← Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
The Anti-Aging Stack That Burns Fat, Builds Muscle, Boosts Libido & Regrows Hair — Ben Greenfield
01:35:24
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- [00:01]
Jillian Michaels
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.
- [00:03]
Ben Greenfield
Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, lift with your legs, man. Santa. Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you britches. I'm not.
- [00:10]
Jillian Michaels
Of course he did.
- [00:12]
Ben Greenfield
Right, Santa, you know my elf, Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list. And elf. I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile. You can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies, right, Mrs. Claus?
- [00:26]
Jillian Michaels
Hi, Mrs. Claude Claus, much younger sister. And AT T Mobile, there's no trade in needed when you switch, so you can keep your old phone or give.
- [00:33]
Ben Greenfield
It as a gift.
- [00:33]
Jillian Michaels
And the best part, you can make the switch to T Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.
- [00:37]
Ben Greenfield
Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber, the holidays are better. AT T Mobile, switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in U.S. cellular stores with sweet monthly bill credits for well qualified customers plus tax.
- [00:52]
Jillian Michaels
And $35 device connection charge credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel financing agreement. 256 gigs $830. Eligible for it in a new line. $100 plus a month plan with auto fees required.
- [00:59]
Ben Greenfield
Check out 15 minutes or less per line.
- [01:00]
Jillian Michaels
Visit t mobile.com shopify's point of sale system helps you sell at every stage of your business. Need a fast and secure way to take payments in person? We've got you covered. How about card readers you can rely on anywhere you sell?
- [01:14]
Ben Greenfield
Thanks.
- [01:14]
Jillian Michaels
Have a good one. Yep, that too. Want one place to manage all your online and in person sales? That's kind of our thing wherever you sell. Businesses that grow grow with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 a month trial@shopify.com listen shopify.com l listen. My guest today is Ben Greenfield. Now he's one of the most influential voices in health, longevity and human performance. He's a New York Times bestselling author, a world class biohacker, an elite coach, a top fitness expert, and of course, host of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast. Consistently ranked among the most downloaded health and wellness shows in the world. Ben has spent decades on the leading edge of anti aging science. I mean, we're going to be talking about everything from cutting edge interventions like peptides, stem cells, gene therapy, regenerative medicine, plasma swabs, and yes, even the new wave of weight loss drugs taking the industry by storm. We're going to hit sex drive.
- [02:13]
Ben Greenfield
If you want to increase libido, that's where you dive into the world of peptides. You can actually, like, huff it up the nose and increase libido dramatically. Like two or three hours before date night.
- [02:23]
Jillian Michaels
For example, hair growth, fat loss, fasting, inflammation, metabolic flexibility. Real strategies to improve health span and lifespan.
- [02:32]
Ben Greenfield
I've done blood filtration in Tijuana, Mexico, and got liters of human plasma dripped into my body in Texas and then gene therapy in Cabo.
- [02:42]
Jillian Michaels
You want to look younger, feel younger, live longer, and actually understand the science behind it and how to do all of this stuff safely. This one's for you. Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels. I am so excited to sit with you. I think I have consumed your content years. I don't even know how many, and learned so much.
- [03:06]
Ben Greenfield
Thanks for making me feel old right off the bat.
- [03:07]
Jillian Michaels
Oh, please appreciate that. Give me a break. I have a lot of guys that. And listen, there's a ton here for women as well, but there are a lot of men that watch this show. And I did a segment or an episode with Peter Attia once on trt and guys loved it. And I was like, I gotta get back into the health stuff, but with the appropriate people. And I want to do a show for the boys. And we're gonna talk about peptides and stem cells and all those things, and they're applicable to everybody.
- [03:38]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [03:39]
Jillian Michaels
But when it comes to men's health, what do you think guys struggle with the most? What is it that they want answers to? Is it testosterone? Is it prostate health? Like, honest to God, heart disease? What are guys coming to you for the most?
- [03:56]
Ben Greenfield
Yes, yes, yes. Testosterone, prostate, heart disease would all be categories, I think probably the biggest. And this is not going to be a surprise to anybody. Like, the lowest hanging fruit or fruits, pun intended in that case would be the testosterone piece. It's just still considered to be the fountain of youth, the libido juice. Even though testosterone doesn't remarkably increase libido, not directly.
- [04:22]
Jillian Michaels
You know, the back up, back up.
- [04:24]
Ben Greenfield
The male pill, it does not increase indirectly. So you won't see a significant rise in sexual desire by increasing testosterone levels. But it can create feedback loops, right? Like, more energy getting into the gym, more better self confidence, better strength. So there's a small impact on libido, but it's less than what guys would think. Like, if you want to increase libido, that's where you dive into the world of peptides. Like, there's an intranasal peptide. It works better in women than it does in men, but it's called PT141. And a lot of times that's compounded with oxytocin, that trust hormone that gets released during the handshakes and hugging and breastfeeding and in higher amounts after an orgasm or during sex. And you can actually like huff it up the nose and increase libido dramatically, like two or three hours before date night, for example. But testosterone wouldn't, you know, the libido piece wouldn't be the main reason to take it. So that would be the one that guys are most interested in. And the problem is we've got all these pill mills now or where you can go and you can fill out a form or have a quick 5 to 15 minute chat with your online concierge doc and you can walk away with a testosterone prescription that you would have only been able to get from your average GP if you had presented with actual hypogonadism. Right. Like levels, depending on what reference range is being used, but below 300 at least. And the issue and, and this is, right reason for guys to look into this is that when your testosterone is, let's say in the three hundreds, and you don't quite qualify for hypogonadism or some prescription of a disease that would get you a prescription for testosterone, you can still feel pretty crappy, right? And I'm sure guys have already heard about all of the symptoms of low testosterone, right? And I mean, things that you wouldn't even think of at first, but you know, sleep, you know, weight gain, brain fatigue, like we think, well, muscle loss and not being able to recover as well. Well, and of course, people kind of have that libido or sexual performance piece mixed in, but it's so multimodal, the effects of low testosterone that guys look into it for. Right. Reason the problem, and this is also the problem with almost anything in the biohacking industry, in the peptide industry, even in the supplement industry, is you need to have the basics in first before you actually go to the big guns. So in the case of testosterone, there are precursors for making testosterone. Testosterone, right. The biggies would be magnesium and a mineral rich diet or mineral supplementation, boron, zinc, creatine, fish oil and vitamin D. Right. Those would be the biggies to just like have in place as your building blocks for testosterone. And those are kind of like boring and not sexy and they're not expensive.
- [07:30]
Jillian Michaels
I was thinking, okay, yeah, I wrote a book way back in the day with an endocrinologist, way back in the day called Master Metabolism. And it argued, you know, the point Was metabolism, weight loss. But it touched upon all of these key hormones. I've spoken to endocrinologists throughout the years and as mentioned, I spoke to Peter and the first thing he went to was body fat.
- [07:53]
Ben Greenfield
Right. And the body fat piece fits into it. And what's interesting is another big part of this fits into the body fat piece and that's environmental exposures. You know, microplastics probably being the biggest new one in terms of what would be called xenoestrogenic or phytoestrogenic compounds that would occupy androgen receptor sites and if you have enough testosterone, still keep it from working well. Which is a concern even if you're on testosterone replacement therapy. Right. Even if you've moved to the big guns, if you still are drinking out of the crinkly plastic water bottles and heating liquids multiple times in the paper cups with the plastic liner.
- [08:31]
Jillian Michaels
And now like, what does this can?
- [08:33]
Ben Greenfield
Well, the cans aren't as big of a deal. I know glass or the plastic bottles with the plastic cap if it's been painted on the underside because that leeches in. And I don't want people to like climb under a rock and you know, buy a bubble suit. But there are things to think about.
- [08:48]
Jillian Michaels
They are things to think about because if we can mitigate them. But it makes a big difference over time and every little choice adds up. But it is exceptionally frustrating. And when I get into conversations about the government, because somehow the government, the world of politics and the world of health have an intersection. You and I both met at.
- [09:11]
Ben Greenfield
Absolutely.
- [09:12]
Jillian Michaels
At a maha event and everybody on my side now, if in fact there is one, is for less government. But in our line of work, I would like more, more regulation for the things that we can't control. Like how about it's not legal to paint the underside of that friggin bottle cap so we don't even think about it.
- [09:30]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, more regular. Although I have a little bit more of like a libertarian capitalist bent than I say well to people so that they bring less business to the people making the harmful compounds and also don't subsidize the production of the harmful compounds. However, the reason the microplastic piece kind of fits into the body fat piece is body fat can store toxins, it can store estrogens. You can basically increase propensity for an obesogenic state based on environmental exposures. And this is the same reason that when people go on detox diet, rapid fat loss diet, they can sometimes feel kind of crappy because some of that stuff does get mobilized as fat cells are utilized. So you've got the building block component, you've got the environmental exposure component. And these are all things to think about before you go visit the pill mill website and get your cream or injection or pill or whatever it is and we can talk about which one's better. And then you've got the lifestyle component. The largest concentration of androgen receptors are in the legs. And, and like you know this like if you go to the gym and you get under a barbell or you grab a hex bar and you're tracking, your HRV is going to plummet because it's one of the most. Your heart rate variability. And I'm wearing, I'm wearing, whoops. People like an aura. There's all sorts of, this is my like $5 timex. But heart rate variability is basically a measurement of vagal activation of the pacemaker cells of the heart. And if you have good interplay between the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system and the parasympathetic rest or digest branch of the nervous system, you will have better stimulation of those pacemaker cells and a better response to stress. Now in certain scenarios, you know, acutely in response to a cold bath or a sauna, or lifting heavy weights with your legs at the gym, you will see a drop in heart rate variability because you're entering a temporary state of sympathetic drive.
- [11:35]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [11:35]
Ben Greenfield
Now the reason sympathetic drive stress, people say high variability. Yeah, sympathetic drive stress. The reason people say high heart rate variability is good is because you wouldn't want chronic stress permanently but brief bouts of so called hormetic stress. Right. Strategically timed discomfort results in a long term stress resilience and B, in the case of testosterone, a rise in your receptor availability and sensitivity for testosterone stressors.
- [12:07]
Jillian Michaels
Improved testosterone receptors.
- [12:10]
Ben Greenfield
Well, strategic stressors in this case based on activation of muscles in the legs. Okay. Yeah.
- [12:16]
Jillian Michaels
So not just in general like the cold plunge.
