask you about your background. Like, what got you all of this knowledge? Where do you come from? Well, I, I grew up in North Idaho. I was homeschooled, and so I Why were you homeschooled? My my parents came from, well, my mom from Detroit and my dad from Miami, and they had really, really rough childhoods. Like, a lot of a lot of gangs, a lot of drugs, a a a lot of a lot of pretty close calls with, with with with both of them, murder and death in their family. Wait. I what why why is that? Like, are you so you're Ben Greenfield. Are you Jewish? Well, Benjamin Greenfield, it sounds like a very Jewish. As a matter of fact, for for 2 years, the actually, it was it was 3 years. About 8 years ago, the Israeli Chamber of Commerce was, like, flying me over to do these big stories on health spas and and food and nutrition in Tel Aviv and Northern Galilee. I think they were pretty convinced that I was Jewish, but it turns out that I'm not. My parents just like the Bible, and so they named all their kids like Isaac and Zachary and Benjamin. And then the last name Greenfield actually was a name that my grandfather on my father's side took on because he, he, had a had a really poor relationship with his father and decided to change his last name from Romelia to Greenfield. And so Why did he pick Greenfield, the most Jewish name you could pick? I have no clue. From Romelio? Well, he he was actually very he he became a very wealthy salesman. He he was one of Zig Ziglar's buddies, and they did sales together. And and, so so Greenfield, maybe he chose it because it was a a wealthy sounding name or something like that. You know, like like, I don't know, green greenback. But, anyways, it turns out that upon doing some genetic testing, which I'm a huge fan of now and and, you know, it's something I I do with a lot of my clients. And I think the the world of genetic testing is is fascinating. I actually am 25% Ashkenazi Jew. So it turns out that after all, I am a quarter Jewish, but didn't realize it until a few years ago. But, no, Benjamin Greenfield one of your grandparents is probably Jewish. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Know which one? Exactly. I I think that my that that same father, grandfather on my father's side is indeed Jewish. Not a 100% sure. But So they they escape how did they end up in Northern Idaho, which seems like an odd like, Miami Yeah. Barely knows that Idaho exists. My mom's my mom's sister, her older sister lived in Moscow, Idaho, so she wanted to move out to be to her sister after she almost got killed, when her office, basically, a gang kind of infiltrate her office and, tried to attack her. And she got pretty freaked out, and that was the last straw for her. And she became a Christian and moved to Moscow, Idaho. And then my dad in Miami, after his brother was killed in a gang fight, over, cocaine, he, like, literally closed his eyes and put his finger on a map of the United States, and his finger was on Idaho. So he moved to Moscow, Idaho also to work for the fire department there. He wanted to become a farmer, but he didn't know how when he got there. So he got his job at the fire department, and they met. They got married, and they both wanted to raise their kids in, like, kind of a a safer, cleaner environment. So they they got some property outside of this little town called Lewiston, Idaho in North Idaho, and they homeschooled us. So I was homeschooled k through 12 and just grew up with a huge passion for for the outdoors, for nature, for for learning. I was a total bookworm. Loved to learn, loved to read, loved to teach, which is a lot of what I do now. And I wound up going to University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho studying, exercise physiology and human biomechanics. Like, I I was really into sports and exercise and exercise physiology, and I actually went premed. I wanna be a doctor. And I I didn't get accepted to the medical schools that I I wanted to get accepted to. I I applied to to a bunch of, Ivy League schools. And although I I got accepted to a few schools, I didn't like the ones I got accepted to. So I decided to, to get a master's degree. So I got a master's degree in human nutrition and pharmacology, and then I got offered a job in surgical sales, in hip and knee surgical sales, which for me at the time was was a really cool offer. And, as a college student, it looked like a lot of money. And so I went and worked in hip and knee surgical sales for about 6 months thinking that a year of working in the private sector in medicine would probably make me a pretty appealing candidate to a lot of these medical schools I wanna get into and just became totally disillusioned with Western medicine during that time. Like, all the docs were unhappy. None of them told me it was a good idea to go to medical school. They were all just covered in reams of insurance paperwork and and did not seem happy. And after about 6 months in that job, I quit, and I walked into the gym across the street from my, the apartment that I was living at the time. And I slapped my resume down and asked for a job. I had a good resume at the time, you know, with my my master's degree. And with all the work I'd done leading up to then, you know, I was a certified strength conditioning coach and nutritionist and personal trainer. And so I became the manager of that gym. And then a year later, partnered up with a physician who I met at that gym to open up a sports medicine facility where I was the, the director of human performance. And we just did a whole bunch of geeked out stuff, like high speed video cameras and metabolic recording equipment and, you know, blood injections and just all sorts of kinda cool cutting edge stuff. And in 2008, I was voted as America's top personal trainer by the National Strength Conditioning Association, and that kinda thrust me into more of what I do now. Like, a lot more speaking, and I consult with people from all over the world, you know, coaching via via Skype and and, phone calls and email. And then I I do a lot of writing and podcasting and kinda more new media stuff and then some investing in in the health and fitness space. And so, so, yeah, that that's kinda how I came to to where I am now. But I started with just, you know, being homeschooled, and as a result of that, just just being a really voraciously independent self learner. Like, I've I've just always loved to learn and been, you know, take taken a pretty independent approach to it, which I think homeschooling kinda helped with. Yeah. And and and, again, I mean, it feels like this is, like, your life's work. Like, everything you've ever learned is, like, poured into this book. There's so much information. So I'm gonna just I'm gonna skip around and just ask you some random questions where I bookmarked. Okay. But, like Alright. But before you do, you mentioned Chaga