SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Welcome to Proximity with Ken Joclin. I am Ken Jocelyn, your host, founder of GrowStack Drive, and everything we do here is driven by one mission. To help one million faith-based entrepreneurs become the best version of themselves in what we call our Core Five framework: faith, health, relationships, business, and finances. Here's the truth that most people miss. Your life does not move in the direction of your intentions, it moves in the direction of your proximity. Who you're near matters. Who you listen to matters. And the rooms that you choose to enter matter probably more than you know. This podcast is built on the principles from my book, The 14th Frequencies of Proximity, where I break down the internal frequencies you must develop to attract the right relationships, gain clarity, and step into the next level that God has for your life. You'll hear real conversations with faith-driven entrepreneurs, leaders, and high performers. Many of them voices from Create, the number one faith-based entrepreneur conference in America, that I host right here in Atlanta every single year in January. This isn't about hustle culture. This isn't motivation for the moment. This is about alignment, discipline, and becoming the person your future requires. If you're ready to grow in your Core Five framework and get closer to the people and environments that accelerate your growth, you're in the right place. I've got a massive, massive guest for you guys today, my good friend Ben Greenfield. Guys, if you're into biohacking, um, any kind of nutrition, any kind of health, you know who this guy is. Ben, good to see you, my friend. Yo, what's up, Ken? Hey, take a minute and tell our audience a little bit about you before we jump into deer heart and deer backstrap stories.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00

Oh man. Well, I've I uh I'm technically formally my background is in exercise, physiology, and biomechanics. That's what my master's degree is in. And after getting that at the University of Idaho, I operated a string of personal training studios and gyms for a long time. I was voted as America's top personal trainer back in 2008. Run a podcast, write books, do articles, do coaching, consulting, advising, investing, all in the health, fitness, and biohacking space. A lot of it like in my boxers at home. I am wearing pants right now, by the way, along with this. I have my beautiful shorts on if it makes you feel any better. Good. I work from home out in out in the middle of nowhere in North Idaho. Got twin boys. We have a 12-acre farm out here. And yeah. And then uh, you know, besides being here, I hop on an airplane every once in a while to go speak somewhere cool or meet some cool people. But yeah, I wake up in the morning basically learning cool things and figuring out how to package it up and educate people and help make their lives better, especially in the realm of health and fitness and eating well and having good energy. I love that.

SPEAKER_01: 3:12

Biohacking is kind of, I think with the with the birth and the growth of social media, biohacking's been kind of the it's kind of the buzz. Yeah, good friend of both of both of us. Biohacking is kind of the thing, but you've been doing this a long time, like way back before biohacking was cool, if you will. Uh, and you know a good bit about my journey. I'm down about 95 to 100 pounds of body fat over the past five years. I feel like a million bucks at 57 years old. I feel better than I ever have in my entire life. Incredible. What gave you that passion to do this before it was like the chic, cool thing to do?

SPEAKER_00: 3:49

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, Ken, I'm I'm I'm not that old. Um I'm 43. I feel like I'm 18, but I mean, if you go back all the way to like the 60s and 70s before I was born, you know, there were people attempting to be like the early cyborgs, right? People who would literally call their bodies wetware and install what they called hardware, like a compass that would vibrate when you face true north, or magnetic implants in the fingers for human machine interfacing, kind of like Tom Cruise, a minority report, or uh, you know, chlorophyll injected into the eyeballs to attempt for night vision, like that old stuff, along with some of the ancient bodybuilding. I don't know if you remember forums, you know, kind of like kind of like Reddit. They were all over the place. And there were a lot of deep dark forums where bodybuilders would talk about, you know, injecting different growth hormone precursors or secretagogs or peptides or you know, early versions of what have become more popular now. But yeah, way back in the early day, a lot of this stuff was just kind of underground and a little bit weird and a little bit fringe. And then as the idea of what I would consider like a modern definition of biohacking became a little bit more palatable and accessible to the general population, namely using self-quantification technology and science to enhance the human body in some way, right? To get it to do something more efficiently or more quickly. Biohacking became, you know, as you just alluded to, kind of like a little bit more of a trend or a fad, or at least something a lot more people adopted beyond just the folks who are like cyborgs. So now you could call yourself a biohacker if you like put collagen in your lasagna or you know, fat in your coffee, or you know, or you know, any of these things, you know, jumping up and down on a trampoline in front of a red light. My own interest in biohacking stems from sports performance. You know, I'd I raced Iron Man all over the world for years, you know, 13 Ironman triathlon, six world championships, race professionally in obstacle course racing, open water swim competitions, adventure races. And a big part of that world was not just training properly and eating properly, but recovering properly. And so my initial foray in the biohacking was hey, if I get all these blood tests, could I instead of taking a multivitamin, you know, customize my supplementation routine to actually reflect what I'm truly deficient in based on me as an N equals one? Or, you know, after a run, could I use like gradated compression boots to milk lymph and blood out of heavy legs? Or could I use red light therapy to recover faster or to help heal an injury faster? Or hyperbaric after a you know, after a long plane flight where I'm hypoxic and I need more oxygen to the body, or you know, pulsed electromagnetic field frequencies to simulate what I'd be getting outside barefoot, but in my own office to help out with inflammation. And so for me, a big part of it was exercise recovery and sports performance. And then as I got closer to about 39 years old, when I started to hang up the hat on a lot of that stuff, it kind of shifted for me into, you know, how can I look, feel, and perform as reasonably healthy as I can, as close as possible to the day that I die. Right. Ken, my goal is not, you know, I'm I'm a Christian. I already know that I'm going to be around forever in some form or another, you know, new body, new heaven, new earth. I get to worship God forevermore. And that's great. And I have no desire to just like, you know, string at the, or I guess, grasp at the straws of life on this planet in this existence for as long as humanly possible. But I do think that there's something to be said for using science to have good health span and lifespan, right? To be an asset to your family, to be able to provide and protect into old age, to throw a football around in the backyard with your grandkids or wrestle with them, or you know, go skiing or snowboarding when you're 80 years old and be able to handle a day of doing that. And I think there really is something to be said for caring for our bodies and being open to doing it, using even some of these modern scientific tools that you know that that would fit into the category category of biohacking.