- [12:19]
Ben Greenfield
Well anecdotally the cold plunge thing. So if you look at, there's, there's one guy who's super popular out there right now who is championing the idea of a pre workout cold plunge. And it works like gangbusters. There's, there's not actual research behind it. Most of the research is on post workout cold water immersion. But the idea is that the endorphin response and the endocrine response, like getting super cold right before you hit the gym is this big shot in the shoulder for giving you a really good workout performance. And I've done it. And it is true. The problem is it Introduces for a lot of people, like one extra bit of friction before you hit the gym. I'm lucky enough to where you walk out my, my kitchen patio door. You got to basically trip over a cold plunge on your way to the gym. So I can just like jump in there, have a dry towel sitting next to it, towel off and go into the gym.
- [13:08]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [13:09]
Ben Greenfield
But the, the testosterone cold piece, that's all based on like, what are like Russian power lifters icing their balls. Awful by the way. Like, like the manly man idea of getting into something cold and then going and putting on your Vik hat and lifting heavy weights. So lifting heavy weights with the legs would be another component. And then everything else when it comes to testosterone is pretty basic, right? Like low stress lifestyle as much as possible, adequate sleep, good relationships. So the reason I'm listing all these things off is back to the interest in testosterone replacement therapy. I tell guys, get the building blocks in place first. Make sure you're lifting heavy weights with your legs and get adequate sunshine. Go outside, try to de stress every once in a while. And that might be meditation or yoga or yoga nidra or a nap or something that allows you to check out at some point during the day, get adequate sleep at night, focus on relationships, which I know is easier said than done, and then go test your testosterone again, you know, six, eight weeks down the road and see what your levels are actually at. Now the number one reason that guys doing everything right would still have a need for testosterone replacement therapy is age. Like you just, you make less as you age and your receptor density declines as you age. And there's some guys who just genetically, you know, are, are less prone to that happening. But a lot of guys over 40 years old feel really good on testosterone. I started it three years ago and feel great.
- [14:45]
Jillian Michaels
You do everything right and you're young.
- [14:49]
Ben Greenfield
Do everything right, comma, did like masochistic endurance sports and iron man and super draining activities and caloric restriction and chronic repair, repetitive motion cardio and rampant amounts of inflammation for like 20 years. So I was pretty deprived to lower the same thing. So, so two reasons really. Like a, there is, there's, there's the idea that just like me biohacking now and doing all the crazy like gene therapies and young blood transfers and stem cells. Part of it's my job, right? Like yes, I was, I was travel riding and racing triathlon and getting paid, you know, slap a logo on my jersey and ride a bike and it was part of my job and I was coaching and so it fed into my career and, and it was fun. Like you're just out racing and traveling around the planet and dropping into, you know, competition. It was like the, the safe equivalent of being a modern day warrior, right, without guns and boats and, you know, everything that the armed forces has to deal with. And then secondarily. And this is why both of my sons have gone through a rite of passage into adolescence and also a rite of passage from Adolescen into adulthood. They're 17 years old. Now, my twin sons, we don't have a ceremonial systematized rite of passage, especially for men, built into their upbringing at some point. And so there are many men who go into their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, still trying to prove to the world that they're men, right, that, that they can go out and do something hard or build muscle or you know, in my case, do triathlons and obstacle course races. So part of it was the career component, but part of it too was just like, you know, I need to prove to the world that, you know, I'm capable, that I can do this, that I'm a man. I think my sons will have less pressure, right, because they've done like a 10 day vision quest in the wilderness and come out and had like a coming of age ceremony and they don't have that pressure to go out and just like prove themselves. So I think that feeds into it. They are also, young men largely are also enabled now to not take daring and dangerous acts towards manhood. And I realize it's kind of a catch 22 that if we had a whole bunch of single young men running around, you know, painting the town red and hitting the bars and getting in fights, that there would be an increase in aggressiveness and violence. But I would almost rather that than young men sitting in their basement using VR porn, never going out and just basically being brave, being courageous, being dangerous, actually getting into trouble sometimes. And even that is a part of the testosterone piece, right? Just this whole idea of like no sunlight, porn, low amounts of physical activity, video games.
- [17:45]
Jillian Michaels
I don't want to sound like a jerk, listen, but women cannot teach men how to be men. And I would argue that it's almost counterintuitive to a certain extent even it emasculates them. It's a very fine line. And there's teachers in school. Like the entire education system has become feminized. The future is female. And you kind of wonder if this is part of what's been making younger men have the testosterone level that a guy who was 30 years older than them had 30 years ago. If we're not playing some sort of role in this and you're not alone. Sebastian Younger said the same thing to me. Benny Johnson said the world was a better place when it was harder for men to see boobs. It's like here's how we give. Matt Walsh said the same thing to me.
- [18:33]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, it feeds into the ancestral mismatch that, that's kind of like part of the whole health message that both men and women face, which is that, you know, I'm sure a caveman would have killed to have lived in our post industrial era and yet we faced diseases of modernity that they never would have faced. Right. The ancient person diseases or things that killed them would have been a praying animal, famine, starvation, disease, and fast forward now, based on modern hygiene and based on our post industrial jobs, computers, transportation, etc. We instead face the diseases that are associated with the sedentary lifestyle paired with 247 access to hyper palatable foods. So, you know, it's obesity, it's diabetes, it's you know, gout, know you name it, like low back pain and hypogonadism. Because there is a direct link. And this is not like a hypothesis like the cold bath on your balls thing. This is like actually proven that going out and doing manual labor, especially outdoors, increases testosterone. And the problem is not a lot of guys have, you know, what I would consider to be almost like the luxury now of being a construction worker or a farmer. Sound like Corolla hauling rocks. There's got to be a group of.
- [19:52]
Jillian Michaels
You guys that create some sort of syllabus or curriculum for young men. Yeah, because you just kind of sit in your silos with this knowledge, but it isn't. And these boys fall into all the wrong hands in some cases.
- [20:05]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, it exists. There's pockets. Now there's even a book that just came out called the Preparation. I just ordered it, I haven't read it. But it's basically a manual for young men to enter into a lot of these blue collar careers, like how to be a fighter and, and how to be a pilot and how to be a farmer. And I think those kind of curriculums will be helpful. But we have to a certain extent fabricated that with gyms, for example, these boxes that we go into that an athlete or an Olympian or a warrior of old would have been the only person to frequent. And now we go in there because we figured out that we're going to die unless we fabricate some semblance of the Physical activity that we engaged in for thousands of years before we got to this point. And yet I would still say, like, I love the era that we live in. I would not want to go back and live in like the 1800s or the 1600s or the 2000s or whatever. But we do have a lot of issues, including this testosterone piece. And that's where I think I'm not opposed to better living through science. If you do want to actually connect with the doctor, if you're doing all those things right that I talked about earlier and get on some form of testosterone replacement therapy. Different doctors have different approaches. Right. Some will use a pellet, like literally just like inject a pellet in your backside. The problem with that is what you get is what you get. Like, that's what you're stuck with. You can't adjust the dosage, right. So let's say you get tested and you've got. And this can be an issue like over aromatization into estrogens. So now you're getting, you know, gynecomastia, man boobs, you know, just basically, which.
- [21:41]
Jillian Michaels
Means too much testosterone that ultimately can't be utilized and gets converted estrogen and is feminizing, which is the exact opposite of what you want.
- [21:49]
Ben Greenfield
Feminizing in excess oxygen is actually really good for both men and women for neural function. But once it gets above reference ranges, it can be problematic. Another issue can be DHT dihydrotestosterone, which is associated with male pattern baldness and sometimes elevated psa. And so you get like the, almost like the paradox of the guy who wants more muscle and wants to recover better and wants to have more testosterone and then goes bald. And it's just, it's just like sometimes the trade off that, you know, it's. And you, you sometimes see vice versa. Like you see guys who naturally have really high testosterone levels and you can like, you see like earlier onset of male pattern baldness. And it's just kind of the trade off.
- [22:33]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah.
- [22:34]
Ben Greenfield
However, if testosterone is administered improperly, let's say you get a pellet and it's too much. That can be an issue that you induce that you might not have otherwise got gotten. You know, for example, like, I've got a full head of hair. I have no issues. I've been on testosterone for three years. My hair keeps getting more and more out of control and I don't use a pellet. I also don't use an injection because the injection, which is typically a large bolus like one or two times a week Unless you're going to be like a human porcupine and take a little bit one or two times a day. Creates the issue of, kind of similar to the pellet, a big surge in testosterone, right? Which in no way mimics the natural diurnal variation, like twice a day, morning and late afternoon or early evening variation that a guy would normally experience just from natural testosterone production. And then you've got the. There's two other methods now that I think are pretty good and superior to the injections or the pills. One is oral and these are pretty new and they cause like a brief surge in testosterone. This would be like pre workout, pre performance, pre whatever. You want to jack up your testosterone levels for two or three hours for, and then they return to baseline pretty quickly. But it gives you that oomph that you need for times when you want to go. And then the last solution, the last popular solution right now is a cream. Typically it's applied a little bit scrotally in the morning, in the evening. The only downside to that is you have to wash your hands really well because otherwise you're going to get like transdermal testosterone absorption on whatever your 9 year old girl, your wife, your little boy. So yeah, you got to be super careful with it, but it's, it's pretty effective. Okay. And that's what I do is twice a day testosterone cream. The kind of like the halfway point that I think most guys should know about or be given the option for, especially if they're younger and want to maintain fertility, would be these things that can help to increase testosterone without impairing your own natural production. Because even for a guy like me who's been on it for a few years, if I were to stop right now, my natural levels would go down quite a bit.
- [24:55]
Jillian Michaels
Of course, right?
- [24:56]
Ben Greenfield
And I'm also impacting my fertility now. I'm done having children, so that's okay with me. But there are options like enclomiphene or Clomid, hcg, a ganatorelin would be another. Any of those three are either taken on their own to give you a bump up in testosterone above and beyond what you get from all the natural stuff that I talked about or given in conjunction with testosterone to help to maintain. Two things guys get concerned about when they're on testosterone, fertility and ball size. So there's some things you can throw into the mix to kind of like modulate what testosterone is going to do.
- [25:35]
Jillian Michaels
The goal would be to take this information and go speak with your internist who should be talking to about this because I don't really love that they're getting it online. They don't have an expert to help them disseminate all of these different options you just gave, like, what's the best way forward?