Tea. Chaga. I wanna make you feel really good about that chaga tea to drink because this isn't in the book, and it's super interesting. And I've been studying up on this recently, and I find it fascinating. And so, like I told you, I'll I'll do that cacao tea in the afternoon, and I put a couple packets of the chaga into it, and I stir it in there. And then I usually save most of my phone calls for the afternoon, and I go out in the sunshine. And I take my phone calls while I'm walking in the sunshine, and it turns out that chaga is very rich in melanin in melanin, which is the the skin pigment, of course, but it's also it's a photosynthetic protein, meaning it can absorb photons of sunlight and, as a result of that, produce electrons. And those electrons are used by the mitochondria to make ATP, the body's energy currency. And so if you combine chaga with sunlight exposure, you're essentially creating free energy in the absence of calories. And there there's only other 2 other things that I've found to be able to do that. One is, methylene blue, which which a lot of biohackers will use as a nootropic. It's often sold as a fish tank cleaner, but if you get, like, pharmaceutical grade methylene blue, same thing. And you go out in the sunlight, it makes electrons that get converted into energy without having to eat food. And then the other one is, anything very, very dark green and rich in chlorophyll. Probably at the top of the list would be chlorella, and then cilantro is also pretty good. Any of these compounds when paired with sunlight, it feels like a cup of coffee for your whole body. And so if you're doing that chaga tea, try and get some sunlight afterwards, and you just feel this instant pickup in energy. It's really cool. It's it's called human photosynthesis, and there's actually this, this book is a rough translation. I believe the author was originally, South American, but it's it's the book is literally called the human photosynthesis. And then there's another really good newer book that I think does a better job explaining it in in layman's terms. It's called, Regenerate by an author named Sair ji. But this whole concept that humans can photosynthesize very similarly to plants if we have the right compounds in our bloodstream, I just find it fascinating. And so that's why I wanna tell you about chaga tea. That's that's not in the book. That is that is fascinating, actually. I'm gonna try that right after this. Tell me about the the 9 this is early on in the book, but tell me about 9 ways to fix your neurotransmitters. Because I do think in this society, and particularly right now, everybody is askew, whether they're depressed or anxious. I mean Right. You know, anxiety medication prescriptions are up through the roof in the past 3 months, but in general, they're up over the every year over year. Yeah. What's going on? And and, obviously, you know, you're either depressed, which can affect neurotransmitters, or you're overstimulated, which can exhaust neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter precursors if you're just constantly exposed to huge amounts of artificial light, backlit LED from computer screens, loud music, traffic, you know, all these things that can basically keep us in a in a constantly driven fight and flight sympathetic mode, or you're on substances that also affect your neurotransmitters. You know? That that's like the definition of an SSRI. You're you're selectively, inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin. So serotonin is just like hanging around the synaptic cleft and kinda similar to that adenosine analogy I gave earlier. You're essentially creating a scenario where you're insensitive to serotonin and you need more and more to feel good, and, you know, that's that's a very important neurotransmitter. And so there's this idea, that you have both excitatory neurotransmitters, like like dopamine, for example, or, acetylcholine would be another one, and you have inhibitory neurotransmitters, like serotonin or like, GABA. That's the one that you'd want in your bloodstream if if you wake up at night at 2 AM with racing thoughts and can't get back to sleep. And an imbalance or a deficiency of any of these neurotransmitters can cause a lot of issues from from focus to irritability to sleep cycles. And so the idea is there are specific things that you can do to care for your neurotransmitters. Some of them are very straightforward and and common sense. Like, you know, don't overstimulate yourself. Don't don't drink a Bang energy drink unless you really have to have a Bang energy drink, or don't have 3 cups of coffee if if one will do. And, you know, don't play your m p 3 player any louder than you actually need to play it. And, you know, dim your computer screen or your phone down to the level where you can still see things, but you're not overstimulated from a from a retinal standpoint. You know, there's all sorts of things you can do. But what I find for a lot of people is because we live in a situation where we are constantly stimulated, particularly with regards to those excitatory neurotransmitters, replenishing the type of things that your neurotransmitters need to replenishing what what you need to build neurotransmitters or replenishing what your body needs in order for those neurotransmitters to communicate properly is a really good idea to feel good from from a cognitive standpoint or from a sleep standpoint. So, for example, we know that there are there are 2 specific compounds necessary for the formation of neurotransmitters. One is amino acids. Okay? Now this is important, when it when it comes to getting enough protein in your diet. But for example, as you age, once you get above about the age of 40, you actually don't produce as many proteolytic enzymes, which are necessary for breaking down steak or eggs or or millet or, you know, grain or anything else into bioavailable amino acids that can be used for neurotransmitter synthesis. And so one one easy hack is and I I encourage anybody who's over about the age of 40 to do this anytime you're consuming an appreciable amount of protein, take a digestive enzyme along with it. Specifically, a digestive enzyme, if you look at the label, that has protease in it because protease is gonna break down proteins and allow for more bioavailability of amino acids. I'm also a huge fan of doing things like drinking bone broth throughout the day for the amino acids that you would get from that, taking a little glycine or eating some homemade Jell O before you go to sleep. So you got a slow bleed of some really good amino acids into your blood stream as you're sleeping. In addition to amino acids, the other one that's really important, all very important, especially if you're vegan or vegetarian or plant based because you don't get much of this from animal foods, would be your entire vitamin b