SPEAKER_01: 8:15

You said something just a minute ago about even throwing a football around in the backyard with your grandkids. And I think for me, I've I've been a visionary now for about 20 to 25 years, just really God putting stuff in my heart, whether it be plant a church, whether it be grow a mortgage business, whether it be do what we're doing now with the top faith-based entrepreneur movement in the country. But behind all that, what usually might was always my health until the past few years. And so in my journey of dropping about 95 to 100 pounds of body fat, it was you know, I started on my own. I didn't know Gary. I was about six months in the process. I got about 30, 35 pounds. Gary immediately put me on keto, immediately got my the methylation test, all my supplementation routine for my blood work, all of those kind of things. And then it's been just then it was my testosterone two, two and a half years in. It was in the 240s, so then it was clomophene, then it was testosterone shots, getting getting that kind of level. It's just it's it's always been that next level has always been something new.

SPEAKER_00: 9:20

It's always saying that because, like, you know, people are like, Well, you know, you used to talk about just the basics, Ben, you know, because I've been my podcast for 18 years, and it is true because I I I've done a lot of QA shows, right? And people back in the day would be like, Well, how do I run a 5k faster? Or, you know, how could I add you know a few pounds to my bench press or get six-pack abs. And, you know, as I tackled a lot of that stuff, wrote about a lot of that stuff, podcasted about that stuff. Then people would be writing in and be like, you know, what wavelength of red light do I shine on my testicles to increase testosterone? Or, you know, should I do umbilical stem cells or bone marrow or fat? You know, and so you do as you as you dive into the the crazy fringes of the health industry, begin to expose yourself to what many people think are you know pseudoscience, quackery, you know, fraud type of concepts. But then if you actually, if you look at the research, you know, I think you can do so. You can find a lot on PubMed. Many of these things that we're talking about, whether it be like enclomaphene or testosterone for low testosterone, what we call hypogonadism in men, or you know, stem cells for an injury or for enhancing, you know, cellular repair or cellular signaling, or something like, I don't know, a fecal microbiota transplant for clostridium or some serious gut issue. A lot of these things that you can find quite a bit of research on for disease conditions can also take somebody who is good and on an accelerated health journey to great more quickly. And I think that's interesting that that a lot of this stuff, yeah, people might traditionally think of it as something you'd do if you were seriously sick or had some kind of a disease, or your doctor told you, hey, you're not making testosterone anymore. When in fact, you know, using testosterone as an example, I mean, you could have pretty low testosterone, not qualify from a traditional MD for testosterone replacement therapy. And yet, you know, if you're pushing 40, 45 years old, you might be in a situation where it really is a cheat code on life to get on testosterone.

SPEAKER_01: 11:29

I mean, there's a lot of subtle nuances there, like 54, 55. I mean, I'm halfway, it's half during halfway during the journey. They literally looked at me. I had I had my my Josh Porter, who's Optimize U, he's a PA. He's got five hormone replacement clinics. He's in our ecosystem. Him on him on my phone, Gary on the big screen in Zoom, and then my my my functional medicine team down at RMI in Costa Rica, my stem cell company. Yeah, and it's literally there, they couldn't believe I had as much energy as I had with like a 250 testosterone level. Well, yeah, it's and I say this in the journey because I'd love for you to speak this to people that no matter where they are in their health journey, either start or take the next step. Because as you said just a minute ago, that was July of last two years ago. I took my good friend Erwin McManus, pastors in LA. Erwin and I went down for three days. Well, I had a lower back pain of about a six or a seven every morning. Super tight, hard to get out of bed, had to loosen up a lot to be able to even lift and do and do the journey. I did a therapeutic plasma exchange on Monday, ultrasound on all the problem spots, put me to sleep on Tuesday morning in stem cell injections. That when I got up, woke up about an hour and a half after, within six or seven hours, my lower back pain was almost completely gone. Yep. And I haven't had an issue with it in two years. Yeah, it's been almost so that's just that. Speak to that that it's a constant journey of say biohacking or just your health journey as an individual.