- [25:54]
Ben Greenfield
Ideally a functional medicine doctor. Right. There's a lot of networks of functional medicine doctors. Or it would also be known as like precision medicine. That would be another example of like, a doctor is going to use quantification to make decisions, which is above and beyond what a lot of GPS will do. Even though there's some really good GPS that can do this stuff. Endocrinologist is usually somebody who you're going to get a referral to from a gp. And that will typically only be if you've presented with hypogonadism. And then the last piece would be one of these, like online, you know, testosterone prescribing factories. But you need to go in there equipped with the knowledge, like, it's easy to get what you want to get. But that doesn't mean that they're going to think of all the stuff or know about or implement all the stuff that I just talked about. Because for them, like, testosterone is the giant ass band aid that just fixes everything.
- [26:48]
Jillian Michaels
Right.
- [26:48]
Ben Greenfield
So you have to, like, proceed with caution. But if you just want to get it and then, you know, implement all this other stuff on the side, you certainly can.
- [26:56]
Jillian Michaels
Let's talk about peptides for a second because we brought them up briefly when it comes to sex drive. And you reference one I haven't even heard of, which I'm surprised about. Yeah, okay. This is, in my opinion, from what I can tell of it, from what I've heard from people like yourself and others, it could be a miracle of modern medicine. Then you go and you'll speak to another doctor and they're like, well, we really don't know. We don't have long term studies on human beings. And I kind of table that for a second. But what I know, if we're sold.
- [27:31]
Ben Greenfield
For human research only.
- [27:32]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, here we go. And I've been guilty.
- [27:35]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [27:36]
Jillian Michaels
And talked myself out of it. When I wrote a freaking op ed for the Daily Mail. I'm like, I gotta stop doing it. It's. So now people are gonna listen to us. I would. I'm already like, oh, I want that spray that I can put in my nose and I can blend these two things and. But Ben, people are getting it on the gray market and there's, you know, there have been rumors that labs have tested this stuff and it's like. Well, there's cheap hormones. The doses are all wrong.
- [28:01]
Ben Greenfield
There's metals, there's bacterial lipo polysaccharide contamination, which is huge. Like, everybody's like skipping seed oils and glucose because they don't want to mess up their gut. A big part of that is lipopolysaccharide production and you can inject that with an impure peptide.
- [28:15]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [28:15]
Ben Greenfield
Which is an issue.
- [28:16]
Jillian Michaels
So let's talk about this. Number one, tell me, tell everybody what peptides are and the things that they can do and the hopes that you have for them.
- [28:26]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah. How much time you got for the things? Well, with the thing, with the things that you can do part. Because there's like massive, like there's hundreds of them, Right?
- [28:32]
Jillian Michaels
Exactly.
- [28:32]
Ben Greenfield
It, it just take days and days to go through all of them. But every peptide is just a short chain of an amino acid or a short chain of amino acids. Right. Insulin is probably the one that people are most familiar with. So it's not as though all peptides are just like dangerous and forbidden and unapproved. Like millions of diabetics injects insulin every day. Another example would be any of these GLP1 agonists that people use for weight loss. That's a peptide and that actually has a lot of long term research on it specifically for diabetic populations. Right. So there are certain peptides that are like approved and you get a prescription from your doctor. You can also buy the same stuff on the gray market. I mean, if you really want to. No reason to do this. You can go buy insulin on the gray market. Right. Some bodybuilders do that. Right. To be able to get more anabolic, more insulinogenic, shove more glucose into muscle tissue and recover faster. But you can imagine the potential for insulin sensitivity issues if you're doing something, and potential hypoglycemia if you did it wrong. You could basically go into a coma if you messed around with insulin improperly. But that's the deep dark world of bodybuilding. That's why they can look like they look. That's not the only reason. But that's a reason. And then GLPs, that's another kind of big, deep, dark rabbit hole because you have GLP1 agonists that act on these hunger mechanisms and satiety inducing mechanisms. And then you have newer and newer agonists that are all just different chains of different amino acids. Apparently there's a newer one coming out soon that's like a quintide type of thing where it targets five different mechanisms associated with hunger. Retatrutide, right now is the most powerful that I know of is GLP1, GIP and ghrelin. Right. So you've got gastrointestinal polypeptide I think is what the GIP is. And then glucagon like peptide and ghrelin. So three different mechanisms that it's working on. And what's interesting is there is what's called a pleiotropic effect of these peptides, meaning that they can act systemically, they can decrease neural inflammation, they can balance lipids, they can obviously control hunger, cause you to feel fuller, faster at standard doses, which is what most doctors are prescribing and which is one of the only ways to get the like, you know, clean. Not sold for human research only versions of these. They can cause a lot of side issues. And everybody's heard of these by now, unless you're living under a rock, right?
- [31:17]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah.
- [31:17]
Ben Greenfield
Stomach problems, slow gastric motility, so you're constipated inflammation and there's just more corn in your crap and corn kernels and, and carrot shreds and quinoa and then there's.
- [31:29]
Jillian Michaels
I mean I hope that they'll find that in there, but it's like it could be worse.
- [31:32]
Ben Greenfield
Everybody gets a little bit of that.
- [31:33]
Jillian Michaels
But yeah, McDonald's french fries in there anyway, everything.
- [31:37]
Ben Greenfield
Potato skins and pumpkin seeds, that's another one. And so then you get of course the issue with you sitting down to a meal. And I actually injected a standard dose once just to see what it felt like. And the effects lasted for a week. And I would, you know, you see all of the advice out there to eat adequate protein and adequate calories so you don't get ozempic face and you don't lose heart muscle tissue along with skeletal muscle tissue and all the issues that go along with under eating. And then you sit down to actually have that whatever, you know, 20 gram whey protein smoothie or you know, piece of steak the size of your palm or whatever it is that you're supposed to do at each meal, meal and you don't want to eat and it makes you nauseous and you want to throw up and so you don't eat it. And this would happen to me. I like make my blueberry coconut whey protein smoothie with cacao nibs and bee pollen and coconut flakes and colostrum and sit down and be like, dude, I just wasted like 15 bucks. I don't want this, I can't drink it. And so Then you go to do the other thing that people tell you to do, which is hit the gym with Twitch pump iron. Yep. Well, I mean, I mean, you've probably gone to the gym without eating before. You just, you can't dig and you don't want to lift heavy weights and you can do like some body weight stuff. And so maybe you're doing some crunches and some elastic bands or whatever, but anything that's relatively glycolytic, that's going to burn adequate calories and carbohydrates and actually build muscle, you're just not motivated to do so. It creates this vicious feedback loop. So that's a problem. And you can get some of the benefits of the GLPs or these newer agonists in smaller doses. Micro dosing, one tenth the dose. But then the issue is, the issue with all of these peptides, you need to figure out where you're going to get a clean version. And the one place that's typically safe to get them is to go through a doctor who's got access to a compounding pharmacy who's going to produce a clean version in the dose that you need and get that to you. Whether it's GLP1 or whether it's PT141 or all these other Star wars robot named, you know, peptides BPC and, and TB 500 and, you know, all the popular ones. And that's difficult for a lot of people to do, especially when, you know, every fifth post on any health person's social media feed is like, this is the new peptide. And there's like 20 different companies out there, so it's tough.
- [34:03]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, so, so my friend, I think you, I think you guys know each other. Brigham Bueller, who, who runs revive pharmacy and ways 12. He can't make them anymore. He's like, we're not allowed.
- [34:15]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [34:15]
Jillian Michaels
He's like, I'm too big.
- [34:16]
Ben Greenfield
The FDA has basically cracked down on the compounding pharmacy's ability to make peptides.
- [34:20]
Jillian Michaels
And so now everyone's like, what do you think about Trump making GLP1s cheaper? I'm like, this is America, you know, people should be able to do whatever they want. What I would like to see is them allowing compounding pharmacies to make these things so they can microdose it. This is where I've actually come to a place based on information I've been given from people like yourself, that these things could be really beneficial in significantly smaller doses.
- [34:46]
Ben Greenfield
Yep.
- [34:47]
Jillian Michaels
And I'll, I'll do you one more.
- [34:48]
Ben Greenfield
You mean the GLPs.
- [34:49]
Jillian Michaels
Yes.
- [34:50]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [34:51]
Jillian Michaels
Brigham was telling me that before this came to a screeching halt because of the fda, they were pairing these peptides in a micro dose with IGF1LR3, like.
- [35:03]
Ben Greenfield
A growth hormone precursor hormone secretagog, you know.
- [35:08]
Jillian Michaels
But the time he's done talking to me, I'm this close to injecting this stuff in my eyeballs.
- [35:13]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [35:13]
Jillian Michaels
I'm like, wait a minute, hold on.
- [35:15]
Ben Greenfield
I'm.
- [35:16]
Jillian Michaels
I'm. I mean, I don't actually have weight to lose, but just the IGF1LR3. I'm like, let's talk about this one, right?
- [35:22]
Ben Greenfield
Recovery sleep. Yeah. You got like Tessa Morellin and Ipamorelin and Saramorelin, which are great for growth hormone. If you cycle them throughout the year and then you get injured and you have BPC157 and TB500, you travel and you can inject Thymus and Alpha One to make your own, you know, basically T cells to amp up your immune system. And all of these are pretty useful. But you have to basically proceed at your own risk. Like, I do order peptides online.
- [35:54]
Jillian Michaels
I have to.
- [35:54]
Ben Greenfield
There's a couple companies that I've used and, and I think just to. For the reasons of safety, I would just say do your own research on peptide websites. I'm not going to name them here because I don't.
- [36:06]
Jillian Michaels
I know, don't.
- [36:06]
Ben Greenfield
I don't want something to happen financially affiliated with such and such, so I'm just going to leave all that. But. I know, but you do have to proceed at your own risk. Now this is coming from like, you know, I've done blood filtration in Tijuana, Mexico, and got, you know, liters of human plasma dripped into my body in Texas and done gene therapy in Cabo. Like, I've, I've done some kind of fringe protocols that would be considered probably just as risky as injecting a peptide made for human research only. But you have to accept the fact that if you're going to mess around with this stuff, you're kind of doing what a lot of bodybuilders do, and you're just basically assuming based on the mechanism of action that something would be safe if you, if you use it reasonably, but it's not without risk because of lack of long term human clinical trials.
- [36:53]
Jillian Michaels
Can I tell you, there's what a lot of biohackers.
- [36:55]
Ben Greenfield
Okay, yeah.