complex. So, you know, supplementing with vitamin b or a good multivitamin that has vitamin b in it or making sure that you're getting enough from your diet, particularly from animal foods. Those are the those are the highest in vitamin b. You know, both the vitamin b and the amino acids are super important for your neurotransmitters. And then like I mentioned, they still have to be able to communicate. And the way that that a nerve signal is propagated is it travels along the nerves, and and it passes, from nerve nerve, along these these sheaths that surround the the nerves. They're called myelin sheaths. And myelin sheaths are comprised of 2 different types of fats. The first type of fat is called DHA, so dosahexaenoic acid. That's something you're gonna find. You probably heard of it in really big amounts in fish oil and in fish. And so in the book, I talk about one of the best things you could do to support your brain is the smash diet, a smash diet. And what that means is sardines, mackerel, anchovies, salmon, and herring. Like, those are all really good clean. They're low on the food chain as far as fish go. They they don't they aren't big predatory fish. They don't wanna accumulate a lot of metals and toxins. And I just have, like, a pantry full of all these these boxed and tinned and canned small fish, like sardines and mackerel and herring and anchovy and salmon. And I'm usually having a survey of those just about every day. And when I travel, I'll just get a really good fish oil, and I'll take about 8 to 10 grams of fish oil in the morning to just bathe my body in DHA. And if you're vegan, you don't wanna have fish, algae, like chlorella and spirulina, things like that. You can add to smoothies, for example, or top on salads. That that's a really good form of DHA as well. And then the other thing that the myelin cheese are comprised of, about 30% of your myelin cheese, they're made up of oleic acid. And oleic acid, as the name implies, is is is a type of fatty acid that you find in really large amounts in something like extra virgin olive oil. Right? And so I I drink a ton. Like, I I just I literally soup my salads with extra virgin olive oil. Like like, just drench them, you know, couple shots, like like, a couple one ounce shot glasses of extra virgin olive oil, which is amazing for nerve transmission as well. So when it comes to the neurotransmitters, don't overstimulate, and then also get really good amounts of amino acids. Make sure your protein's broken down really well. Get a good amount of vitamin b, and then get tons of DHA and oleic acid, and and all of that's just wonderful for the brain. And then if I could give one other tip regarding neurotransmitters that I think would be useful because I've already alluded to it a couple of times. It would be that if you wake up in bed, like, in the wee hours of the morning, like, 2 or 3 AM with racing thoughts, which a lot of people do, and it's kind of annoying because it's too early to get out of bed and go crush the day. Because if you get up at, like, 3, 3:30 AM, you can do it, but you're gonna be super tired by noon unless you're taking modafinil or something. And so you gotta figure out a way to shut down those racing thoughts and to get yourself back to sleep. Well, there's a there's a few ways to do it, but the best thing is to get some kind of inhibitory neurotransmitter into your body. And things like, like passion flower or holy basil, you know, just like these liquid extracts you can get from from Whole Foods or from the grocery store, those are chock full of a lot of precursors for the formation of GABA, your inhibitory neurotransmitter. There's also companies that that will literally make, supplements. Like, there's one called, and I don't have any financial affiliation. There there's one, called the lipo calm. That's the one I have up on my bedstand, and I'll just do, like, 4 squirts of that under my tongue. And then you just kinda lay there, and you do some really relaxing breathing, like 4 count in, 7 count hold, 8 count out. And after about 5 minutes, you start to fall back asleep because you flood your brain with these inhibitory neurotransmitters. Now the other thing that's that's newer I don't think I talk about this in the book, but there is a study at Stanford where they found that one of the reasons or or one one of the the things that happens when you're laying awake at night when you can't get to sleep or when you wake up in, again, the wee hours of the morning is you shift a lot of blood to your frontal cortex with with all these racing thoughts. But if you cool the frontal cortex, you actually limit that from occurring. And so Wow. They're now making I I haven't tried it out much, but I I have one in a in a box up by my bed. I have it to to put it through a fair trial, but they make this, this, like, cooling headband, you know, almost like the, you know, like the chili pad that you put underneath your sheet at night to circulate cold water to keep your body cool as you sleep. I have never done that, but okay. It's amazing. Like, it's amazing for sleep. I I have one. I put it at 55 degrees. I sleep on top of it. It's right underneath my top sheet, and, oh my goodness, game changer when it comes to sleep as far as keeping your body really cool while you're asleep, which is super important. Get that? Is that on Amazon? Yeah. It's called a a chili pad. And so this this thing's like a chili pad for your forehead. You just, like, wear it, like, a little soft band on your forehead, and it circulates cold water on the front of your head. It just kind of, like, lulls you back into this sleep like state, apparently. Although, I haven't done a lot of heavy testing on that one yet, but it it's it's next on my list of things to try. So so what about in terms of, like, you know, kind of focus and concentration in the morning and and even creativity? Kinda like the things that dopamine's supposed to do for you when you're first starting your day and you're being creative and so on. What what what do you suggest for that? Like, you mentioned, you know, neurotropics and stuff, and you talk about it in the book. What's what's ideal there? Yeah. So there's there's a few interesting nootropic stacks that you can use for something like that. You know, the one one of the really important ones that is also a precursor for some of your neurotransmitters, particularly choline, is, or or acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter, but choline is the actual nutrient. And so using choline or including things like egg yolks or walnuts or even organ meat sausages, which my kids actually do. My my kids, a lot of the mornings, they'll get up. We have chickens. They go out. They get some eggs from underneath the chickens. They come back in. They make scrambled eggs. But based on what I've taught them, they'll put, like, a handful