SPEAKER_00: 13:08

Yeah, I think that you can certainly reach a certain stage in life where you've dug yourself into a corner where it feels as though you know it would be impossible to get back into shape or to fix a back injury or to fix you know libido or testosterone or anything else that seems broken. And it's pretty shocking what you can do these days to get yourself back on track pretty quickly. I mean, you've brought up Gary a few times. He, of course, has the famous story of the work that he did with Dana White, for example. That's a perfect example of a situation in which you can use self-quantification. We live in an era where the type of blood tests, genetic tests, salivary tests, stool tests, urine tests that would have cost you tens of thousands of dollars at like Princeton Longevity Institute or some executive health panel, you can literally get most of those in the comfort of your own home now. You could turn around with that data, you can say, Oh, this is how I need to eat, this is how I need to supplement. You can take a joint that normally would require total hip or total knee and go to a place like RMI or go to a stem cell clinic and get stem cells as an alternative to surgery. You can look into hormone replacement therapy, you can look into peptide therapy, which really pushes the fast-forward button on a lot of this stuff for growth hormone, for sleep, for inflammation. And armed with a little bit of knowledge and those tools, I mean, you can achieve in a year or two what would have taken like five to 10 years a decade ago. So we live in an era where if you decide you're gonna take charge of your health and you have access to the right information or the right people, you can do it a lot more quickly and completely than you might have been able to in the past, which is super cool. And I think should be motivating. Like it's it's no longer as long, it still takes you know, blood, sweat, tears, and hard work, and you got to be, you know, walking and lifting heavy things every once in a while and doing some heat and doing some cold and not stuffing your face 24-7. But you know, if you've got the fundamentals in place, you can get a lot better results now.

SPEAKER_01: 15:16

For those of us just listening, you're on a you're on a walking, you're at a walking desk right now, like literally getting steps up. So if you can't see Ben, he's getting steps in right now. And I mean, I I've seen the dude on his Instagram without a shirt, he don't need to be on the treadmill at 12 o'clock in the afternoon. He'd be good to skip a day if he wanted to.

SPEAKER_00: 15:33

But you don't do, you know, I probably get 20,000 steps a day. And I mean, Ken, that that's another thing, is so let me explain it this way. So we kind of live in a culture where we have this ancestral mismatch, meaning that human beings for you know thousands and thousands of years, we hunted, we lifted heavy things, we built fences, we hauled rocks, we hiked, we gardened, we foraged. And now we don't have to work that hard to find calories. We live in like temperature-controlled boxes and flying them and drive in them and sleep in them. So we don't experience much thermal stress. We have 24-7, you know, hyper-palatable access to foods. And you know, now we deal with these like diseases of modernity, you know, whereas like our caveman ancestors would have had to deal with famine and starvation and a saber-toothed tiger and viking invaders, you know, now we deal with obesity and heart disease and dementia and like you know, microplastic invaders. And so, based on this ancestral mismatch, what you have to ask yourself is how can I tweak my environment, even though I live in this comfortable post-industrial, post-technological era, to somehow mimic the primal movement that I know is good for me as a human. And how do I introduce these small amounts of discomfort into my day-to-day existence so that I'm able to fight that mismatch? And that might be fasting, that might be a sauna, that might be cold plunging, you know, subjecting yourself to stressors of heavy lifting, you know, all those things that you can do. But back to the treadmill piece, and what got me on this mini TED talk in the first place is the way I look at it is you should tweak your environment, especially your working and living environment, so that the gym is like an option, not a necessity. You don't have to go into the fake place where you pick up heavy things and set them down over and over again. You don't have to do that. I know that for me it's a happy place. I love to go to the gym. I know a lot of people do, but you shouldn't use that as an excuse to be inactive or sedentary much of the rest of the day. So I've got a pull-up bar installed at the door of my office. I got a kettlebell on the floor, I'm walking on a treadmill, I got a foam roller down there. So I can be locked away in my office for eight hours, walk out of the office, and literally have like, you know, 50 push-ups, 100 pull-ups, 100 burpees, some foam rolling, 20,000 steps, and I've put in a full work day. And so I think that's a real cheat code if you can tweak your environment to fight the ancestral mismatch, but do so beyond just visiting the gym. Like you tweak your office environment to do that, and it's a real game changer when it comes to fitness.