- [36:56]
Jillian Michaels
Well, so my wife has this autoimmune condition and, you know, to really make this a questionable freaking podcast, she noticed it got worse after the COVID shot. And it has to do with skin. It's this weird condition called anitoderma. And weird as in like, no one's ever heard of it. Even our internist, who's also a rheumatologist, is like, man, this is super duper rare. And nothing could sort of calm this down. It would make her skin burn. Like, she'd bend down to pick something up and her skin would burn. And I did some research and I was like, I don't know, babe, like, at some point you gotta make a choice on your own. But I could put together a protocol. I put together a protocol of like, you know, BPC157, TB500, thymosin, alpha KPV, like all these.
- [37:46]
Ben Greenfield
Right. You basically got immune modulators and anti inflammators.
- [37:49]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, exactly. And I, you know, had some friends I could talk to, did a little research online. And this is terribly irresponsible of me to say, but it made a huge difference for her.
- [38:02]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [38:03]
Jillian Michaels
And like, I'm trying to discourage people from going to random sites on the freaking gray market. God forbid something terrible happens, which I'm sure it's going to be inevitable, but at the same time, it's exceptionally frustrating because if you can fix joints without knee replacements, possibly, and you can boost sex drive to help marriages without people thinking testosterone's way. I can't tell you how many menopausal women I know are actually using testosterone cream thinking this is going to be the key to boosting their immunity or I'm sorry, their sex drive. And it isn't the kind of panacea or this, this kind of cure all for that issue that they were hoping it would be. What do you think? When does this. Does this stuff become.
- [38:47]
Ben Greenfield
I. I don't know. They're. They're.
- [38:49]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah.
- [38:50]
Ben Greenfield
You know, and this is like the whole conspiracy thing. There's probably some pharmaceutical lobbying at play to keep what is a pretty inexpensive solution to a lot of medical issues from getting into the hands of the populace. So I would say like, you know, look, look into them and proceed with. With a reasonable amount of information. The main things that I would consider would be ask if a company can produce lab coa certificate of analysis for their peptides for the cleanliness that they've been tested for purity. You can actually ask that. And if they don't have it on their website, you can contact them and ask it. I know that introduces friction into the whole buying process, but it's worth taking the extra step. Don't and I know I'm painting with a really broad brush here by peptide ties that came from China. Like that's one of the biggest sources of contamination. USA and Germany are good sources. And then I'm blanking on what they call it might be the CGMP registered facility. It might be FDA approved facility, but there is a certain cleanliness that goes into the facility that they're manufactured in if they're made in USA and Germany. And I'm blanking whether it's CGMP or fda.
- [40:00]
Jillian Michaels
Pharmacies have this, don't they?
- [40:01]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, it's basically like a facility certification. They'll advertise it on their website if they do. But basically looking at where it's from, where it's made, like what factory it's made in and then or what manufacturing facility it's made in and then whether they have a lab coa. And that way at least you're covering your ass to a certain extent.
- [40:17]
Jillian Michaels
Would you look into that lab cert? So in other words, I showed one of my partners in this little supplement company and like this one company and lab certification and he goes, but like how do you know they didn't make GPT could make this? Yep.
- [40:33]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, yeah.
- [40:34]
Jillian Michaels
He's like, how do you know they didn't make this with the freaking. The AI?
- [40:37]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [40:37]
Jillian Michaels
And I googled it. But it's like the most random jank band.
- [40:41]
Ben Greenfield
It's a wager. And there's also like the social piece. Like there are some peptide companies that have some pretty well known functional medicine doctors using their peptides now that they're not using compounding pharmacists. And if they're associated with a doctor who's working with a lot of patients, I mean again, it doesn't mean 100% sure that they're clean. But look into the ones that some the big functional medicine docs are associated with.
- [41:03]
Jillian Michaels
Those are exceptional guidelines. You know, as time has gone on, I've almost tried to push people away from biohacking despite the fact that of course I love it. I'm fascinated. I have all these questions for you, like gene this, that like okay, I hearing about it, you're talking, I'm going to ask you questions. But I worry that too much of this gets people not to focus on the big rocks that you mentioned before turning to testosterone supplementation. How much of this stuff is hey guys, like don't overeat, use common sense with your food choices, get your sleep, manage your stress, go outside, get the sun, move your body. Are we going to accomplish 90% of the things we want doing those things? Or do you think it's like, Jill, you're living in the dark ages.
- [41:50]
Ben Greenfield
There's no way to know the percentage. You're not living in the dark ages. And this is something I'm always careful to delineate to people who read my work or listen to my show or anything. I live life with like one foot in the realm of modern science and one foot in the realm of ancestral wisdom. Meaning like I live in a total stupid home. There's no technologies that are connected to WI fi. You know, the lighting is all circadian friendly, the floors are grounded, but it's almost like this. As close as I can get to fabricating a modern day deep, dark natural cave. And I spend time outdoors and it's a 12 acre farm. So we're hauling rocks and alfalfa bales and building stuff and digging dirt and you know, cleaning ponds and we're outdoors a lot. We're grounding, we're earthing, we're living close to our ancestors. And yet on a dark cloudy day, I've like got a red light bed that I will go and lay down in to get all of my, you know, red and mid and near and far infrared exposure for mitochondrial health or for skin health. And when I get off an airplane, like I'm flying home from LA on Monday and before dinner on Monday night, I'll probably climb into a hyperbaric chamber and just like go after a little bit of hyperoxia because of the hypoxic, you know, three hour event that I've all have experienced just traveling home on the airplane, I sometimes have ruminating thoughts and I have a hard time turning off my brain and I could probably just go outside and lay there with an eye mask or whatever and meditate, but I climb underneath this like light sound therapy machine that basically makes it feel like I've taken a bunch of magic mushrooms, but none of the side effects of that. And the whole chair vibrates underneath me and it just whisks me off to another planet for like, like 30 or 40 minutes in the middle of a hard work day. And I wouldn't be able to achieve that, that hack, right, that shortcut, that overriding of my os of course in a native state, unless I was, you know, unless I moved to the Himalayas and you know, took meditation classes for 20 years or whatever. So you know, when, when you look at a lot of these bioacts, you know, Peptides would be an example, like yeah, you could Just like whatever, shut up the inner and not be hungry. Or you could inject some peptides, right? And so a lot of this stuff, it's like well, well you know, I think there, there's, yeah, there's value to, to an approach that utilizes both. And if you look at a lot of biohacks, many of them, if you look at red light, right, Simulating what we get from sunlight or earthing and grounding and PEMF mats and shoes and mattress tops. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy is what PMF therapy is. It's basically like taking the natural frequencies that the earth would admit that we would with all the negative ions and hertz frequencies that are, that are healing and anti inflammatory. I mean and, and this is not just you know, biohacker, hippie, Petulia bullshit like this. This is actually stuff that you can find on PubMed. There is a transdermal conduction from the surface of the earth to your skin. Like every time lightning strikes the surface of the planet and solar radiation bombards earth, it actually collects ions and those are transferred into your body, which is why there's anti inflammatory potential from going outside barefoot, from walking on the beach, from swimming in the ocean. But if I'm like at my desk all day and I have an eight hour workday, I'm standing on a grounding mat or I'm like doing my 10 minutes of stretching in the morning while I'm laying on a PEMF mat, which is kind of similar, but it's just like a much, much higher concentration of that same electricity. And then if you look at like, like cold, yeah, you could work all day outside in the winter, but maybe that's not your job and you don't have the ability to do that. You live in Florida or whatever. So you're going to do a, like a daily cold plunge to mimic some form of thermal stress and very similarly with heat. Right. Like maybe you're not hiking all day, gathering food, hunting like our ancestors, but you're going to go do a sauna session a few times a week to simulate that heat. So you're essentially almost like using biohacking to fabricate the same stimuli or discomfort that you would have experienced if you weren't living in kind of like this modern era where we're disconnected from a lot of that.
- [45:59]
Jillian Michaels
I love the way you.
- [45:59]
Ben Greenfield
So that's part of it because I.
- [46:02]
Jillian Michaels
Always just think of it as like some bullshit magic bullet. Not, not this what you're talking about, but more so the way that people.
- [46:10]
Ben Greenfield
But that's the problem is the people who are, you know, visiting, you know, you know, whatever. There's, there's so many clinics out there, like even here in la, right? You got love life and you have Next health and you have Hume and you know, you can't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting some biohacking facility in la. And it's not the only city that's like that, Austin, Miami. But you got the people who are just like indoors all day, you know, back to the like the sedated male hypothesis thing of the guys in their basement and then they're just like, you know, getting in their car, you know, and you know, using their electronic self driving Tesla to go and lay in a red light bed and put on NormaTec boots and hang out on a PMF mat. And they're not actually just like maybe occasionally like hiking up a mountain in a weighted vest or swinging a kettlebell or you know, jumping into an actual icy cold lake rather than, you know, very climate controlled room with one cold tub in the middle of it. And it's just pristine and clean and everything's predictable. So even part of that comes down to, you know, not being the biohacker who's like cold and hungry and libido less huddled inside of a hyperbaric chamber as your primary health routine, but just using a lot of these technologies as icing on the cake in a reasonable and balanced way. And then a lot of the fringe stuff like whatever, like gene therapy, let's talk about that. Blood filtration, plasma filtration. Yeah, we can talk about that. But okay, just, just as we, as we talk about these ideas like this is the stuff that would be highly experimental but that may add extra years to life. We have no clue because there's no long term human clinical research on much of the this. It would be used for that. It would be used to fast track even over and above what you might be able to get if you were already lifting weight, something like, you know, follow statin gene therapy, for example. And then finally it would be used for management of a disease or a condition that you might not have been able to solve through allopathic medicine, through alternative medicine, through functional medicine, such as a really heavy Covid spike protein burden that you go to Tijuana, Mexico and lay in a hospital bed with, you know, your blood getting pulled out via catheter in your jugular and pass through a filter, you know, to actually pull out all the blood and put it through a filtration medium that is sticky that spike protein sticks to and then the blood goes back into your body. That's real. That's real. I've done it. Not because I had Covid, but because I work with people who have issues like that. And I wanted to know, like, what it was that I was recommending them to go down to Tijuana and do.