of walnuts into those scrambled eggs, or we have these really good good tasting sausages that are made out of, liver and organ meats, which are chock full of choline. And so they're getting a lot of choline in the morning and a lot of really well formulated, you know, nootropic supplements. There's one that I use called Qualia, for example, q u a l I s. Oh, yeah. I use Qualia. Yeah. So I use the caffeine free version of Qualia, the the Qualia Mind caffeine free because it got a lot of choline in it. It's got, like, 40 different good, you know, neurotransmitter precursors or neutropressant. But I I like to have my coffee too, so I use the caffeine free version just because I I like to drink coffee, and I don't wanna double up on the caffeine. So quality is really good. Another another really good one, just like a microdose of nicotine, like a 2 to 4 milligram piece of, nicotine gum. It's actually really good. It it upregulates a part of the the mitochondria called PGC one alpha, and it's actually a mild exercise mimetic, meaning it can upregulate mitochondria and ATP production kinda similar to what exercise would do. And so I'm not opposed to the use of a a small amount of nicotine either. And nicotine actually pairs really well with coffee because they're acting on 2 different pathways. And so you're you're not you're not doubling up on the same pathway, which is important with a lot of these these nootropic type of formulations. The these, so so the coffee and I mentioned mixing coffee with theanine, which is really good. Doing coffee plus a small microdose of nicotine is really good. Including some type of choline with breakfast is really good. And then, I like that quality of mind. That's another really good option. But then, I'm also not opposed to the use of of these micro doses of psychedelics. I think those can be really meaningful as well, especially when it comes to creativity or left and right brain hemispheric coordination. So there's there's one variant of LSD called LSA. You get a lot less of the the jitteriness and the irritability that you might get from LSD. And you're using a very small portion, like 10 to 20 micrograms, which is, you know, 1 tenth of what a what a trip dose might be. But a very small amount of that with food to even knock more of the jitteriness off, that's that's a really nice nootropic. It's pretty safe in those small amounts. So LSA Is that is that is it possible I mean, is that legal, or is it possible to get it? Yeah. You can get you you can get any of this stuff from human chemical research website. So so not sold for human consumption, you know, nudge, nudge, wink wink type of thing. But, yeah, you can get a lot of that stuff from websites. Although I tell everybody probably the best three resources on any of these things would be Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, the 3rd wave website, which is, 3rdwave.c0, and then, anything from the MAPS Foundation at maps.org. They put out, you know, really good research based advice on on psychedelics. But microdosing with LSA, I think is is good. Another really good stack that's quite popular that also includes a microdose of of, psychedelic is taking a very small amount of psilocybin, you know, like anywhere from 0.2 to 0.5 grams of psilocybin. And what you do is you take that with anything that increases blood flow, like, beet powder or niacin is is something that's most commonly used, and then a little bit of lion's mane. And that 1, 2, 3 stack of psilocybin with niacin and lion's mane is an incredible stack for focus, for creativity, even for things like increased sensory perception, improved communication skills. So that's also a a pretty good stack that could even be included in, for example, morning cup of coffee. So those are a few. And then the last thing I would recommend if you have the time in the morning is, you know, different forms of breath work, as we've already established, are more parasympathetic and relaxing. You know, like 4, 7, 8 breath work or alternate nostril breathing or box breathing. And then others are more sympathetic, but also improve focus and creativity and alertness. And you can actually do more of that type of breath work in the morning if you have, for example, even just 3 minutes to spare. You can do about 2 minutes of Wim Hof style breathing. Right? And and you could even pair this, after your shower or in your shower if you'd like. And then you finish with that long exhale. And then typically after that long exhale hold that you would normally do after a round of what I'll do is on after that long exhale hold, I'll then breathe everything up and squeeze every muscle in the body. So you kinda squeeze your sex organs and drive all the energy all the way up out the top of the head, all the way up out the the crown chakra, and this just seems to shove all the energy and the blood flow up to your skull, up to your thought centers. And you hold that for as long as you can, then you finish with the next. So you do this sitting down or lying down just in case you get dizzy or pass out or anything like that. And that that one round of really, really sympathetically arousing breath work can often be just as good as a, you know, a cup of coffee or or a nootropic. Because a lot of times when you wake up in the morning, you know, a lot of people have have sleep apnea. A lot of people are not breathing properly during the night of sleep. They're either breathing through their mouth or they're they're waking or or semi waking multiple times during the night due to hypoxia. And so waking up and doing breath work that just fills your body with oxygen can be really stimulating and almost, like, reoxygenate the brain after a night of sleep. And, of course, pairing something like that with any of these nootropic or psychedelic blends can give you a, you know, a really good one, 2 combo. So so that's amazing. I I I don't do any of that, so I'm gonna have to start doing it. It's it's all good stuff. Tell me about, I was really intrigued. You you have a lot of stuff in here about antiaging, and and you yourself have done these experiments where on yourself with, stem cells and and things like that. Tell tell me the story of got what got you into that. Originally, I got into stem cells, and I don't think I'll ever live this down, because Men's Health Magazine a few years ago hired me to do, like, an immersive journalism story on everything a guy could do to enhance his sexual performance. So they had me, like, taking all the different gas station dick pills and, you know, and then they did lab testing to figure out what was actually in the gas station dick pills, and it turns out it's mostly just ephedra and viagra. So all the fancy Chinese herbs that they say on the front of those things, none of those are in there. It's basically ephedra, a huge central nervous system stimulant, and