SPEAKER_01: 18:25

I I love that you said ancestral mismatch because I think a lot of times we do, we were just talking about this at Thanksgiving yesterday, is like our kids have it so much better than we had it. We had it so much better than our parents had it for the most part. Yeah, and in that comes when we really want to, or God is this has this moment in our life when we're trying to believe God for this bigger vision or receive this, okay, God, what's my purpose? What do I do? I think a lot of times our physical fitness, our health journey gets in the way, but for people just to start in the journey, and I want to I want to bring the peptides up you talked about just a minute ago. Because in this journey, I've been doing peptides now for about a year. I do BPC 157 Monday through Friday, and then I do uh Tesla Moreland, uh Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I think I'm like six weeks on, six weeks off, or something like that. Will you speak to like those two that I take? And then what are some of the other peptides you suggest for people?

SPEAKER_00: 19:27

Sure, a little foundation for people. Peptides are just these short chains of amino acids, right? So you're probably familiar with protein, steak, chicken, fish, et cetera. They're all made out of amino acids, but peptides are pretty short. And based on the fact that they're these short fragments, they can act on specific cell receptors and organ systems in a very precise fashion. So you know, and I'll name a few briefly, uh, but there are peptides for sleep, peptides for inflammation, peptides for liver support.

SPEAKER_01: 19:55

What are what are the sleep ones? Because I just took a sleep test two days ago.

SPEAKER_00: 19:59

Yeah. Okay, let's address those two that you're on, and then we'll get to sleep because one of the ones that you're on it could be useful for sleep. So the two that you're on, Ken, BPC 157, that says for body protection compound 157. Your gut naturally makes that, but you can also synthesize that same amino acid fragment. And if you were to take it orally, it's fantastic for gut inflammation. But then if you were to inject it, it's actually really good for recovery, for repair, for inflammation. And in many cases, if it's injected kind of locally to an area where there's a sprain or a strain, or I always have a bottle in the fridge. If I've played like a couple hours of pickleball and the shoulder's just feeling it, it's great as like a spot treatment for injuries. Now, tesimerelin, that is something that can increase your natural growth hormone secretion or sensitivity to growth hormone. So this would be, if you're thinking about growth hormone, something that would assist with muscle gain, something that would assist repair, and something that would assist with injury healing. So that would that would be those two. And you mentioned you're going like five days on with BPC, six weeks on, six weeks off with testamerelin. That's an important note for people because peptides, if you just like take them consistently year-round, they have kind of what's called in in medicine or science, a taphophylactic response, meaning your body gets used to them and doesn't respond as well with long-term use. So, you know, I do testamerelin as well. I do five days on, two days off, 12 weeks on, 12 weeks off, right? So I'm kind of cycling into these anabolic phases with testamerelin. BPC 157. I don't even take that every day, I take it only when I've got a bum joint or an injury that I got to do a little spot treatment on. Or I'm dealing with a gut issue, like I've been traveling and the gut's a little buggy. Also fantastic to take orally for that. So those are a couple now for sleep.

SPEAKER_01: 22:03

Let me ask you this question before we jump into sleep. What's the difference? So I do shots by B B C 157 in my in my belly. What's the difference? Because I heard you say it almost has two different effects depending on how you take it. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00: 22:16

If you take if you take BPC 157 orally, it's going to primarily act on gastric mucosa and gut inflammation. So this would be like maybe you're following a gluten-free, dairy-free diet, and you went out for pizza, and your gut just feels like you know, it's flipped upside down, it's obviously inflamed. That's where oral BPC would come in handy. Let's say you have had a long-haul international flight, and you're like, I just know I have systemic inflammation. Well, then you could just inject it like subcutaneously a couple inches to the right or the left of the belly button and get like a full-body systemic anti-inflammatory response. Or let's say, like the example I gave, you know, I got pain in the front of the shoulder from a couple hours of pickleball. I'll literally, you know, proceed at your own risk. You know, I'm not a doctor. You know, if you're if you're doing this yourself, there's always risk, but I will, you know, clean off that area with an alcohol swab and just go straight into the shoulder for a localized injection. So that's kind of the difference between the three different forms or the three different ways to administer. And most yeah, most peptides, by the way, are best administered via injection. Or now there's newer technology that allows for you to deliver them via a patch. On my left hip right now, I have 1200 milligrams of NAD and 200 of GHK copper peptide just transdermally going into my body like an IV while we're podcasting. And patch delivery is kind of like a new kid on the block for peptide administration. The other one that's somewhat effective is intranasal, right? So, and that's kind of a great segue into sleep. There is a peptide, for example, called DSIP. That's deep sleep and deep sleep-inducing peptide. If you do this anywhere from two to three hours prior to sleep, it can specifically enhance deep sleep percentages or deep sleep time. And it's pretty effective because it can cross the blood-brain barrier with intranasal administration, like a couple of sprays in each nostril. The other one that's pretty good for sleep is kind of it's one that's been around for a while, definitely older than DSIP. It's uh SMORLin. Now, SMORIN might even sound a little bit like tesamerelin for good reason because it is one of those growth hormone precursors, but it also has really good impact on sleep architecture. So let's say you wanted the ultimate kind of one-two growth hormone muscle gain, fat loss, sleep combo. You would do an injection of tesimerelin like in the morning before you work out, and then you would do an injection of sernerelin in the evening before you go to bed. There's another one that you may have heard of before that acts a little bit similarly to sernarelin. It's called CJC1295 with ipamerelin. I love how these all have like Star Wars, R2T2, C3PO, but that's a pretty good stack, also. Tessamerelin in the morning and either Ceramarelin or CJC1295 ipamerelin in the evening. I'll tell you a few other really good peptides, though, to think about. I'll even tell you two new pretty fringe ones are really expensive, but really cool. So the ones that I think are pretty good for people who want that combination of health span and lifespan. There's really good research from Russia on. Now, Russia is where a great deal of peptide research has been done. There's one doctor who recently passed away over there, Dr. Kavinson, and he had a lot of really good data on both human and rodent models for lifespan extension and for mitochondrial health. And there were three peptides that he had researched, and these are peptides that you can do a short 10-day cycle of once or twice a year. They are epitalon, like E P-I-T-A-L-O-N, MOTS C, which is M-O-T-S-C, and humanin. That's kind of like the holy trilogy for mitochondria. So you could do like 10 days of each over the course of let's say March, like March 1st through 9th, you're going to do epitalon, and then you know 10 through 20 to do MOT C and then finish up with humanin. And then you could do that again in say September, for example, as like two different times during the year when you're just pumping up the mitochondria and improving mitochondrial health. So those three are pretty cool. And then if I could name just a few more for the recovery and injury piece, TB500 and GHK copper peptide are kind of like the two that in addition to BPC 157.