- [48:51]
Jillian Michaels
I'm kind of obsessed with skims. I think you've gotten that by now. But my new thing is their sleepwear set. They're kind of like the Goldilocks zone of pajamas. You're super duper cozy, but you're never hot. Then you're never cold. And the fabric feels amazing on your skin, so much so that you. You almost leave the house in them to run your errands throughout the day. And I know this sounds cheesy, but I know you know what I'm talking about. They're so comfortable. You could literally live in them. And this is just one of the things that I love about skims. All of their stuff, whether it's the bras, the underwears, the sleepwear, even the gym clothes, are just incredibly comfortable and practical and it doesn't break your bank. Plus, the holidays are upon us. And I'm sure you have a special pair of holiday jammies. So, guys, you can shop my my favorite pajamas@skims.com and after you place your order, please do me a favor and let them know that I sent you. So you just select podcast in the survey and be sure to select my show in the drop down menu that follows. And if you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the skims holiday shop is now open@skims.com it's that time of year, guys, and when it comes to holiday gifting, I want to give things people really love love, right? Beautiful, timeless pieces that they can wear for years. And that's why Quince is one of my go to's. They've got everything from Mongolian cashmere sweaters to Italian wool coats. Everything is premium quality at a price that actually makes sense. And Quince has something for everyone. As mentioned, those Mongolian cashmere sweaters, they're only 50 bucks and they feel like designer pieces pieces. They've got silk tops and skirts for when you need to get dressed up. They've got perfectly cut denim for everyday wear. They've got outerwear that actually keeps you warm. And those Italian wool coats that I mentioned, they're standout pieces. They're beautifully tailored, soft to the touch, and they last for seasons, literally. I've had one for about three years now, and I live in it every winter. Every piece is made with premium materials from, from ethical, trusted factories. And they're priced below what other luxury brands would charge. The craftsmanship shows in every detail. The stitching, the fit, the drape. It's elevated, timeless, and made to wear on repeat. So find gifts so good you're gonna want to keep them with quince. Just go to Quince.com Jillian for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada as well. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com Jillian to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Jillian okay, okay, hold on. I actually don't think I could get through the thing in the jugular to be dead.
- [51:43]
Ben Greenfield
Well, the hard, the hardest part is when you gotta go. So they take you in a wheelchair. Tijuan is actually nice now, like tequila and ping pong balls. And so I like. They put you in a wheelchair and just like wheel you across, like, back and forth. This luxury hospital, this luxury hotel room with, like, great food and everything's catered. But it is hard because every night you go to bed, you have the catheter still, like in your jugular. And so you're just like laying there. Like, what if I roll over the wrong way and I bleed out?
- [52:12]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah.
- [52:12]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah. Whoa.
- [52:13]
Jillian Michaels
That's intense.
- [52:14]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [52:15]
Jillian Michaels
Did you feel better? Did you notice a difference?
- [52:17]
Ben Greenfield
I felt like a little bit of an uptick in energy. But a lot of this stuff I'm doing as either a coach or a consultant or an immersive journalist, not because I have. Have a problem to fix. So for me, I'll usually notice, oh, I feel really good, you know, clean energy. But I'm. I'm actually pretty healthy as it is. So a lot of the stuff I'm doing is just like. I don't want to sound like I'm not speaking from humility, but it's almost like going from good to great. I don't have a lot of problems, of course, so I'm just doing this stuff out of curiosity to write about it, to tell people about it.
- [52:50]
Jillian Michaels
Okay. When we look at all of these things. Things. So gene therapy. I remember watching Brian Johnson do a video going off the coast of Nicaragua somewhere.
- [53:00]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [53:00]
Jillian Michaels
And he's like, I'm gonna edit my jeans.
- [53:04]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah. It's like this new longevity city that they're building. I think it's done by Panama.
- [53:09]
Jillian Michaels
It's because it's not legal here. And it's like, well, there's a kill switch if something goes wrong. I think it was antibiotic.
- [53:17]
Ben Greenfield
Antibiotic, yeah. Right.
- [53:18]
Jillian Michaels
And I'm just, I'm like, how this sounds nuts. And every day I tune in to see if Brian's alive. I'm like, he's alive, he's alive, he's live. And I really respect that, honestly, because it's like you guys are scouts. You're going forward, you're trying it, you're being the guinea pigs. But it. Do you ever worry that like you're gonna wake up one day with a tumor somewhere from this stuff that you do?
- [53:43]
Ben Greenfield
So if you look. I mean, I'm going to just like delve into the mechanism of action behind your question. If you look at a lot of these things, whether it's testosterone replacement therapy or growth hormone peptides or follistatin gene therapy or plasma replacement therapy. Excuse me. They all induce some amount of an anabolic state that would allow you to maintain vitality and muscle mass and strength with age. So you're basically staving off the onset of sarcopenia and arguably osteopenia. Because a big part of loss of bone density is the tendons pulling against the long ends of the bone, not just the compression, which is like the strength of your muscles. So if you look at kind of like the other side of the longevity world, kind of like the, the cold, hungry libido list laying inside the hyperbaric chamber side of. It's like limit proteins, don't activate MTOR excessively and, and you know, and put yourself into a state where there is a low potential for carcinogenicity and you know, out of control cellular growth because you're not in an anabolic state very much at all. It's difficult because there's like these two worlds and you have to balance both of them. Because on the one hand we have the advice for protein restriction, then we have the guys doing like amino acid and folastatin gene therapy and all these things that would upregulate muscle protein synthesis. And then you've got like whatever, fasting, calorie restriction, etc, and when you're doing human plasma replacement therapy, you're basically dumping a bunch of highly bioactive MTOR disinhibited compounds like exosomes and growth factors. And when I did this in Texas, which is the only state where it's legal, it's a very similar procedure to what Brian Johnson did. I'm laying there in a clinic in Austin getting 101 liter bag eggs of young 18 to 25 year old human male donor plasma infused into my body as my own is taking out. So it's like an oil change for the body and then you're replacing it with a bunch of young stuff. But it kind of flies in the face of, you know, don't be too anabolic.
- [55:51]
Jillian Michaels
So I want to put this in English for people and correct me if I get it wrong, but long story short is like you got the one side, it's like don't eat too much, it's too oxidative, stress your body won't get into to autophagy, which is like when we starve it and we deprive it of eating too much food. Long story short is it will cull dead and senescent tissue so tumors can't grow and we're not feeding them with growth hormones and insulin growth factors like insulin things. I'm sorry is what I meant. And I fell into that world very heavily actually, the David Sinclair world and was all the way down that rabbit hole when I got torn into shreds by Lane Norton, who's anybody who doesn't know him as a PhD in nutrition science and took the exact opposite approach, the approach you're talking about. So of course I invited him on and I walked away being like that's wrong, this is right. And then Gabrielle Lyons, same thing.
- [56:43]
Ben Greenfield
Yep. But it's like they're, it's a balance. Back to the ancestral thing. Like what do humans thrive on? Press, pulse, cycling, beast, famine, cycling, cycling, like feed, recover, work recover. So what that looks like is there's some element of like the anti growth stuff that you can just weave into your life. This would be for example, a daily 12 hour intermittent fast. A certain period of time a few times a year where you might be doing something like a fasting, mimicking diet that someone somewhat protein restricted, right. Where you go like four or five days cellular cleanup, not as much protein as you normally take in. And maybe once a month doing like a 24 hour dinner time to dinner time fast. You're doing some things that are going to allow you to maintain a little bit of that catabolic state. Like a lot of these mild hormetic stressors spread throughout the day, you know, the sauna, the cold plunge, you know, walking and staying physically active, you know, even lifting weights. You could argue that that is catabolic without the actual feeding cycle afterwards. So you know, you're lifting weights all year long. But there are certain periods of time where you're not in a state of caloric excess or even caloric balance. So it's all about making sure that. And this would be even the same reason that, you know, if you're going to do growth hormone peptide. Right.
- [58:12]
Jillian Michaels
Like, gotta ask you about all that.
- [58:14]
Ben Greenfield
You would typically take, like a standard cycle would be you're doing something like injecting Tessamorelin in the morning and you're injecting something like love these names, CJC, Ipamorelin or Serumorelin in the evening. And you're doing that five days on, two days off for 12 weeks of the year and then taking a 12 week break and then doing it for another 12 weeks. Right. So it's always the idea of not being in a constant.
- [58:39]
Jillian Michaels
These are these washout periods with peptides that they recommend.
- [58:44]
Ben Greenfield
Exactly. But every, everything I just described is loosey goosey. Right.
- [58:47]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [58:48]
Ben Greenfield
There's no actual science plan.
- [58:49]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, here's exactly how do people know now? All right, I'm gonna take this on and you know, you'd think that this is kind of rarefied air. People would hear this and switch off. The reality is everyone's doing it. Everyone that I know is doing it. How do they get dosing information.
- [59:07]
Ben Greenfield
For peptides? Yeah, I mean dosing peptides, like that's, that's not hard to find.
- [59:14]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [59:15]
Ben Greenfield
But you're still dealing with lack of long term human clinical research on the dosing that you find. And a lot of this is coming from just like you know, 20 years of bodybuilding forums or Reddit or you know, whatever GPT has found. So it is a little difficult. And then, and if you look at kind of another big aspect of the biohacking world, self quantification, you can kind of sort of keep your finger on the pulse of what's going on. Right. So if you have really high, let's say hemoglobin A1C, a three month snapshot of your blood glucose values, and maybe you're wearing a continuous blood glucose monitor and seeing a high amount of blood glucose spikes or high average blood glucose and you have really high insulin like growth factor or elevated insulin value values. And you have, let me think of another example. Let's say you've got, well, you would actually see this associated with a highly anabolic state, in some cases rampant levels of inflammation, just like this, this, all these signs that you're in pro growth mode. And then maybe you're even taking a deeper dive and doing like a cancer blood biopsy. Like, like a grail or one of These tests that can actually look for cancer markers or as much as I think they produce a pretty large laundry list of false positives, something like a full body mri. So you can kind of sort of use some of these blood tests or a full body MRIs to, you know, like on a yearly basis or you know, once every two years to know if you are producing being, you know, a pro growth state. But you're still like playing like you're, you're, you're trading a little bit of the unknown for, you know, body brain longevity. But you have to accept the fact that it comes with risks. And that, that's, that's a tricky part for me because I'm like, you know, I do a lot of the biohacking stuff and yet I still try to present people with reasonable information that's backed by research when it comes to health and fitness. You do. But there's a big part, a big part of what I do, I have to tell people. Look like there's no reason for me to tell you that this is 100 safe. Like if you go to Texas and do plasma, go to Tijuana, get your blood filtered or take peptides or, you know, and so if you want to be 100 safe, you know, swing kettlebells, hit the cold plunge, get in the sauna, right? Eat adequate protein, don't stuff your face 24 7, like, you know, the fundamental principles, still you, you use the figure 90%. That's probably close to accurate. It's hard to say. But if you want to play it totally safe, you know, do that stuff.