then sildenafil, the active component of viagra. So, of course. Wait. They you don't need a prescription to to get any of those? Not if you get them from the gas station. So the yeah. They're not, like, regulated? I don't know. No. It's not. Supplements are you gotta be super careful with supplements. Like like, if they're not made in a certified good manufacturing practice facility and, and have a a good certification behind them or they're not made by a trustworthy company, you know, like Designs For Health or or Thorn or Standard Process or any of these safe companies, yeah, you don't know what you're getting. So it turns out the gas station dick pills. If you want some free ephedra and viagra, just get those, and, be careful that your heart doesn't explode afterwards because I felt like mine was going to. And then, they had me do, like, some Ayurvedic tactics, like not ejaculate for a month and, do, like, tantric breath work for for multiple orgasm training. And then they also had me do, this one thing called GAINSwave where they'll they'll take, like, an ultrasound wand or a or a sound wand. They they they blast your genitals with this thing, and it supposedly breaks open old blood vessels and causes angiogenesis or the formation of new blood vessels. And so Were were you worried at all during this stuff? Like, hey. They're they're messing around with the most important organ on the body. Always go to PubMed for a really long time before I do most of this. So the gas station dick pills, that's one of those things where it's like, alright. I might need to take some milk thistle extract after to clean out my liver, maybe a little n acetylcysteine, but, you know, I'll survive. You know, some of this stuff I looked into. It turns out, you know, a lot of this stuff is is is diagnosable and even has insurance codes for things like erectile dysfunction or Peyronie's disease and is relatively safe. So and you put on numbing cream, and they basically take this, like, jackhammer to your dick. And that that one actually works too. Like, you, like, you literally feel like a 16 year old boy in terms of the way that you're you're, you're operating for, like, the next month. Wait. The ultrasound one? Is it? Yeah. But then they also had me do 2 different types of injections. One is called platelet rich plasma where they take your blood out and they spin it and they isolate the growth factors, then they reinject them back into your dick. And then they also did one that where they took all the the, not all of it, but they they did, like, a liposuction of the fat on my back and then concentrated the stem cells, groom for 3 months from the fat in my back, these these mesenchymal stem cells. They're called MSCs. So I had a really high stem cell population. And then, they injected them into 3 different locations on my on on my penis. And that, that made my dick look like it got run over by a semi truck for, like, 3 days. It was all black and blue, and my wife was pretty nervous. And, I would say everything that Were you forget about your wife. Were you nervous? But of everything that that and, again, like, I had it done by a doc who does this procedure, and so it wasn't like people are like, oh, Ben's the guy who injects his dick with stem cells. And, no, I like, it was it was in a medical facility. And, I would say if anything that I did, I had, like, rock hard boners for, like, 6 months after I did that protocol. And I I I think that it actually works. And after I realized and during that whole process, research stem cells a lot, I do think that they are pretty beneficial because your endogenous stem cell pool declines with age. And so by replacing stem cells, arguably, you could fight off some of the decline in the ability to be able to do things like repair joints or blood vessels as you age. However, I think that they're not completely necessary because when you look at stem cells, a lot of times, it's their ability to communicate that degrades faster than the availability of the stem cells themselves, and they communicate via these tiny little vesicles called exosomes. And so a lot of doctors now, they'll they'll do exosome injections instead of stem cell injections or pair exosome injections with a more readily available form of stem cells like amniotic or umbilical or placental stem cells from a healthy source. And that in a as opposed to, like, going under the knife and getting your fat taken out or or the bone taken out from your hips and getting that concentrated and reinjected, I think doing something like a nonautologous stem cell protocol with amniotic or umbilical or placental. It's it's it's not so much the getting of the stem cells that worries me. It's the injecting them back into the penis that worries me. I was under an anesthetic when when they did the so what I did I don't care. I I I I I didn't feel it, but, that was that was during a full body stem cell procedure in in Utah where they just injected everything head to toe with stem cells. And, my wife did something similar, and we both really liked the results. But I think of I I think that that's still more kind of, like, immersive journalism stuff or the stuff that people with really deep pockets who just wanna pull all the stops out are gonna do for antiaging and longevity. And when I wrote the book and and when I when I originally came up with the idea for the book, I wanted it to be all about antiaging and longevity, and it kind of morphed into just a blueprint for the entire human body. But in writing the chapter, you know, which is over a 100 pages long on antiaging and longevity and digging into what a lot of these blue zones do, you know, these areas where people are living for a disproportionate long period of time, you know, they're not injecting stem cells in in Sardinia or Nicoya or Okinawa or any of these places, you know, they're instead you know, there's, like, a 108 year old gin chugging cigarette smoking grandmas there, but, you know, they're they're out in the sunshine. They have really healthy relationships. They're eating big family dinners with lots of people. They have a a gratitude practice or a prayer practice or a belief in a higher power. And and and a lot of times, they're also consuming, you know, really flavanol and polyphenol rich beverages throughout the day like teas and coffee and healthy amounts of of red wine. And a lot of times, they're, like, outside often without their shoes on, so they're getting in touch with the planet and grounding and earthing and, you know, drinking fresh, clean, pure water. And so, you know, there's so, so many things that you can do before you turn to stem cells. And if you were to kinda go for, like, the the in betweenness, I would say 2 of 2 of the better antiaging compounds that you could consume or supplement with or get treated with if you're if you're gonna try to do