SPEAKER_01: 26:59

The copper peptide you said Ben is the one you have a patch with, correct?

SPEAKER_00: 27:03

You can do it with a patch, you can also do it via injection, although it stings a lot and results in some of that post-injection soreness. GHK does. And you can also, so anybody who remembers us from high school chemistry, actually measure uh these types of molecules in a unit called Dalton's D-A-L-T-O-N-S. And GHK copper peptide is a very small Dalton size. If you look at a lot of modern beauty products, they're using GHK copper peptide now because it's even absorbed transdermally very well. So it's great in a patch, it's good transdermally. Injection causes a little bit of soreness, and I prefer for getting the most into the body at once, the patch delivery mechanism for GHK copper peptide. And then TB500 is typically an injection. And then the last, if I could name three more, unless you want to talk about the brain ones, which we can. Three more that I'd have on the radar. One I use whenever I'm going to be traveling, and I want to amp up my thymus production of killer cells, natural killer cells for the immune system. People travel out down to Mexico and they do NK killer cell infusions, you know, for either cancer or for immunity. I've done that. It's obviously a little bit inconvenient. There's one called thymus and alpha one that pumps up your own natural kill factory production. So it's also abbreviated T A one. And that one is incredible for the immune system. Can you say that again, Ben? What was the name? The name of it again, thymus. T A1. T A one. Yeah. My son got the snipples and a sore throat yesterday. I'll inject my son's, my wife, or myself anytime that then that's another one. I don't do it every day. I just have a bottle handy. I keep them in the freezer because you can keep the powder in the freezer, and then you reconstitute it with the water when it's time to use it, you'll your peptides will last longer. But TA1 is really great for immunity. And then the two that are like newer, more expensive, they're they're kind of long protein fragments. They might even be called like a protein instead of a peptide. But one is clotho. Clotho has a great deal of research on it for blood flow, cognition, and vascularity. Now, a bottle of clotho is gonna run about$700. Like this is not an inexpensive peptide, but the effects on especially like neuroplasticity, cognition, and blood flow are pretty incredible. It's kind of a new player on the block, and it's only once every two weeks that you need to inject.

SPEAKER_01: 29:44

Do you really how long does that price usually take for that to come down, Ben?

SPEAKER_00: 29:50

I don't know for cloth though. You know, kind of you're paying for like the RD, the patent. Right, they had they had normally you'd have to go do gene therapy to upregulate your own clothho production, which is could be a little risky. Now you can just inject it. They bind it to something called albumin to make it more bioavailable. Yeah, and then the other one that's very similar that normally you'd have to do gene therapy for, that kind of turns on relatively uninhibited muscle growth is called folostatin. F-O-L-L-I-S-T-A-T-I-N folostatin. That's similar to cloth, though. It's expensive. You only inject it once every two weeks. And these are like new, new, these are like in the past two months. So not a lot of people are using them right now. I know they're uh Bio Longevity Labs has them in stock because I recently got some. So those two are like kind of fringe. Like if you're looking for as many extra edges as possible, you want to put on you know a pretty significant amount of muscle in a short period of time. The folostatin in particular is pretty good.

SPEAKER_01: 30:52

And then just so the cloth, let me let me let me let me say something about the cloth though real quick.