- [61:52]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [61:53]
Ben Greenfield
But then people take proven long term stuff like fish oil, creatine, like this stuff that's just got like reams of research behind it.
- [61:58]
Jillian Michaels
I'll give you one that I think a lot of people do care about. Despite the fact that arguably it's less sexy as we get older. You are facing cognitive decline. Some of us have an Alzheimer's gene. I do. There's Parkinson's in my family. I've got nicotine gum in my mouth right now because the whole MAHA crew got me on it. You know, with all the research, I'm like, well, you know, it could prevent Parkinson's.
- [62:23]
Ben Greenfield
They don't talk as much about the vasoconstriction and they should.
- [62:26]
Jillian Michaels
But yeah, okay, so, so I limit it.
- [62:28]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [62:29]
Jillian Michaels
And I want to, I want to explain what that means to the listener. I have no more than 2 milligrams a day, no more than five days a week. But I take it it for ADD does help me focus, I take it, in the hopes that it will prevent the onset of Parkinson's or delay any progression of Alzheimer's. Along with caffeine, along with Ben, a freaking host of peptides. One that I shipped in from Russia called Cerebralyzin. And I felt a little bit better about that one because they've been using it in Russia for 20 years on people who were stroke victims. Do you like, do you think this is not just like I wanted a harder erection and I want six pack abs. I'm trying to prevent pooping my pants and not knowing my kids names in the next 20 years.
- [63:25]
Ben Greenfield
Right.
- [63:26]
Jillian Michaels
Is this something? Because right now they're nowhere. Fish oil. That's what I've got. Exercise in fish oil.
- [63:34]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah. And it'd be nice if there was like a magic pill. This is why I like the work of guys like Dale Bredesen, for example. Dwayne Goodenow, I think, I think that's how you pronounce his name. Has some really interesting work on Alzheimer's as well based on some compounds that help to support the cell membranes. But it's a very multimodal approach, meaning if you look at Del Bredesen's protocol, you've got hyperbaric and you have, you know, head worn intracranial or intranasal red light therapy and you have fish oil and you have ketones. You know, creatine is playing an emerging role in neurological issues. And then you have like, you know, an anti inflammatory diet and you know, nicotine may fit into the equation especially for like the Parkinson's piece. And you have certain blood flow precursors for the brain, you know, like, you know, Huperzine and ginkgo biloba and then certain things that help with the gasoline for the brain like acetylcholine or phosphatidylcholine or choline rich foods like walnuts and eggs and fish. So it's, you know, it's just like building muscle. Right. Like if you wanted to just like be as, you know, as yoked as possible, you know, it's not just like lift weight, just lift weights and it's protein and it's creatine and you know, and you know, sometimes the growth hormone piece, there's a lot that fits into the equation.
- [64:53]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah.
- [64:53]
Ben Greenfield
I think that, that when it comes.
- [64:56]
Jillian Michaels
To hear me, what do you do for cognition, mental acuity, verbal fluidity, recall and prevention of dementia? What would you do?
- [65:09]
Ben Greenfield
You can find information out there until you're blue in the face. But everything that I Just described, like Del Bredesen's book, the End of Alzheimer's. Like, just stacking that protocol, I think is reasonable. His research is anecdotal, but. But it's anecdotal with decent patient sizes. So I think his work is really good. He doesn't talk a lot about these peptides, and there are three in particular. There's actually a fourth, newer one. I'm totally gonna blank on its name. It's a long one.
- [65:39]
Jillian Michaels
Is it Cortexin, Penneolon, Epithelon, Dihexa?
- [65:43]
Ben Greenfield
No, it's got a name like pt. It starts with an S. Okay. Anyways, though. So cerebralysin, C Max, and C. Lank would be the top three peptides that you can take intranasally that you could stack for something like this. You know, all of those protocols. Like, there's a device called the V light that you can wear on your head that does intracranial and intranasal red light. Regular use of a hyperbaric chamber, fish oil. High amount of omega 3 fatty acid intake, good creatine intake, preferably like the 10 plus grams. It's more associated with neurological function. And all of this is spelled out in a book like that. And then Duane's book. Duane Goodenow. I forget the name of his book. But he also talks about these precursors that help with the membrane stability. And he's got some good research in that book as well. So do you do nicotine gun? This is kind of similar. I'll talk about the nicotine in a second. I don't. Don't leave this part of our conversation. I have used nicotine, so I'll come back to nicotine gum and close the loop. No, you can keep it in. I'm going to close the loop on this because it'd be gross. If you take it out right now, you don't have to live with it. Now I'm freaked out under the desk. So with the Alzheimer's dementia piece, this is kind of similar to what you see in just like the biohacking, fitness health world in general. I want to pop the pill, I want to use the gadget, I want to use the technology. Whereas the things that, you know, produce blood, sweat, tears. In the case of what we're talking about right now, smoke come out your ears would be the things that also really move the dial that are a little less comfortable. This means like learning a musical instrument that you practice that kind of makes you focus on the notes and memorize things. And you have the hand eye coordination and the dexterity, doing things like, you know, learning how to spell the Alphabet backwards and playing brain games and getting little brain books like brain aerobics and you're doing the crossword puzzle. The things that take a little bit more time and a little bit more mental strain and stress. Your brain is very much like a muscle in that regard. You have to push it. I mean, just for you to be having interesting conversations with people on a wide variety of topics, that counts. But I think, you know, or you felt the difference between that and, you know, I'm no Andrew Huberman, so I probably can't explain every last anatomical region of the brain that you are stimulating now versus doing that. But there's a difference between the conversation we're having right now, which is stimulating and interesting. And we both kind of, we got to stay sharp right now because there's people listening and we're diving into all these different topics and you know, you don't know what I'm going to say and I don't know what you're going to ask, ask. But at the same time, it's different than you going home tonight. And just like learning to play the ukulele or doing a crossword puzzle or even just like, we love to do this. We play family games every single night at the dinner table. And it's like rhetoric and logic and conflict revolution, resolution, like learning new rules and we buy a new game once or twice a month. And that's one of the best, best ways to keep the brain sharp because the kids now are just having to constantly learn all the time and it's hard to learn a game. Like there's all these mechanics and rules and it's just like a new thing that keeps your brain sharp. So that's, I think, the most important thing that people need to hear because a lot of the other stuff is not hard to find. I mean, I just mentioned a book and a few peptides and it's also not besides the dent in your pocketbook, like hard to see, just like buy this stuff and whatever. Wear a red light headset while you're checking your emails in the morning. The hard part is like doing the actual work at night or in the morning that actually, for lack of a better term, make smoke come out your ears.
- [69:34]
Jillian Michaels
So, okay, yeah, let's talk about.
- [69:36]
Ben Greenfield
Oh, nicotine. Okay, so, so you're right. Like there is some evidence on, on, you know, the benefits of stimulation and, and the neurotransmitter response. Response, the effect on long term risk for Parkinson's the issue is the delivery mechanism. Like, as you know, or as you've probably heard, like, microplastics are an issue in the pouches, and artificial sweeteners and dyes are an issue in many of the gums, even the ones that say that they're natural. Yeah. So if you want to be as clean as possible, you just slap on a patch. And the benefit of the patch, not that you'd want to, like, rob Peter to pay Paul, but let's say somebody's, like, got constipation or they've got poor gastric motility because they're on a GLP agonist. If you take a patch and you put it right over the ileocecal sphincter, kind of like a few inches to the right and slightly below your belly button, it can actually really help with bowel movements and gastric motility. But you also get really good absorption. It's great for vagal nerve function, so that HRV response. And you don't have to to mess around with a lot of the junk that you find in the gum, the pouches, the lozenges.
- [70:43]
Jillian Michaels
You know, I looked and looked and looked for a gum that claims to not have any of that stuff in it. I mean, it is gum, obviously, gum.
- [70:51]
Ben Greenfield
Stuff, because the gum base, unless they're using a mastic gum base, and there's no nicotine company that's using mastic gum.
- [70:58]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [70:59]
Ben Greenfield
Because it's expensive, so you can use lozenge.
- [71:06]
Jillian Michaels
No, I'm switching over.
- [71:07]
Ben Greenfield
It's done.
- [71:08]
Jillian Michaels
You don't even need to tell me other ways. Switching to the patch.
- [71:10]
Ben Greenfield
I know I'm not financially affiliated with them, but there was a company in my hometown that I lived in, like, eight months ago. Spokane Knickknack. I know they have a clean one. Like, there's a lot of, like, cleaner lozenges out there.
- [71:21]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [71:22]
Ben Greenfield
But do those or do a patch.
- [71:25]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [71:25]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [71:25]
Jillian Michaels
Good to know. Okay. Hair. You said your hair grows like crazy. Okay, men and women want to hear this. Ben. Honestly, I, I, this one is not easy. I can't tell if it's a stress level thing. I don't know if it's an age thing. Every time I get out of the shower, I'm like, all right, I gotta pick a different career. I gotta get out of retirement.
- [71:49]
Ben Greenfield
Clogging the drain.
- [71:50]
Jillian Michaels
Holy cow. This can't be normal. Yeah, just. And it isn't. I take, you know, the hair supplement and the whole thing. I need help. Helps. But I take the shots of collagen. Peptide, ghk. I take collagen.
- [72:07]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [72:07]
Jillian Michaels
And yet in the, in definitely in the last year, it's like breakage, little pieces of. I won't even lighten my hair now because it just snaps. I'm like, I gotta be way more careful with this.
- [72:16]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [72:16]
Jillian Michaels
What, what would you recommend for people?
- [72:19]
Ben Greenfield
Right? And you've got a lot of the basics. Right? So collagen is good as a precursor for the building blocks of hair. Amino acids, like essential amino acids that would be in a. Another component.
- [72:28]
Jillian Michaels
Take a hair formula with all the things, the bees, the horsetail, this, that, the other. And I mean, I'm sure I'd be bald if I wasn't taking it.
- [72:36]
Ben Greenfield
And gsk, copper peptide, especially for, for coloration. That can also be really good. It's like a copper based peptide.
- [72:41]
Jillian Michaels
Do you put it on topically? I use it on my face.
- [72:44]
Ben Greenfield
No, you can, you can inject it or you can use it transdermally. You can take the transdermal stuff and you can rub it into the scalp. Okay, but. And this kind of leads into what I think is maybe, maybe some stuff people don't know about. You have to introduce blood flow to the scalp. And that can be as simple as getting a really sharp plastic comb and just like combing violently when you comb. I think it's a little bit better and more effective to use a derma roller on the head. And this is like the stuff you can do without going to the cosmetic surgeon using a derma roller. So twice a week I derma roll the scalp.