something but not wanna go through the hassle of stem cells, it would be 2 things that really help with DNA repair and decrease the rate at which your telomeres shorten, and that would be NAD and sirtuins. So sirtuins, also known as stacks or sirtuin activating compounds, that just involves eating, like, a Mediterranean style diet that's rich in a lot of the dark blues and the dark reds and the purples, like blackcurrant and wine and dark chocolate and blueberries and blueberry powder. Like, I make every morning what I call my antiaging smoothie. And, you know, I I just dump all these different powders in it with a little bit of ice and Stevia, usually some bone broth, and it tastes really great. But half the things in there, they're just like super dark blue, green, purplish red, sirtuin rich compounds. That's really, really important. And, you know, there are supplements like resveratrol you've probably heard of that are just basically stacks. Right? They're they're sirtuin rich compounds. But then when you combine that with NAD, which is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, doctor David Sinclair is probably the most famous guy in terms of Yeah. He's been on my podcast twice. Harvard researcher who's done a lot of work on this. Other forms of it are called NR, nicotinamide riboside, or or NMN. So, like, I think NMN by Alive by Nature. So NMN by Alive by Nature, that's a sublingual tablet that you dissolve in your mouth, and arguably, you'll get higher levels of NMN and DNA repair in the hypothalamus and in neural tissue when using NMN versus something like oral NR. But, really, I mean, if you wanna cut straight to the chase, the best way to increase your levels of NAD would be via getting, like, a monthly NAD IV. I've never heard of that. They also make patches that you can put on that kinda give you a slow bleed of NAD into your system via what's called an electrophoresis patch. There's a lot of there's a lot of good docs in the New York City area, James, who could do NAD. One really good guy there is, he also he does a lot of regenerative antiaging medicine, doctor, Holland Chen. I discovered him after he was on a he was on a big VICE documentary about antiaging, And, he he does he gets really, really good NAD. I think he gets it from Japan. And, so he he's a good guy in your area who could do an an NADIV. But I'm a fan of doing stuff like a monthly NADIV, but then doing like you're doing and just taking NMN orally in between those IVs. And then you combine that with just doing really good sirtuin rich foods every day or supplementing with resveratrol. And I think that 1, 2 combo is one of the best things you could do for for antiaging and longevity. Yeah. So I do I do the NMN. I do the resveratrol. I don't I mean, I don't do the blueberry smoothie. Sound sounds like you do coffee, then a blueberry smoothie, then you drink some bone broth. Like, consume a lot of liquids in the morning. Yeah. Well, the the bone broth is in the smoothie. Like, that's why I use the liquid instead of water or instead of milk. Mhmm. And so I only eat 2 or 3 times a day. Like, I have a smoothie for breakfast, and then depending on how busy the day is, I'll I'll sometimes stop at lunch and have just a big salad. We'll just, you know, take a bunch of sprouts and shoots and microgreens and usually open up a can of the, you know, those smashed fish, put that on there, bunch of olive oil, some sea salt, some seeds and nuts. And, you know, that's sometimes I'll have lunch, sometimes I won't. It'll depend on how busy the day is. And then dinner is always just like a really good meat, like, grass fed, grass finished beef, or wild caught salmon along with a roasted vegetable like carrots or parsnips or beets or sweet potato or yam, glass of red wine, a little bit of dark chocolate, and, you know, pretty pretty simple and straightforward. I I there's not a lot of variation in the way that I eat, but the one thing that I do, again, kind of coming full circle to where we started with glycemic variability and blood glucose fluctuation is I don't really eat any carbohydrates the whole day. And at the very end of the day is when I eat all my carbohydrates. So my body is forced to be burning fatty acids the whole day. My blood glucose levels don't go up and down during the day aside from, you know, maybe that mild elevation due to a cup of coffee or something like that. And at the very end of the day, I'll eat all my carbohydrates for the day, which is really cool because carbohydrates will help to increase your serotonin levels, which help to increase your melatonin levels, which help you to sleep. And, also, you get some carbohydrates into your body if you're gonna be working out the next morning, for example. And, also, dinner is like the one meal a day that if I'm gonna, quote, you know, cheat, unquote, you know, at a restaurant or I'm with people, like, I want that to be the one meal where I can kind of eat what I want from a macronutrient standpoint. So as long as I'm not eating a lot of carbohydrates the rest of the day, dinner can be a little bit more free for me as far as what I choose to eat from a carb standpoint. Won't the blueberry smoothie have carbohydrates? No. Because I don't use blueberries. I use dark organic blueberry powder. So the amount of fructose that I get is like a speed bump. Like, it's nothing compared to, like, a few handfuls of blueberries. So I just get organic concentrated blueberry powder from Amazon, and I'll put about a heaping teaspoon of that into the smoothie. And there's, like, barely any carbohydrates and something like that. You know, I kinda do something similar. I only have the carbs in the evening, but it's because I I do a lot of intermittent fasting. So there are many days where I'm just not eating until the evening. Yeah. Which is a pretty good approach. I mean, I a lot of folks because a lot of my background, you know, I kinda skipped over this, so I was talking about what I do, but, you know, I I competed as a bodybuilder in college, and then I competed both professionally in amateur in Ironman Triathlon for, like, 12 years after that. And then I got a contract with Reebok and raced as a pro Spartan racer for 4 years after that. And as a result, a lot of the people that follow me, they're kinda exercise junkies, and they, you know, they're athletes. They exercise a lot. And for those people, the, you know, the OMAD, the one meal a day or hefty amounts of intermittent fasting, that doesn't work so well. And so, you know, it kind of depends where you're at. If, you know, for, like, the Silicon Valley exec biohacker extreme productivity crowd, you know, the Jack Dorsey, I suppose, is probably the guy who's most famous for this because the news media said he had an eating disorder when he announced, actually, on my podcast that he eats 1 meal a day. And and I think for that