SPEAKER_00: 30:56

Yeah, because you said that's good for for memory and and yeah, yeah, just for mind cognition, blood flow to the brain, blood flow to the body, which means blood pressure, cardiovascular health. It's a pretty big sledgehammer. It's kind of like one of those new darlings in the longevity space, as far as everything that clothes being studied for. So it's um it's pretty impressive. And then the last ones I'd think about is if you're looking at an alternative to coffee, smart drugs, nootropics, nicotine, etc., go back around to the nasal spray concept. Just like you can intranasally inhale DSIP a few hours before bed to enhance sleep. There are three that are incredible, and you can combine all of them if you want to, for brain health, neuroplasticity, post-TBI, post-concussion, sleep deprivation, inflammation, long haul travel, etc. They all three of them start with an S, so easy to remember. One is called S S31, one is called C-Max, like S E M A X, and one is called C Lank, S-E-L-A-N-K. And those are all intranasal sprays. At least if you're gonna use them for the brain, they're best administered as intranasal sprays. You know, as far as sourcing, biolongevity, they've got things like clotho and folostatin. There's another company I'm getting most of my peptides from now. They're called Peptual. I think that's that's who Gary also works with now. And they have the patches, they have the powders, they have the sprays. It's kind of like my one-stop shop. You can't even get peptides from them until you do a quick telemedicine consult with a doctor. It's only like 15 minutes long. And then they mostly source from the US and Germany. They produce them in CGMP labs, which means good manufacturing practices.

SPEAKER_01: 32:50

I was gonna ask you, doesn't it matter where you get your peptides?

SPEAKER_00: 32:53

Oh man, there's so many crappy impure peptides from China. Like you hear about people injecting and winding up with sepsis-like issues or inflammation or like flushing or insomnia, and usually that's an impure peptide, meaning the peptide fragments aren't what they say in the bottle, or they have contamination. And the contamination is usually with something called lipopolysaccharides, these dump into the gut and cause your gut to become leaky and produce rampant inflammation, which is why you know one of my buddies was like, Yeah, I found a great source for BPC 150. He was telling me this last night. He's over my house for Thanksgiving, and he's like, I'm paying$30 a bottle. I'm like, There's no way that you're getting high quality BPC 157,$30 a bottle. They're probably importing from China, slapping their label on it, or white labeling some other brand that's doing that. So, yeah, be careful where you get your peptides. Normally, you know, a few years ago, you could have just worked with a doctor who's got access to a compounding pharmacy, but the FDA, bless their hearts, have kind of shut most of that down. So now the next best thing is to just look for CGMP lab COA, which means they have a certificate of authenticity, and then preferably gated or guarded by some type of physician community to ensure that you're getting the same stuff that the doctors are using with their patients.

SPEAKER_01: 34:14

Yeah, I love that. And from what I understand, that's that's the FDA changing that on peptides is something they're working pretty heavily on right now.

SPEAKER_00: 34:23

Yeah, I don't want to put on the conspiracy theory hat, but peptides are pretty effective, they're relatively inexpensive compared to pharmaceuticals, besides some of the fringe ones that I mentioned. And I would imagine there's a little bit of pharmaceutical financial interest in not having peptides like rampantly available. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 34:41

Yeah, I I I remember the first time I should I think I showed this week. I remember the first time I met Gary about four or five years ago and we sat in him and Sage's place at the Porsche Design Tower where they lived in there in Aventura, North Miami. And he pulled up his he pulled up his board, his Google board, and he talked about dementia and Alzheimer's being type three diabetes. Yeah, and how if I wanted to hypothetically give you diabetes, if you came to me, I'd take you right to this. And he did. He pulled up the American Diabetes Association that showed the recommended diet. And he goes, If I put you on this diet in five years, you're gonna have diabetes. And I'm like, dude, I was I was blown away. Yeah, I'm like, why do we not hear this? What Ben, where's your passion for this come from? What's your to talk to me like what drives you out of bed in the morning? Is it just seeing people and helping people and watching their lives just literally transform in front of you?

SPEAKER_00: 35:33

I mean, honestly, I'm an autodidact. You know, I was homeschooled K through 12. I like learning about just about anything, right? But diluted focus produces diluted results. And even though I'm super carrying, um I study up music and education and parenting and cooking, and I get my hands dirty with a lot of stuff. But health and fitness kind of became near and dear to me because of my love for sports. You know, as a teenager, I played tennis, I played college tennis, played volleyball and water polo and basketball, and really like understanding things like macronutrients, recovery, biochemistry, nutrition, some of the stuff we're talking about related to peptides or biohacking. For me, it kind of was a good way early on in my life to unlock sports performance. And then, like I was telling you about, you know, now it's more like longevity, health span, and lifespan. But you know, I love to study, I love to learn. If you were to ask me, like at my heart, what my highest skill or orientation for something that makes me happy and feel purpose-driven towards, it would be educating. You know, I consider myself a teacher first and foremost, whether it be through the written word, the spoken word, etc. So I wake up in the morning, you know, excited to read the three books stacked on my bookshelf, couple of journal papers, turn around, do a podcast, be interviewed on a podcast like yours, do some writing, do some teaching, have a couple calls with clients on the phone to go over blood work or labs or whatever. But yeah, for me, it's just like I love learning about this stuff. My niche is the human body based on just personal interests and sports. And I'm not bored with it yet. You know, maybe maybe a couple of years will be underwater basket weaving.