- [73:18]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [73:18]
Ben Greenfield
And then if hair loss is a serious issue, I don't do this. But there are serums out there. You said that you use a serum right now, transdermal.
- [73:27]
Jillian Michaels
Okay. So I use ghkcu, a peptide that. A copper peptide that helps with collagen. But I don't use it on my head, I use it on my face.
- [73:36]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah. So you can use any serum on the head. Caffeine's like the easiest. Cheap, I mean like coffee rub, caffeine based oil. Caffeine actually has really good hair growth properties. There's one company, not financially affiliated, Scandinavian labs. They have like a serum that's got some cool stuff. And there's, there's one particular compound in there that they've studied for hair loss. And you rub it in, but you rub it in after you've aggravated the scalp. So this would be derma rolling. This would be the same reason that if you would go super fancy and go to a cosmetic surgeon, they wouldn't use derma rolling because they feel that's too violent for the skin, they would use micro needling which is more effective. A little deeper.
- [74:11]
Jillian Michaels
Yes.
- [74:12]
Ben Greenfield
The guy who my kills when you.
- [74:16]
Jillian Michaels
Do it on your head.
- [74:17]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, yeah. So a couple times I was like wow. Yeah, I tried it once and the guy who I went to uses like a microplastic based vibrator or not micro needle, not microplastic. Okay. Getting microplastic. So the vibration like distracts you. You know, it's the same reason like if you have a massage therapist doing super deep tissue work, but they're like rubbing one of your legs or your head at the same time, you feel it less. Yep. So some form of dermal abrasion using. If you're doing this at home, derma rolling, which I think is better because you're reduces friction. You're not going to go to a cosmetic surgeon every couple weeks. But unless you're super bored and have way too much time on your hands. The derma rolling though, every few days. And then you put on a serum if you really want to magnify the effects. And then the third step, and I do this, this almost every day is the red light helmet just.
- [75:11]
Jillian Michaels
I stopped doing it cuz it broke. I got to get back into that. I think Brian Johnson and you look.
- [75:15]
Ben Greenfield
Like a total nerd red light spaceman. I mean like I. My neighbors could see in my window for my first 20 minutes of emailing. It's like, you know, I'm buck ass naked sandwiched in between two red light panels with like the, the cath or not the catheter, the, the nasal canula, you know, breathing the spirit special oxygenated water with a red light helmet on. Just stacking as much as I can for the first 20 minutes of the day. Just like spaceman Ben at my desktop. So the red light this cuz she.
- [75:49]
Jillian Michaels
Literally is like you look like such an. Yeah, it could be so much worse. I love this.
- [75:53]
Ben Greenfield
But yeah, it's hard to look sexy when you're biohacking. So the, the red light, the abrasion serum if you can.
- [76:02]
Jillian Michaels
Serum. Got it.
- [76:03]
Ben Greenfield
And then yeah, I mean GHK copper peptide is good. Collagen amino acid intake. But I mean if you were to ask a cosmetic surgeon, they would say that the only way to really truly stave off hairline loss and regrow hair is a follicular transfer.
- [76:22]
Jillian Michaels
Oh God. Okay.
- [76:23]
Ben Greenfield
I know it's a pain, but.
- [76:25]
Jillian Michaels
Gotcha. Interesting.
- [76:26]
Ben Greenfield
That's like.
- [76:27]
Jillian Michaels
Appreciate that one. Okay. Another sexy one. Sex drive. You touched on it. People struggle with this. I, I think so much of it is stress related. Like I get that there's an age component for people, of course, but I see young people, you know, struggle with this. 30 year olds, it just. We're so stressed all the time. We're looking.
- [76:52]
Ben Greenfield
Nature doesn't want you to make babies when you're surrounded by tigers.
- [76:55]
Jillian Michaels
My goodness, is that the friggin truth?
- [76:57]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [76:58]
Jillian Michaels
So would you recommend. Okay, so exercise, we know that one. Obviously, you know, eat right, stay at a healthy weight. All these things are common sense. Get your sleep. But they want the hack. They want the freaking hack. There's guys out with the, you know, spread eagle in the sun.
- [77:15]
Ben Greenfield
What's it called? Perennial tanning? Perennial sunning. Yes.
- [77:18]
Jillian Michaels
Like, are we doing that? Are we going into the yard?
- [77:21]
Ben Greenfield
No, I mean, you can make a case for, for blood flow, for, for vasodilation. That's actually what the, the offhand remark I made about nicotine is that it is associated with erectile dysfunction in men in high doses because it does have a vasoconstrictive effect at 2 milligrams a day, five days a week, or a couple times a day, less of a problem. Like once you're getting at 10mgs plus, which honestly, like a lot of guys are like punishing a canister a zen. And you know, I see, see women chewing nicotine gum all day long. Like that's where you start to get into the vasoconstrictive categories, which is a sexual issue for both men and women.
- [77:56]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [77:57]
Ben Greenfield
You need dilation just as much as guys do. Okay, so the, the exercise piece is interesting because that can play a role if it's in excess because you can get reduced blood flow to the genitals, you can get reduced endocrine function, you know, stereotypical, just like Ironman, triathlete or marathoner, that's an issue. And even in hard and heavy sports, these are the extreme athletes who have to worry about that kind of stuff for enhancing libido. That intranasal that I talked about, the peptide, it's called oxytocin and P, that is oxytocin. And I would have to double check to make sure, but I'm Pretty sure it's PT141. The only reason I'm second guessing myself is I was thinking about other brain peptide and that one might be PT141, but I'm pretty sure they can google it. No, it's, it's PT140. Got it. Okay. It is and then there's another peptide that's kind of like. Again, back to the bodybuilding industry. Very popular in that industry because it's. You inject it and it makes you tan. Melanitan. Yes. And a lot of people like, it works pretty well. But if you're a freckly person, it darkens, it melanicizes everything. So your freckles will turn dark and your skin will turn dark. So if you. A lot of. If you have a lot of freckles like that, avoid. It can be an issue for some people. But then it can also cause vasodilation in erectile tissue in both men and women. And in men, it can be almost like problematic and distracting and result in that, like, whole, like, you know.
- [79:32]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah.
- [79:32]
Ben Greenfield
Erection thing that sends you to the hospital if it lasts for too long. Right. It's funny because a lot of guys are like, that sounds great. It's like, no, it's not. You can't. I can't sleep. And. Yeah. So melanotan would be like an alternative option. PT141. Oxytocin, that, like, trusting loving hormone.
- [79:48]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [79:50]
Ben Greenfield
You touched on a lot of this stuff.
- [79:51]
Jillian Michaels
I'm dosing my wife. I'm just gonna literally slip it.
- [79:55]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, she's sleeping. Yeah. Nasal sprays are hard to just like slip into the lasagna and then anything. It's kind of interesting because there's almost like a positive feature feedback loop. Kind of like I was talking with testosterone. Not a huge impact directly on libido, but the positive feedback loop occurs because you're lifting weights, you're more confident, you have more muscle, you feel better naked. Just like all these things can start to happen with testosterone. It's similar with a lot of blood flow precursors. Right. Like, once you start to get it up or once you start to experience something like clitoral enlargement or any of the other things that occur with better blood flow, you're all right already in. In a more ready state.
- [80:34]
Jillian Michaels
Right.
- [80:34]
Ben Greenfield
So this would be, you know, the basics like beetroot juice, beetroot powder, watermelon, arugula. Not using mouthwash excessively because it nukes the bacteria in your mouth that allow for the conversion of nitrates and vegetables into nitric oxide. Hold on. What if you.
- [80:53]
Jillian Michaels
Not only do I use it, I've got like, what is it? Food grade hydrogen peroxide in there with the freaking mouthwash. Either the water pit shooting through the.
- [81:03]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah, better to coconut oil pole. Like, that's. That's better. But using like a standard Mouthwash is too harsh and rid you of excessive bacteria in the mouth. So you don't get good nitric oxide conversion from doing something like chewing on a nitrate rich vegetable like an arugula salad, but the whole like, you know, like the stereotypical arugula beet salad with cubed watermelon and extra virgin olive oil and all these nitric oxide precursors. That's great. And you could make a case for both men and women from a blood pressure and heart disease risk standpoint of a baby dose of tadalafil, which is the active component of. I forget, either Cialis or Viagra, basically. Viagra, yeah, Viagra, Cialis. I forget which one uses sildenafil and which one uses tadalafil.
- [81:49]
Jillian Michaels
Basically, Sildenafil, because my little dog is on it for. For heart health.
- [81:53]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah. So sildenafil, tadalafil. A dose would be like 5 milligrams. And your dog probably has a great sex life.
- [82:00]
Jillian Michaels
Well, she's 18 and a half, but she's kind of, she's, you know, maybe a few years back it would have been helpful. But at the moment, yeah.
- [82:08]
Ben Greenfield
So a smaller dose, like 5 milligrams or so. And a lot of the, the mechanisms of these drugs were originally intended for high blood pressure because if you think about vasodilation, that's what a big part of sexual performance is. So a smaller dose can be good for blood pressure, but and, and will have a mild impact on the dilation that would indirectly increase libido. But a slightly larger dose, like 10 milligrams of tadalafil would be like a, you know, two to three hours before type of dose that would indirectly increase libido just from the blood flow component.
- [82:41]
Jillian Michaels
Okay. Top thing you're excited about on the horizon for longevity, is it like museum stem cells? Is it gene therapy? What do you think it's gonna be?
- [82:58]
Ben Greenfield
So it's gonna be different for different people, but couched in the idea of some of the environmental toxicity that we were talking about earlier. I think the idea of some type of regularly scheduled oil change for the body is really reasonable. And I realize this is not something everybody on the planet is going to rush out and do because even these are expensive and there are levels plasma. So this could be. Not necessarily. This could be ozone. Like ozone plasmapheresis, where you go to a clinic and you have some of your blood pulled out, ozonated and put back into your body. They'll use this for things like Lyme infections, mold, etc, and it's less expensive than the next level up, which would be. Be a therapeutic plasma exchange. And there are places in LA that do this where they remove your plasma and then kind of like an oil change for the body. They replace it with synthetic albumin and then you get a bunch of vitamins and minerals to replace what was the good stuff that you pulled out in the plasma. But that can also be kind of like a way to regularly clean up the body. And then you get to kind of like the more. More thorough end of things where you either do you go to Texas and you do like an actual plasma replacement, which is different than a therapeutic plasma exchange. We're actually getting like young plasma infused.