crash, just fine. Eat 1 meal a day. You don't you don't have to, like, replenish post workout nutrients or anything like that. But, you know, a lot of really active people, you know, cross I guess CrossFit doesn't exist anymore, so I can't say that. You know, gym junkies, they they do need to eat a few times a day to keep energy levels topped off. You know, plus me, I'm I'm just a skinny a*s guy. I'm lean. I have a high metabolism. I like to eat at least 2 times a day. But, yeah, it can be a pretty good productivity hack to, to wake up, have a cup of coffee, you know, maybe, you know, have some gum, some sparkling water, some teas, some bone broth, etcetera, throughout the day, and then finish up with with a really good big dinner. So, of course, you have a chapter on best foods and supplements for sex. Maybe talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, actually, I have I have a question before that. So I have friends who, you know, after they hit a certain age, they start doing testosterone therapy. It always seems to me like a bad idea because it's like what you were saying before about other you know, what you were saying about serotonin, for instance, is that if you kind of replace something, the body thinks it doesn't Yeah. Need to make it anymore, and it doesn't really seem like the results are that great for these people. Yeah. Like but you have a section on, you know, TOT testosterone optimization therapy. Maybe what's the talk about what the difference is and and what you do. Yeah. I've I've 2 comments based on that that question about, sex foods and testosterone. The first regarding testosterone. Testosterone replacement therapy, if done correctly, can actually be really good at improving energy levels or maintenance of muscle mass or libido, etcetera. But a lot of doctors, no offense, they're they're just kinda dumb about the way that they approach it. And, a, they don't test the patient properly to make sure that the testosterone is not getting overaromatized into things like estrogen or converted into things like, you know, DHT, which can cause hair loss. And they're also not monitoring some of the problematic things that can happen if you're not monitoring testosterone levels like thick blood and really high hematocrit and hemoglobin levels, or even PSA levels. And so if you were going to speak to a doctor about testosterone replacement therapy, which I'm not opposed to, what you wanna do is mimic what the body is doing as closely as possible, which typically involves a diurnal dosing of testosterone because your body's testosterone peaks in the morning, and it peaks in the evening. So a good doctor will prescribe you a small amount of a testosterone cream or gel that you apply scrotally once in the morning and once in the evening rather than what a lot of doctors do, which is like one big injection, like 1 or 2 times a week, which just sends your testosterone level sky high and you're angry and irritable and get the blood issues, and then it drops back down and you're on this roller coaster ride. And so part of it is the way that the testosterone is prescribed. And then regarding the question about whether or not you are kind of on it once you start it for life, the short answer is, yeah, it's pretty difficult if you get on testosterone to get off it and allow your body's normal testosterone production to return to normal. There is some evidence that if you supplement at the same time as you're taking testosterone with something called human chorionic gonadotropin, which is called HCG, that you may limit some of the some of the ball shrinkage, so to speak, that occurs when you're on testosterone. But anybody who gets on testosterone, you're gonna have a really rough ride for, like, 6 to 12 months after you get off it, and you're gonna feel like you got run over by a truck and have really low libido and low energy levels. You can get off it, but it's it's hard to do. So it's one of those things where once you start taking it, you better be sure that it's something that you wanna start doing and something that you're gonna use as kind of a better living through science hack for most of the rest of your life, which, again, I'm not opposed to If it's used correctly, it can be safe, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're just, like, take a bunch of testosterone, especially improperly timed testosterone, and then come off at any time you want. You know? It's worse than coming off coffee when you come off testosterone. And then, by the way, I shouldn't neglect for your for your female listeners. If you were gonna want to do something similar, progesterone is probably at the top of the list for women when it comes to hormone replacement with age. Progesterone is amazing for women as they age, for libido, for sleep, for maintaining bone density, for for a host of things. So I'm I'm not opposed to those type of things, but you just wanna make sure you're not starting it too early and that you know that once you start, it's gonna be tough to come off. And then regarding the the, you know, the foods for sex, really, you know, I I recently spoke to a group of doctors about all the things that could boost blood flow for an athlete who is gonna perform at altitude or like an endurance athlete who needed really high, VO 2 max or oxygen utilization. Turns out all those same things are amazing for sex because they're increasing your nitric oxide production. So anything that has appreciable levels of what's called arginine or citrulline in it. So we're talking about things like beets, extra virgin olive oil, pumpkin seeds, arugula is amazing, watermelon or watermelon juice. You know, a lot of I think, you know, I think it was Tim Ferris who wrote the For Our Body and talked about the pre hot date meal of, like, a giant steak with a bunch of bee pollen and fats so that you get your your hormones up. And it is true that those type of meals can really assist with hormone production, but the hormone production that kicks in from that isn't gonna occur for a few days, and you're gonna have a bunch of blood diverted to your gut, rather than to the organs that you wanna use for sex. And so I'm a fan of a lighter meal with a bunch of compounds that boost blood flow, a lot of nitric oxide precursors. And, frankly, you know, I well, we've established that I don't recommend gas station dick pills. Any of these, like, pre workout supplements that that would cause, like, a pump, like, an increase in blood flow, amazing for sex too. And there was one trick that I used to use back in my bodybuilding days when I'd pose on stage and I had to look really vascular with big veins and have a lot of blood flow to my body, always backstage. Because when I was doing that, I was a poor college student and could afford all these pre workout supplements. I had a bottle of red wine and a bar of dark