SPEAKER_01: 37:14

I don't know, but we got we got a couple minutes left. Uh, you said something I want to ask you about. What are your what are your three books you're reading right now? What's and what's been your number one book you've read over the past year?

SPEAKER_00: 37:26

Right now, I've got two two books are actually religious books. One is called it's a book on on porn and sex that I'm taking my kids through. We have Father Son Book Club since they were six years old. We read a chapter of a book and we talk about it right before dinner. This one's called Fight Like a Man. Pretty sure is the exact title of it. So Fight Like a Man. I'm rereading a book I return to almost every year, uh Mirror Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Yeah, it's and then the last one. See, it's up there on the shelf of reading it in preparation for a podcast. It is called The Hunger Code by Jason Fung. It's a book about how calories in, calories out provides an incomplete picture of why we get hungry and gain weight, and that the hormonal response to foods and the satiety response to foods widely varies beyond just the calories, which seems kind of dumb because most of us understand that like 500 calories of Oreos feels way different than 500 calories of like a beautiful garden salad. But the book kind of goes into the chemistry of why that is and why you got to go beyond just like if it fits your macros.

SPEAKER_01: 38:41

It's good. The fight like a man, I can that's the book. It's a bold biblical battle for personal purity. Yeah, is that the one you read?

SPEAKER_00: 38:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really good just because it strikes at the heart of discontent that results in temptation. Like, grass is always greener, there must be something greater. I've been gaslit into the secular idea that you know the the walk that I have as a Christian is causing me to miss out on certain things in life that could be pleasurable. And it's that initial discontent that serves as the trigger to bring you into lust, pornography, cheating, just all the things that wind up derailing men. And you know, for guys like honestly, like for guys like you and me, Ken, like we're public figures, and that's the kind of stuff that really gives Jesus a bad name in public. And it's it's the way like the devil loves to take godly Christian men down via that sexual pathway. I think it's the biggest chink in a lot of guys' armor, it's the one we need to work on the most.

SPEAKER_01: 39:42

I heard I heard T Djakes do a message probably 25 years ago, and the it was titled PMS, and it was power, money, and sex. Yeah, and that's what we talked about. He goes, PMS is the number one thing it takes that takes that the enemy uses to go after men. Power, money, and sex. I dude, dude, hats off to you for taking your kids through this and literally having convers and giving your we just had this conversation. I spoke for Dr. Zega in Seattle this weekend. They had their big business leadership conference. And so I spoke, did their service on Sunday at their church. And and one of the things we talked about was I a good friend of mine named Blaine Bartell, who used to have the largest youth ministry in America in Tulsa 25 years ago, about 2,000 kids in his youth ministry, fell pornography, adultery, and now he literally has a whole ministry helping pastors. And there's there's no space for pastors to come in and go, I have a problem. Yep. Because if they do, they're gonna lose their job.

SPEAKER_00: 40:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 40:43

And so for you, really having the conversations up front with your kids as they're young, it does take that. Like did did you know when Eve sinned in the garden? Did he did the enemy really did God really say you you would die? Exactly. Just that just that that thought that he puts in the mind. But so dude, then that's that's a that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 41:04

Yeah, that that that that did you really or did God really say that's the second part is disbelief. You know, the the book basically describes starts with discontent, right? There must be something greater out there, you know, like the Disney princess, and then disbelief, right? Wait, did God really say, like, you know, like porn, like it's not really cheating, and if it's AI, it's not hurting anybody, you know, right? Because it's really not anybody's daughter or sister or mother, and then it's deification. It's like, well, you know what? I decided that I want this knowledge, I'm gonna make the choices, I'm gonna be my own God. And so that discontent, disbelief, deification is kind of like the slippery slope towards justifying sin to yourself. And then before you know it, game over, you've lost your wife, you've lost your kids, you've lost your legacy, and you're either starting from scratch or not really getting a chance to start over over again.

SPEAKER_01: 41:50

Yeah. Final thought, Ben, what would you say to our audience today? People in whatever whatever phase of their health journey they're that they're in are stuck. What would you what would you say to them?