- [84:18]
Jillian Michaels
These kids at like high school and.
- [84:20]
Ben Greenfield
Paying them just back. Yeah, back parking lot of the high school. No, they screen them. They, you know, they, they screen for healthy donors. Like they're still like, this is still not without risk. You're putting another human being.
- [84:32]
Jillian Michaels
Right?
- [84:33]
Ben Greenfield
Fluids.
- [84:35]
Jillian Michaels
Reject this. Like you can reject an organ.
- [84:37]
Ben Greenfield
They, they blood type you first and they only choose donors that compatible with your blood type.
- [84:43]
Jillian Michaels
That's incredible.
- [84:44]
Ben Greenfield
And there's still a mild immune response. Like you got to take a little bit of an immune immunomodulator. So this, this is like more the fringe stuff. But you know what you would want to look into if you either wanted to go into the pointy edge of longevity or you had some serious issues with like lime mold, mycotoxin, microplastic load. Because the next step up would be you actually go overseas or to Mexico and you can do something like. Lumati was the company that oversaw me flying into San Diego, crossing the border and doing the blood filter change in Mexico. There's an even more powerful one in Vienna where they use hyperthermia, which was originally like a cancer treatment to heat up the whole body, but they do that so you pass more blood, bludgeon the filter. And that one's in Vienna, Switzerland. It's called an HHO treatment. And there's also a clinic in London that does this. And there are a lot of functional medicine docs who are sending like whatever, they're royal, you know, Abu Dhabi princes, you know, super wealthy clients off to do these kind of things as like A, a longevity hack and B, as a way to just completely clean out the body. So that would be kind of like, like the, the more expensive like fringe stuff that's coming down the pipeline. I don't think peptides are going away and we talked a little bit about those. But like a lot of this Stuff like, I would be remiss not to say this, I know this is kind of like esoteric and woo woo, but a lot of the stuff that we've talked about is kind of like even related to the sexual piece. Whether it's libido or sexual performance or hormones. It's kind of like cold and heartless and clinical and medical. And if you look at Harvard's longest running study on longevity, isolating for all confounding variables what increased or decreased risk of all cause mortality, heart disease, diabetes, everything, you probably saw this study, but this is like the results were I think a year and a half or so ago. It was the quality of your relationship, quality of your relationships. It's just loneliness. And you know, the idea that there was a time when isolation from your tribe, excommunication, anything like that would have resulted in a down regulation of anything related to you having a strong immune system and up regulation of inflammatory markers and sympathetic nervous system stimulation. So you can survive. Right? But now those same survival mechanisms kick in even when we're not technically alone and in danger. Right. There's this whole new thing, it's called the subjective loneliness paradox in which you can feel lonely simply by looking at all of the fans and followers and likes and friends and comments on somebody's social media account and feel that subjectively you pale in comparison and even that can make you lonely. So I mean the, the fix is obviously it's like in our face. Yeah, get out of the basement, go out. I'm leaving from here to go play pickleball for three hours. I'll meet new people and I'll be out there with a group of folks who I've never met before. I'll be laughing, I'll be having fun, I'll be high fiving. We have a family morning huddle at our house at 7am Me and my wife and our kids are all just gathered in the living room talking about the day and doing a clap and a huddle like a football team and praying together and reading together and doing breath work and same thing. 7:00pm Giant family party. We're all together and we're singing songs and playing the card games and the board games for like an hour during dinner. And we have like those two special bookends of the day every day. Twice a month we have a huge dinner party at our home. And it's like the island of misfit toys. It's like, you know, the home homeless guy from downtown and the massage therapist and you know, the two employees and the property manager just like, everybody just, like, comes together and has a big party. We cook food and it's potluck style, and people bring stuff to share, and we just party down for a few hours. You can't expect this stuff to come to you, though. And that's the uncomfortable part. It's just like the boy in his basement on porn. Right. You have to get out there and fabricate what is. Honestly, it feels a little bit stressful and dangerous, like making new friends. Is this person a threat? Like, am I comfortable in this scenario? Am I bored with what this person is talking about? But opening yourself up to situations in which you're meeting other people and fabricating situations in which you're initiating people coming together is, I think, the biggest longevity hack that we have at our disposal.
- [89:15]
Jillian Michaels
Faith. Last question. What role does faith play in all of this, do you think?
- [89:21]
Ben Greenfield
Faith in what?
- [89:22]
Jillian Michaels
Well, like, religion. People that have religion.
- [89:25]
Ben Greenfield
Like, religion.
- [89:25]
Jillian Michaels
My family prays together.
- [89:27]
Ben Greenfield
Right.
- [89:29]
Jillian Michaels
I've always been agnostic.
- [89:31]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [89:31]
Jillian Michaels
It never been kind of a thing for me. I. I just sort of like, we know. I know right from wrong.
- [89:36]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah.
- [89:37]
Jillian Michaels
And I always, as a child, thought it was a benefit because I'm like, I don't care what God you pray to. I don't care. You know, this doesn't matter to me. Like, awesome for you. But now I start to see, like, did I, you know, I wonder if I missed something here. So much. So almost like when I didn't think I was gonna be a mom. And then I worked on this project where I was working with families, and this one family had a couple of young kids, and I had this moment of thinking, I'm definitely missing something here for sure. I don't want to get to the end of my life and think, I wish I had spent more time in the office. And I see, you know, get together, pray together, have a lot of friends, I guess, now, that are religious. Do you think that that's. That plays a role in longevity, health? Maybe it's community. Maybe it's a belief in something more, Feeling connected to something greater, feeling tethered.
- [90:30]
Ben Greenfield
Yeah. I mean, if. If you look at it and you just touched on two components of. Of the religious experience. Extrinsic religiosity and intrinsic religiosity. Extrinsic religiosity is what a lot of people are familiar with. These are like the churches, the temples, the places where people go to worship the form of religion that has also, you know, developed a bad rap, you know, over history in terms of, you know, developing into, you know, political power and wars over religion and, and state religious conflicts. And yet at the same time, the extrinsic religiosity component plays into the loneliness piece. It is for many people, the core collective of people who you see on a weekly basis in a systematic manner because it is, after all, religious. You go do it on a Saturday or you go do it on a Sunday and you're with people and you're doing something that feels holy and reverent and outside of all of you in a way that brings you all together and then seeing these same people throughout the week or like church isn't just something that you go to on a Sunday and leave. Like I get an email newsletter every day, like pray for such and such, they were in a car accident or this person is looking for a ride to the airport, or this person is whatever, selling their motorcycle, you name it. It's like this entire community, not in a cult like way, but just like a community of people who can help each other out and help people in need. Which is what a church should be, right? A church shouldn't be, you know, a powerful institution that's dictating state policy or federal policy. It should be the place where people are gathering, that's extending tendrils into the community to help people who need help and also to be a place where people express together. The second component, which is intrinsic religiosity. This is the hope and the purpose that you alluded to that you derive from the idea that we are not just a bunch of chunks of flesh and blood floating on a giant rock through space. And then there comes a day when it's just like game over. And that's it. That's the big part of the whole biohacking and the transhumanistic, immortality seeking aspect of that that I think is flaw. It's not about being here 150 or 180 or 200 years. I mean like if you read Lord of the Rings, Gollum lived a really long time, right? And that was just an ugly life, right? It was just like, you know, take.
- [93:10]
Jillian Michaels
A hard pass at the end of.
- [93:11]
Ben Greenfield
The day, you're going to be ugly and your muscles are going to be like beef jerky and your bones are going to be porous and you might be around a long time, but it's instead about living as healthy as possible, as close as possible to the day that you die. And, and I think that purpose and the intrinsic religiosity that's associated with purpose feeds into that meaning. If you actually believe that there is a meaning for your life, if you actually believe in a benevolent, intelligent force behind all of our existence, an intelligent force that is not the Matrix simulation, but that is actually this being, almost like a deity, like being that exists outside of us, us that we can talk to and that we can cast our cares upon and that. I mean, if you look at it from my perspective, right, a Christian perspective that actually loved us all so much that they sent their son to die for our sins so that we are able to just basically be free of shame and guilt and fear. It's a very beautiful. And it's a very beautiful and free way to live. Not free in the way that you feel like you can just like go out and do everything because you know, Jesus died for your sins, you can just go do whatever you want. But it's. It's more the idea that any guilt, any fear, any shame, any of the, any of the things that we carry, like a heavy burden on our back through life can be laid at the foot of that hope in Jesus Christ. And that I. The idea that there's a greater story written for your life and that when you get out of bed said there is a purpose, there is a hope, there is a deeper meaning, there is, as you know, like the Disney Princess song would say, like something greater out there, right? There must be something more. And you know, if you look at like ancient writings like Pensies or Augustine or C.S. lewis, they describe this as the immortal whole in our soul, right? Like our longing for something eternal. And that's where I think a lot of the dissatisfaction and loss of purposeness and loneliness and just lack of meaning in life comes from, is we're trying to fill that eternal gnawing with something that's material or un. Eternal, right? Cars and houses and jobs and girlfriends and boyfriends and sex and everything. Peptides and everything else. And so what I think is beautiful is once you fill the eternal hole in the soul with something that's actually eternal. Eternal, right, Like a belief in God, belief in a higher power, the ability to be able to talk to that higher power. And even stacking on top of that, like gathering with other people and like deepening the relationship with. With a community through your connection to that higher power, that all of those other things actually become more satisfying because you're not like grasping at the straws of life to get as much as you can before the game's over. You're instead just like living out this greater purpose for your life life and knowing that at the end of the day, you just go on for eternity as a beautiful person, as a beautiful soul. And for me, that's a very, it's a very happy and purposeful way to live.
- [96:23]
Jillian Michaels
Ben, you're even more fantastic in person. Thank you so much for all of your wisdom and your knowledge. This has been really special. Can you tell people where they can get more from you on a daily basis?
- [96:36]
Ben Greenfield
I'm not hard to find, just BenGreenfieldLife.com is my website. The Balanced Life Podcast.
- [96:43]
Jillian Michaels
You're awesome. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please like comment, subscribe and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future. With savings over $390 this shopping season, VRBO helps you swap gifts raft time for quality time with those you love most. From snow on the roof to sand between your toes, we have all the vacation rental options covered. Go to VRBO now and book a last minute week long stay. Save over $390 this holiday season and book your next vacation rental home on VRBO. Average savings $396 select homes only.