chocolate. And it turns out that red wine and dark chocolate, you know, there there's a reason those are Valentine's Day foods or or romance foods. They increase blood flow. And so, you know, if you have a a nice arugula salad with some extra virgin olive oil or some beets, watermelon, arugula, even as, like, a side to whatever else you're eating and a lighter protein like, say, fish, and then you finish that up with red wine or dark chocolate, that's the perfect recipe for for a good date. That's fascinating to know. I did not know I did not know all that. Is that so like, going back to, you were talking earlier about, like, drinking dark chocolate, would that also be a a a good thing? Actually, yeah. Because then if you're drinking it, you're getting pretty concentrated amounts of that theobronium I was talking about, so you get a little bit more dopamine as well, which is a really good, feel good chemical. And so so, yeah, there there's a lot of I mean, you know, there's a reason I wrote the entire chapter on sex just because there's a lot of other hacks. You know, tantric sex and different forms of breath work, different forms of pelvic core musculature exercises. You know, there there's a lot that you can do to enhance the sexual experience. That's the thing is there's literally 12,000 techniques in this book. Like, for instance, who like, you know, the chapter before the sex chapter, you have a technique. This is more about, you know, eating and so on and and but you have chew eat chew each bite of food 24 to 25 to 40 times. Like Yeah. Who does that? I don't chew. I'm having popcorn. You want me to chew it, like, 25 times? Well, let let me tell you about this. I I actually by the way, I have a I have a lunch meeting, speaking of lunch, coming up here at about 1:30, and so this might be the last thing I'm able to to dig into in much detail. But it it's it's actually really interesting, and and I'm glad you brought this up because I was talking to my kids about this at dinner last night. Everybody's talking about, broccoli sprouts and how healthy broccoli sprouts are because they have all this stuff in them called sulforaphane. You know, doctor Rhonda Patrick talks a lot about broccoli sprouts. And, you know, sprouting your own seeds is actually something that during this pandemic, I know a lot of people who have gotten into, including myself, like buying just cheap a*s seeds that have what's called a high germination rate. You know, I I order this stuff called broccoli and friends from Amazon, and you, like, soak it in a glass jar and you rinse it a few times and you put it in a dark place and you turn it upside down, and you can make your own sprouts pretty easily. I read I actually read a new book called Sprouts and taught myself how to sprout, really nutritious seeds during this pandemic, but it turns out that unless you put them in a blender or unless you chew them and chew them and chew them when you're eating your salad, you actually don't unlock any of that sulforaphane, and they just kinda pass undigested through your digestive tract. Furthermore, it appears that for optimal production of digestive enzymes, optimal satiety, like like how full you feel after a meal, and even especially for kids, the proper formation of the teeth in the mouth and to avoid overcrowding in the jaw and, proper alignment and structure of the jaw. You're talking about the chapter I wrote on on beauty and symmetry where I talk all about things kids and adults can do to just have really healthy bodies from a symmetry and a beauty standpoint. Well, it turns out that chewing your food, like, and taking a long time to eat a meal and eating in a parasympathetically driven state, you know, in a state of relaxation, not while you're driving in a car, and, yes, chewing each bite of food 25 to 40 times like a cow would chew cud if you're not going to use a NutriBullet or a blender, which is kind of a hack and is kind of a shortcut and can allow you, you know, again, back to better living through science. There are there are ways that you can have your meal pre chewed for you if if that's the way you want to go. It's actually amazing for overall symmetry of the jaw, health of the digestive enzymes, satiety, etcetera. And, yeah, it is kind of a foreign concept to us because many of us are used to just, like, eating our food and moving on. But, you know, the way the way I live now is if I don't have the time to eat or I feel like I'm gonna be eating in a rushed or stressed state, I will just, like, drink some kind of liquid beverage. Right? Like a, again, a cup of bone broth, or I'll make myself a really quick smoothie that'll go down a little bit more quickly. But if I know I'm gonna be in a rush or I'm stressed or I don't have time for the meal, I now just do not eat any meal that would require me to choose those 25 to 40 times because, frankly, for your overall health, for your digestive function, it's not worth it. And I'll tell you the the one biggest clue to know if you're not chewing your food properly is, to look at your poop in the morning, and if you have undigested food particles, little seeds, little nuts, little exterior coatings and shells or corn or carrot slices or anything else in your poop, that means that you're probably not chewing your food enough or you aren't making enough digestive enzymes or both. And so, yeah, it actually really is inconvenient, but also really important to chew your food each bite 25 to 40 times. And that's just one tip of 6,000 from that one chapter on beauty. Yeah. But the whole point is so, like, we've been all over the place in the interview, and I think the whole point is there is so much valuable information in this book, boundless, you you know, in the subtitle upgrade your brain, optimize your body, and defy aging by Ben Greenfield. Such a valuable book. This is like the bible of health. I can't out of the 600 people I've had on my podcast that I've had on so many, you know, health practitioners, medical practitioners, and so on, this is really the most valuable book for health I've ever read. I've recommended it to a ton of people already. So thanks, Ben Greenfield, for for coming on the podcast. I super appreciate it. There was a lot of good advice, but I really just wanted to make the point that these are just small samples of the advice you're getting in the book. Like, this is this this is how how you talk is, like, one hundredth of what the book is. So so thanks for coming on the show. It's great advice. And, Well, for all for all James fans, if you see him, like, running around a Speedo in the New York City sunshine with a mug full of chocolaty, and his mouth is blue from drinking fish tank cleaner, now you know why. It's your fault. So alright. Thanks a lot, Ben. I'll talk to you soon. Alright. Thanks, James.
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