SPEAKER_00: 42:06

Action can create both emo and motivation. And this is not just like esoteric, you know, Tony Robbins stuff. I love Tony Robbins, but I love Tony. If you look at your vagus nerve and your parasympathetic drive and your rest and digest and your desire to be stuck in that safe place without the fear of the danger that's associated with stepping into the gym or the cold plunge or whatever else, paradoxically, the best way to trigger the sympathetic activation of the vagus nerve and the motivation and the flood of neurochemicals that comes with that is by beginning to do the very thing that you fear. Running towards the fear, not away from it. It begins by I'm not gonna get in the ice tub, but I'm gonna stand in it, right? Or I'm not gonna do a workout of the gym, but I am gonna go in there for two minutes and ride the bike. Or I'm not gonna get 20,000 steps in, but I am gonna walk around the neighborhood. Or I'm not going to completely overhaul my diet, but you know what? I think I might grab the salad at Mickey D's instead of the burger. Like it's those little steps that create the emotion and the motivation and the flywheel to take the bigger steps. It comes back to something that you said earlier, Ken, like the best time to plant a tree, right? The best thing you can do is just something small today. And understand that this is not just like motivational speaker gobbledygook. This is literally neurochemistry. Like once you take that first step, then your vagus nerve and your nervous system responds, your neurochemicals respond, and all of a sudden you enable yourself to take the next one and the next one and the next one. And before you know it, you're jumping up and down on a trampoline with a training mask on under a red light, and then taking a head dive into an ice bath with a peptide needle sticking out your butt.

SPEAKER_01: 43:55

I love it. Ben, what's the best place for people to connect with you, man? I'm a ben greenfieldlife.com. Yeah. I love that. And uh Ben Greenfield Fitness, is that it on Instagram? Pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. Ben Greenfield Fitness on Instagram as well. The website, one more time, was Ben GreenfieldLife.com. Ben GreenfieldLife.com. Dude, thank you so much. Yeah, dude. You're incredible. I literally could sit here. I know one of the things in this next season of podcast for us, we're gonna transition to is long format, but long format with two or three guys having the conversation. I love that. Dude, if I if I could get me, we've got a guy in our in my in my ecosystem, Dr. Krishna. He works with uh plasmologens. Yeah, um, what's the other plasmologens? Ah I can't believe I can't remember what it is, but anyway, he is Indian guy brilliant. And they're seeing literally his his mission right now on Earth is to reverse autism, which he's seeing. He's got a 17-year-old patient uh on the plasmologens, and there's something else inside of the thing that rebuilds the cell structure walls. Yeah, he's literally a 17-year-old kid, non-vertible for his entire life, after about six to eight months on just it's just supplementation and rebuilding cell walls. This kid's speaking, he's got a job, he's driving a car. All kids with autoimmune disease and and autism, it's unbelievable what they're seeing right now. And just to get guys around the circle to talk about all of the things that, like I said, the first time Gary, I heard Gary five years ago, and even with you, I'm like, dude, man, where where is this information at?

SPEAKER_00: 45:39

Why do we know? Some of it's anecdotal, some of it's experimental, some of it's you know, guys, you know, like me or Gary, just like out there trying stuff and talking to the unicorns nobody knows about, then turning around and telling people about it. But yeah, and even like the like the plasmalogens and some type of cardiolipin support, like a fatty acid support that this guy you were talking about, you said Krishna? Yeah, Dr. Krishna. Yep. Yeah, Dr. Krishna. Like, you know, for example, I was just with somebody in Malibu, and they're using something similar, but then they're using high-intensity, high power medical grade red light therapy to direct those compounds into specific areas of neural tissue. So then, you know, and that's something that you mentioned RMI, a lot of stem cell institutes are doing that too. Like they give you the stem cells and they use red light or electricity over the area that they want the stem cells to migrate to, and they act almost like a magnet to pull the cells in there like a homing beacons. And, you know, again, you aren't gonna find like a double-blind human clinical research trial on PubMed lasting 10 years on this stuff, which yeah, is gold standard, but at the same time, there's some cool stuff out there that's just kind of like fringes of science, but can definitely make people's lives better and sometimes save lives.

SPEAKER_01: 46:49

Yeah, it's amazing. Well, dude, thank you so much for your time. Uh, can't wait to get this information out to people. And uh hopefully we'll see you in January. Create, dude. We'd love for you to come hang. Uh I would love to come out. I saved the dates on my calendar, so come on, man. All right. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you so much for hitting us up on this episode of Proximity with Ken Johnson. We'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. And if today's episode challenged you or gave you clarity, remember this. You didn't become the best version of yourself by accident. You became it through alignment and proximity. When your faith, health, relationships, business, and finances are aligned, everything changes. That's the heartbeat of GrowStack Drive and the experience we build every year at Create, the number one faith-based entrepreneur conference in America. So if you're serious about becoming the best version of yourself and growing alongside other faith-driven entrepreneurs, I want to invite you to take your next step. You go to GrowStackDrive.com forward slash free and join our free GSD community. You'll get access to leadership content, conversations, and proximity designed to help you align with your Core Fi framework and grow with intention. And if this episode brought you value, I'd love to have you subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone you leave. Remember, great leaders want something for people, not from people. This is Ken, this is Proximity with Ken Jobson.